Frog

Less Fat, More Filling

2011-11-28T15:43:00.006-06:00

I haven't read Steven Pinker's new book, but I suspect it sucks. First of all, his website defending the book begins by answering the question "How do you define violence?" Pinker responds: "I don't.". . . . and then proceeds to provide his definition.

An inauspicious start.

Second, he apparently calls a period in which his country of residence alone was continuously killing people around the globe "the long peace." And this man studied liguistics. Finally, in all the absurd coverage the book has received, he never once discusses situational dynamics.

For example. Lets say you have a would-be warlord who meets resistance in imposing his rule upon the native farmers. After an altercation, he kills one of them. Yet he finds the remainder still restless. In fact, not until his misfit army has killed 10 of them do they obey his decrees. In neighboring Stanstan, by contrast, the resident warlord has constructed a fence around the population and developed weaponry that is vastly more efficient. This warlord finds that need only kill one native farmer before the rest "align with his policies." In yet a third land, lets call it Can-ada, the warlord doesn't have to kill anyone. He just rounds up 20 people and forces them into boxes for large chunks of their lives. Maybe he even comes up with a plausible rationale for doing so.

Are either of the latter two societies less violent? I say not. The numbers may drop as efficiency in the means increases; violence may become more controlled, deliberate and less likely to impact you - whitey - but this hardly encompasses what concerns people like me about the use of "violence."

Observations

2011-11-10T11:18:00.008-06:00

I just received the following email, which went to everyone at the 300-person office: "My friend and neighbor is making pork tamales this weekend for orders she has already received. They are very delicious. She sells them for $13 per dozen. If you would like to order some, please let me know." Naturally, I ordered 5 dozen for my Mexican-themed Thanksgiving party.

Going to work is like using a public toilet. Sometimes you just have to do it.

BMI is directly proportional to love of tchotchkes.

Tampons are the only thing in the world used to both prevent an explosion and initiate an explosion.

The only living artists worse than Damein Hirst and Jeff Koons are Stuckists. I take that back. Frank Stella is still alive.

La Rana loves redheads. Redheads do not love La Rana.

What A Relief

2011-10-18T13:29:00.002-05:00

Hitch is writing things like:

"It seems that we can add, to sausages and laws, churches as a phenomenon that is not pleasant to watch at the manufacturing stage"

and

"he should be asked to defend and explain himself, and his voluntary membership in one of the most egregious groups operating on American soil"

It is the manufacturing that is unpleasant to watch, not the noumenous themselves. And if a group can be egregious, a proposition I highly doubt, can one imagine a formulation with less utility?

Here I was worrying about having admired ole' hitch, and maybe he sucked all along.

From the Annals of Unintended and Undesired Empirical Analysis

2011-10-17T17:11:00.005-05:00

Either copiers break a disproportionate amount of the time on Mondays, or the fucker tasked with calling George, the copier fix-it guy whose robust business was routed entirely through his cell phone, just never has the time to get to it after hump day.

And no. I don't fucking know George, can't fucking tell you how to fucking reach him, don't fix fucking copiers, and can't fucking direct you to someone who fucking can. Good day.

Not so friendly letters

2011-10-13T11:26:00.002-05:00

Dear Chris:

I once considered you an intellectual inspiration, for lack of a better term. Back when you wrote Letters to a Young Contrarian and the Trial of Henry Kissinger, your refusal to bind your words to the politically acceptable roused me. I felt emboldened by your unreserved athiesm.

But now you write only things like this.

Please focus your energy on not dying from stage four esophageal cancer. Or please die.

Love,
La Rana

Let me jus put it out there

2011-10-10T09:12:00.003-05:00

Yes, in 2001, Dick Cheney or someone else in the executive branch of the federal government directed a highly compartmentalized unacknowledged program that sent U.S. military weaponized anthrax to several individuals around the country as a means of ensuring support for the coming war on fundamentalist Islam that the actors in said program deemed existential, and thus able to justify a mild kick in the pants to the insufficiently motivated citizenry.

Or, a single individual was able to make a biological weapon of such awesome sophistication that only the most powerful states have to date demonstrated the ability to create, in complete secrecy, in a highly classified government laboratory, using a means and method that no one has been able to trace or even fully comprehend, for no reason that anyone can explain other than he wus jus crazay.

Jack Goldsmith, lawyer, former assistant AG, law professor

2011-10-01T11:32:00.003-05:00

The premeditated murder of an American citizen in Yemen by his own government was, in fact, legal. I am not here to explain how that is, nor will I let myself get boxed in by specifically making that claim, but I am going to leave you with that distinct impression by spicing up my utilitarian argument with misleading declarations about the law. Did I mention that I am a powerful lawyer?

First things first: we need to poison the wel...I mean provide sufficient context. Drone strikes, doncha know, are commonplace, effective, important, and used only after a painstaking process with the most delicate care. [He could be selling Italian leather goods on Madison. "Assembled by 72 year old direct descendants of julius ceasar after being cured in a real human vagina!"]

But wait theres more! Awlaki was targeted because the government claims without any publicly available evidence [true! Look it up!] that he had an operational role in Al-Qaeda. [He does this to frame the coming analysis. If Awlaki is only guilty of propagandizing for AQ, and advocating violence against the US, Goldsmith has a problem: those activities are specifically protected by the first amendment. He knows this, so the first thing he does is explain that Awlaki was an "operational" member of AQ. Or rather that the USG claims he was. That no public evidence exists to support this contention, that the USG lawyers realize this conceptual issue as well, that the USG has a long and glorious history of dishonest manipulation of the legal system - these things do not trouble him.] Daddy told me so!

This was not assassination because this is war!, just like world war 2! ["This is war!" is the crux, meat, introduction, body and conclusion of his argument]. We declared war on Yemen! So this is just like bombing Germany and Japan! We declared war on Al Qaeda! Doncha remember that declaration of war?! Doncha remember all those customary and treaty-based laws of war governing wars on loose affiliations?! Heelllloooooo. Daddy told me so!

And furthermore (adopting my scholarly tone) "it is not accurate to say that he was targeted without due process." Due Process, ya see, depends on the context, and in this context the USG convinced a federal judge that Awlaki has no Due Process rights. [read Goldsmith's argument here carefully. He literally argues that Awlaki was not targeted without DP because Awlaki has no DP rights. He just can't or won't bring himself to say that directly]

And don't worry, the president only kills the best Thanksgiving turkey. Cautious and unprecedented targeting procedures, oh my! How can you argue with such robust procedures?!

Which brings me to the final and most important point. For not only is the murder of an american citizen by his own government legal, as I so carefully explained by providing a few baseless declarations and obscurely relying on the failure of Awlaki's father to convince a federal judge to intervene, it was right and just. For all claims to law are merely symbolic, abbreviated claims to moral rightness. This was legal but more importantly, this was just. Or as Kant once said, explicating the obligations that justice thrusts upon us, "accurate, successful and cost-effective."

Just Remember, American Citizens

2011-09-30T09:43:00.004-05:00

The President can, and will, murder you for saying things he doesn't like.

My favorite part:

Further the killing could further harm the image of the United States among average Yemenis, who are staunchly against outside military intervention in their country.

Unlike all those other, less scary brown people, who welcome bombardment of their country. I honestly have a hard time conceptualizing just how demented and divorced from the proceedings of reality one would have to be to write that sentence.

Moral Quandaries

2011-07-12T11:39:00.003-05:00

Let me see if I've got this right. God's chosen people have prevented themselves from asking others to stop helping them.

At least thats the democratic view. Or: An organization that claims the sole legitimate authority to exercise force within its boundaries (and beyond!) is attempting to make the moral correctness of this exercise of force irrefutable by using force to prevent the expression of any disagreement beyond not personally assisting.

Oh wait.

Yay! We murdered another dude in Pakistan.

2011-05-06T10:23:00.003-05:00

What day is it?

As a result, the State Department recommends that Americans think twice about traveling . . . anywhere.

And they say ending our worldwide military occupation will lead to isolationism!

America: don't leave home, unless you have a gun.

All right, I can see you don't want to be cheered up here, Dude.

2011-03-11T08:35:00.004-06:00

The German Parliament voted in January to begin withdrawing its 4,900 soldiers by the end of this year . . . Britain . . . with about 9,000 troops, said in December that it was “possible” that its forces would start leaving this year . . . Poland has said it will bring its 2,600 troops home by 2012, and Canada is scheduled to pull its 2,800 troops out by the end of this year. Last year the Netherlands became the first NATO country to end its combat mission in Afghanistan, when it withdrew its 1,900 forces.

“Unfortunately, some of the recent rhetoric coming from capitals on this continent is calling into question that resolve”

- Gates, reading the tea leaves

A Man For All People

2011-02-22T10:11:00.007-06:00

They say Qaddafi has survived for so long by managing to balance the interests and appease the various tribes and peoples of Libya, and his attempts to reinvent himself are legendary. You can find him in traditional Berber garb, eurotrash fluorescent shirts, military uniforms, kaftans, anything with a fez and $500 sunglasses, etc.

But his latest look is definitely my favorite:

He's got the bedoin headwear and an Arabic wrap over the socialist workers shirt. Its a 3-fer!

And he's putting on quite the performance on Al Jazeera, considering he is clearly hidden in a bunker, surrounded by emergency flourescent lights.

I mean sure, kill him. But for god sakes, be nice about it.

2011-01-14T14:37:00.004-06:00

God I hate this Wittes fuck. His response to Greenwald is to call him a Jacobin and say that "Greenwald is not part of the same conversation as I am" and that Greenwald has a "very ugly eagerness to attack honorable people," unlike Wittes, who just has "a preference for civility and decency."

This is Wittes' whole pose. He is just honestly trying to resolve "wrenchingly difficult questions." Its says it right there on the masthead: "hard national security choices." He's not a bad guy, he doesn't even want some of the things he advocates! Its just that these are difficult questions and figuring out what to do is very hard and requires lots of serious consideration by serious people, like Wittes (who has no law degree, but went to Oberlin, where all well-known assholes attend).

As it turns out, these "hard national security choices" seem to be whether to kill people or imprison them without charges for life, and exactly how much of the 4th amendment to carve out. Proposing that we follow the constitution, or make some attempt at all to align our conduct with the principles that illuminated the document to which we claim allegiance - as Greenwald proposes - is not serious.

That Wittes' entire life is dedicated to determining exactly how to traduce the guarantees of the constitution seems not at all to have occured to him.

Notes

2011-01-14T10:12:00.002-06:00

1) Greenwald takes down Wittes for his ridiculous pretention that he is anything other than Yoo and Addington with a knack for sounding reasonable. Take this, for example, in which Wittes says that he doesn't at all agree that Kiyemba subverted the Supreme Court's holding in Boumediene. Boumediene ordered habeas rights - that is, the ability to challenge your detention and be released if the reasons are found wanting. Kiyemba declared that judges can't order release after all, effectively nullifying the whole point of Boumediene, and oh by the way, the writ of habeas corpus, the only individual right found in the text of the Constitution. Wittes disagrees for the same reason he's pleased that Kagan has recused herself on all things GTMO, leaving an evenly divided court that will be unable to overturn the DC Circuit's surversion and effectively turning the DC Circuit into the supreme court on all detainee issues: not because it is consistent with the law, or even his demented view of possible law (he thinks the government can lawfully detain someone without charges despite the 5th amendment explicitly prohibiting it), but because it ensures that the government can continue to imprison and abuse people who make Benjamin Wittes wet the bed at night. Yes Donny, these men are cowards.

2) Jeh Johnson, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, said that MLK would support America's ongoing killing of people throughout the world. I don't even know what to say to that. I mean, how does a human being even make their mouth move sufficient to claim that a fervent critic of American imperialism would support American imperialism? Though, to be fair, this is only more mind-boggling than the more widespread and equally psychopathic idea that we're killing for Jesus on account of the fact that people alive today actually knew MLK.

A new way forward

2011-01-12T17:11:00.004-06:00

I must say, reflecting on this video from Sarah Palin, that I am a bit surprised. Surprised at how short sighted we've been. Surprised at how quick we are to reach conclusions. Surprised at how unwilling we are to embrace new ideas, or discard with old.

Surprised that no one has turned this Palin phenomenon into a political themed porn series. "I'll score that like the motherfucking CBO!" It would kill, KILL, KIIILLLL.

Art

2011-01-12T15:17:00.002-06:00

I hereby nominate Mark Landis as one of the greatest artists of the last 25 years. Its better than Banksy; just right out in the open.

What the fuck are you babbling about?

2010-12-14T16:14:00.005-06:00

In possibly the most bizarre David Brooks sociologizing to date, our favorite lawnchair academic offers that America could, in its decline, become "champions of the gospel of middle class dignity," as has been an American historical trademark from Ben Franklin to Horatio Alger to Oprah to big leveraged houses with flatscreens in the suburbs. We could do this despite people ridiculing American culture "for centuries" as being tepid, materialistic and middle class, because Ben Franklin's ideas about middle class values won in the end.

What the fuck? America is ridiculed AND celebrated as middle class? Tepid? Centuries? What do Horatio Alger's fictional stories have to do with anything? What do Oprah's? In the margins of which introduction to a Ben Franklin biography did you scribble the first draft of this column while taking a shit? David Brooks, what the fuck are you babbling about?

There's a Lot of Water to Carry

2010-12-11T13:37:00.002-06:00

If you are looking for Darth Vaders of the systematic deterioration of civil liberties in the U.S., you could do worse than Benjamin Wittes. His boyish looks and "what me?" persona aside, probably no other human being has done more to perpetuate imprisonment at GTMO and lay the groundwork for indefinite detention; that would be a life time prison sentence without an indictment, a trial, or a verdict, which aside from being batshit insane and obviously inimical to anything resembling a free society, violates the 8th and more or less the entire 5th amendment. He is the go to source when you need a non-government official to say something supportive about detention - he openly advocates indefinite detention on the basis that the government says you are bad - and his only non-marketing skill seems to be a remarkable ability to convince himself that everything the government says is true. He wrote an entire book on GTMO out of the sentence: "the detainees are terrorists because the government says they are."

He has been around for some time, but I mention him after perusing the website he created with two other war-on-abstract-noun-dead-enders (which they have called lawfare, unironically and unselfawarely redefining a word used to to describe imperial legal manipulation to mean resistence to the same) and pause to note that in addition to his other useful qualities he does not understand what the word hypocrisy means.

Read Glenn Greenwald

2010-12-08T16:10:00.002-06:00

Ignore all the bad things I've said over the years.

The Rear Guard

2010-12-03T10:46:00.004-06:00

IOZ points out that Paul Schroeder, source of this week's argument against Wikileaks, relies on the success of the Treaty of Versailles, which, obviously, is less support for an argument than a crater in which to place it.

Looking this over more carefully, one notes that his whole thesis is fucked:

Open diplomacy is flawed because (1) closed diplomacy worked
in two instances, one of which actually failed catostrophically, and the other of which was quite clearly not the result of diplomacy; (2) public revelations force monstrous war criminals to "retreat further into the shadows;" such a powerful metaphor that it outweighs the fact that the revelations helped to end a war and strip the warmongers of power; (3) amateurs that blow off hillsides to build roads might hit the City's electrical lines.

Add in some conclusory assertions and a meandering what-the-fuck-are-you-talking-about-grandpa digression about Bismark, and that's literally it. The entire argument.

As some have noted, the most vociferous opponents of Wikileaks are the press, who rightfully see it as competition. John Burns, for instance, who was the Times Bureau Chief in Bagdad, has taken to writing gossip pieces about Julian Assange now that Wikileaks did more in one day than he's done in a career. With that in mind, one can't help but notice Schroeder's closing recommendation:

except in special instances, confidential communications ought to be released only after passions have settled and scholars can examine the records in fuller context.

I wonder what Schroeder does for a living?

The Threat Was Very Real. Impossible. But Very Real.

2010-11-28T10:09:00.002-06:00

I don't even know what to say about shit like this anymore. Just from the fucking article we learn that the FBI designed the plan, gave him cash to buy the bomb components, offered to assemble the bomb, demonstrated a model bomb, and supplied him with a fake passport to make his escape. Then, to ensure they could imprison this guy - who neither had the means, the know-how, or the wherewithal to set off a bomb - for attempting to set off a bomb, they tell him he could pray instead of setting off the bomb they just made for him.

Are people getting more gullible? Or do they just all work for the fucking New fucking York fucking Times?

Prediction

2010-11-16T08:14:00.002-06:00

Stories on the kidnapping and punishment of a successful arms trafficker will not notice that the kidnapping and punishment is being meted out by the world's most successful arms trafficker. The few writers that do notice this highbrow turf war will rely heavily on words such as "legitimate" "authorized" "proper" "legal" and "terrorism." The real or attempted killing of Americans will always feature prominently, but ignore the remaining 95% of the planet and the fact that American arms are the leading cause of American death by firearm.

Genocide Doesn't Pay?

2010-11-10T00:39:00.002-06:00

I don't think Finkelstein had this in mind.

Only in America. Which was founded, on, uh, well, ya know.

The untended phone cord will always re-tangle

2010-11-09T15:26:00.003-06:00

John Cole has lost his goddamn mind. Again. Could be partisanship, booze, drugs, or cats, but all signs point to some sort of addiction.

I'd move him down to the funny section of the blogroll, but addiction is no laughing matter.

Aesthetics

2010-11-08T05:26:00.006-06:00

When a system founded on an inherent contradiction grows to occupy every aspect of human life, it inevitably lays claim to every irreconcilable position, no matter how inimical to another. For some its free. Others are compelled to buy it. Products are prohibited and encouraged. Justice is demanded and obscured. War is opposed, and initiated. Our enemies are on our payroll. Apologists are dispensed to sooth the cognitive dissonance. Conan is coming back. The Giants are doing well again.

It's all in the game. One cannot occupy the color wheel and avoid the opponent process.

Damn Sand Niggers Won't Respect The Jews Only Sign

2010-10-14T18:03:00.004-05:00

So sayeth Michael B. Oren, Israel's ambassador to the United States. Or as Oren puts it, the Palestinians are just not ready "to accept us" . . . as the only inhabitants of their culturally significant former homeland . . . able to dictate its name and inhabitants for all of time . . . permently segregated from "them."

His clarity is refreshing. Is "Jews for Apartheid" a Facebook group yet?

Its for your own good

2010-10-13T12:26:00.005-05:00

My wife and I make more than $373,651 annually, and have a net worth of several million. I therefore have no need to make additional income. But I would like to ensure that my children receive as much money as possible ~~so they don't have to meaningfully contribute to society~~ to put their own kids through college and buy a house (both of which will have already occured by the time I give them the money under the premises of this article, but bear with me).

I would therefore like to work to make additional income. But I will only work to benefit my children in exchange for large amounts of money to give them on top of the millions they are already guaranteed, and democrats are trying to make that difficult. They want certain tax rates to return to their level 10 years ago, in order to pay for spending that I have advocated in positions of considerable influence. We need to pay for that spending now because I also argued that we should limit our ability to pay for that spending then. But that was then, this is now. Which is not to say that we should pay for it now, because we shouldn't, or at least I shouldn't.

If you make me pay for it you will lose the benefits of me and myself. Watch, I'll prove it with teh maths. If I use an example that allows me to credibly pretend as if people like me pay anywhere close to the highest tax rates, include the fact that I am subject to a tax that only 0.3% of the population is subject to, but fudge the existence of that tax when it is inconvenient (which allows me to avoid the fact that the premise of this article will save my children only $300 over the course of 30 years), and compare my taxes to a situation in which the government I actively support and worked for does not exist, the return to my children is obviously insuffient to incetivize me to write things like I am writing right now, in direct contradiction of that principle.

I love my children for $10,000 a day, but not for $1,000 a day. Think about how small that is on top of the millions of dollars they already stand to inherit. I mean, come on.

In sum, because rich people are so rich, it is hard for them to become richer, and therefore the artists and doctors who would only work for huge amounts of money will deprive you of entertainment and medical services. Think about it. Give me money or you will suffer.

Greg Mankiw, ladies and gents.

I wonder if his children know how much money they stand to inherit if Mankiw dies before the estate tax window closes at the end of the year? I bet if we run teh maths on his existence it comes out in the red. The numbers don't lie.

They are disgusting and do not deserve equal civil rights, but its not like I am a bigot

2010-10-11T12:42:00.004-05:00

Well, we can turn the page on that one. I lived in NYC for several years. There are more gay men in more positions of power in that City than anywhere in the world. Congratulations Governor Andrew Cuomo!

The Good Fight

2010-10-05T10:02:00.002-05:00

"After Stoner reported hashish use, Morlock and the savage mormon skinhead threw severed fingers at him."

The lady doth protest too much, methinks

2010-09-29T10:08:00.001-05:00

Axioms

2010-09-28T16:48:00.001-05:00

Taking seriously the proposition that you can declare war on an abstract noun will melt your brain.

Affecting

2010-08-20T21:35:00.003-05:00

La Rana listens to mostly Marc Bolan, Miles, and dirty delta blues, so this is way outside my comfort zone, but every time I hear it I get chills. This is by far the best version. Stick with it, especially if you are skeptical.

So bad its good

2010-08-19T11:53:00.003-05:00

At least 8 people mounted the stage, but the lights were reserved for just three. The singer and two guitarists, who I now realize are twin brothers. They were the pretty faces. Both brothers had guitars in their hands, but neither did more than strum. Whenever a guitar solo or feature was needed the family facade affected the part, aided by the lighting and production team, but the actual guitar playing was being done by an unlit man, bald and bespectacled, resembling a self-hating Hunter S. Thompson. Lacking the necessary sex appeal, he was relegated to the shadows behind one of the frontmen, turned almost to face the drummer. I burst out laughing.

The music, which I am duly informed has myriad influences, resembled this: Coldplay (already a mishmash of U2 and Radiohead on quaaludes) pretending to be Joy Division, if Joy Division had only tried pop, and was composed of robots from Ohio. Every song was in 4/4. Their attempts to heighten emotional intensity consited entirely of playing louder. What they lacked in musical ability and originality they made up for in crescendo. I laughed some more.

Notwithstanding their mad crescendoing skills, the crowd was decidedly apathetic, with the band unable to rouse them from their music-induced dispepsia. At one point the lead signer apologized: they were not used to a crowd this subdued. Still unable to raise the patrons to their feet, the band reached into their bag of tricks and started a clap-along. Only they did it off-beat. The crowd, eager to help this limping, soggy, train-wreck of a show along, began clapping feverishly, even as the band struggled to match the tempo. Eventually the band settled into a jam-band routine until the clapping died out, restarted their song, and tried to get the crowd with them again. The signer, apparently bolstered by the clapping response, if not its all around success, truly believed that this crescendo would be the one. As he reached those last chords he threw the microphone, stand and all, expecting that it would feed an already boisterous crowd. But the crowd was unmoved and tempered and the microphone landed with an awkward thunk.

I was now bent over laughing, and the Mrs. had to usher me from the stands as onlookers offered threatening glances. I had been bribed with free seats, but even that was too high a price. This group of men had skill enough to win the high school talent contest, but little else, save a trove of post 1980s British rock and a good production team.

I say all of this because I notice that Will Wilkinson highly recommends The National. I don't know quite what to say, except that this calls into question every opinion he holds. This is the sewer of pop music. Carefully orchestrated production without any intrinsic redeeming value. It is the Justin Beiber of the 4-8 person rock band, representing nothing more than the end (or perhaps nadir?) of culture in this country.

But perhaps that is too harsh. At least that Beiber kid is cute.

Homicide on K Street

2010-08-13T12:38:00.008-05:00

Lunch. As I wait to cross a busy intersection, a metro bus, acting with familiar indifferent agression - not doubt enobled by legal speciation - enters the intersection some 3 seconds after its light has gone red. Michael Resonant, his squat frame well fitted to his SLK-350, is turning right, aggravated by pedestrains and the voice on his iphone. He doesn't see the bus.

The ensuing crash is unremarkable. All 27 of Michael's airbags deploy, but before the cops can get out of their cars - 6 were within sight of the accident - he emerges from the passenger side. He is directed to medical personnel, but as they attend to him he is non-responsive. Still on his iphone.

I step forward, into Gary Gutting's line of sight. "Well, at least that was amusing"

"What was amusing?" he shoots back, forehead wrinkled incredulously.

"The accident, and that dude on the cell."

He pauses. "What if the accident did not happen?"

"Um . . ." I search for his point, beyond an unfortunate consequence of language. "I don't get it. The bus ran the light and hit that fat fuck's benz."

"You are ignoring the possibility that the light was necessarily green," he quickly retorts, his smugness directly proportional to my confusion.

"What? It was red. The bus hit the benz. End of story."

"I didn't see an accident, and lots of sensible people didn't see an accident either."

"Are you just being a dick?"

"The existence of this accident is an assumption you have not justified. And you can't justify it because first you have to prove that only things that can be justified exist."

I kill Gary Gutting with my Potbelly sandwich. Roast beef on wheat. After three hung juries, the prosecutor withdraws the indictment. The End.

Teddy of the North

2010-08-10T14:31:00.003-05:00

What are the odds of being in two plane crashes, each with survivors?

At least he died doing what he loved. Bribery.

I built an ant farm once, but one of them bit me, so I had to kill them all in self-defense

2010-06-04T13:54:00.005-05:00

I also had to kill all the ants trying to bring food to the ant farm, because otherwise I could not maintain their impoverished wellbeing.

We obviously can't pretend like its normal!

2010-05-29T09:40:00.002-05:00

For opponents of the ban against homosexuals serving openly in the military, the steps by Congress this week to repeal the policy, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” were a major victory. But now they are girding for what may be an equally difficult task: the transition to a force where straight and openly gay servicemen and women live, work and fight alongside one other.

For instance, the color scheme will have to change and those drapes, well, they're just gonna haveta go.

He's gonna see my peepee!

Unfriendly Letters

2010-05-28T17:41:00.009-05:00

Dear Any Asshole Complaining About Characterizations of GTMO as "America's Gulag":

Today the DC Circuit "reinstated" an earlier opinion, styled Kiyemba, which SCOTUS had vacated without deciding (weird procedural aspect, but ignore that for now). Kiyemba says, essentially, that although persons imprisoned in GTMO have a habeas right (which is guaranteed in Boumediene), federal judges cannot order the executive branch to release the person onto American soil. As is obvious, the power to order that one is held unlawfully is meaningless if it is not tied to the power to order release. Kiyemba effectively castrates the writ of habeas corpus, which, if you give a fuck, is probably the most important element of a representational government. It may be the straw that broke England's monarchical back. The founders of this a here country recognized this, enshrining it not in the bill of rights, which many thought was unnecessary and possibly counterproductive (history has borne that position out, but that's another matter), but in the text of the Constitution itself. It was seen as, and in my view is, singularly important.

This new decision not only reinstates this formal revocation of the writ of habeas corpus, it expands the original Kiyemba ruling such that federal judges may no longer have ANY say in whether the persons they have declared as being held illegally are, ya know, no longer held illegally.

The practical import of this is that none of the persons being held at GTMO, which have either been declared unlawfully held by the executive branch (several dozens, including the Uighurs, who brought the Kiyemba challenge), or the courts (36 out of 50 habeas challenges have thus far been successful), can be released anywhere. To reiterate: the government has found that a number of people currently imprisoned in GTMO are either innocent, or the government does not even possess the most rudimentary evidence to be able to hold them (far short of any legal standard I have ever seen, but whatevs), and yet, the government is continuing to imprison them.

The relevant complaint is that the comparison to the Gulag was inapt because the Gulag housed political prisoners. Why do you think Bush, and now Obama, has refused to release these people? FOR POLITICAL REASONS. It allows their political opponents to ramble on about terrorism, and not keeping America safe. It makes their ability to get what they want harder. It exposes the administration to the embarrassment of one of the people we admittedly unlawfully imprisoned for 6-9 years going on the teevee and explaining how he was tortured. While a handful of the persons we have released have taken up some sort of terrorist activity in Yemen, Saudi, or Afghanistan, something close to 99% have not, despite the fact that we imprisoned them unlawfully for 6-9 years (the DoD has published dozens of contradictory and self-refuting reports on detainees "returning to the fight," but each time they have been dismantled by careful inspection. DoD counts as "the fight," for instance, telling CNN that the CIA fitted a brace around your neck and smashed you against a wall, kept you awake for 3 weeks straight, or sent you to Jordan to have your testicles cut with a razor.). In the overwhelming majority of these cases, such the Uighurs, the persons being held are unequivocally innocent. In most of these cases, the government recognized this fact years ago.

So. How are these people NOT political prisoners? GTMO is not America's Gulag?

Sincerely,
Go. Fuck. Yourself.

Due Process

2010-05-14T09:02:00.005-05:00

As La Rana has been a sayin' these many years, the electoral system is far and away the biggest cause of the nightmare that is politics in the United States, and the biggest impediment to any improvement. Single Member District Plurality Voting virtually ensures that the fear-mongering, emotional appeals, upapologetic tribalism, and supernatural nonsense will never change, nor will the virtual enmeshment of monied interests and policy decisions. So long as those things persist, any attempt to slow the imperial and destructive drive of a country currently tottering on the transaction costs required to move money to the top 1% from the remainder will be a fools errand. Not. Gonna. Happen.

Most developed countries have proportional systems. Through some manner or another, a party wins a percentage of representative seats in rough proportion to the percentage of the vote garnered. In the United States and other plurality systems, by contrast, only the individuals who tally the largest vote total within their district get seats. Longitudinal studies have demonstrated that, particularly in Presidential systems with heterogenous populations and high immigration, this will always lead to two parties. There is even a name for this.

Though the effect is lessened somewhat in a parliamentary system, and a unique and goofy political history, Britian is one of the few developed countries with a plurality voting system.

That may soon change. The liberal democrats appear to have made this their priority, and they have the unique ability to stall the exercise of any power in Britian, at least for the time being. The link shows many possible options for a proportional system, and makes it flamingly obvious how plurality voting systems work to extirpate certain popular political ideas.

If you care at all about the future of the United States (and the rest of humanity, for that matter), and believe that there is something worth salvaging, then you must begin to agitate for this change. It may be politically impossible. It may be too little too late. Half the planet's population may starve to death from the oil crash or climate change no matter what happens. But the single most important political change in the 21st century would be a shift to some form of proportional voting in the United States.

Epistemic Closure Fail

2010-05-04T09:15:00.002-05:00

I don't want to steer this ship. I don't want it to be run "well." But I have never understood why conservatives are so happy to have demonstrably stupid people in charge of the government. I mean, Reagan, Bush II, and Palin are really very dumb people. Unsophisticated, uneducated. Incapable of higher level thought. IQs in the double digits. I don't mean to impute any moral classification here, but why in the world would you want the people least knowledgable about the world and least capable of comprehending complexity to be in charge of the entity that takes half of your money, makes all the laws, and has all da bombs? Its just bizarre.

Part of the explanation, perhaps, is Julian Sanchez's now viral idea of "epistemic closure." That is, conservatives on the whole are more likely to be intellectually insular and only seek out information and opinions with which they already agree. Maybe its that, I dunno. I have been searching for some explanation for this phenomenon for years (Liberals elect and annoint stupid people too, but less so. I don't think that is arguable). Manicheanism? Lack of curiosity? Youth brainwashing? Cowardice? I dunno. But epistemic closure is a good one.

Conservatives are obviously not too thrilled about the idea. So when Billy Saletan writes about it in teh Slate, Kevin D. Williamson rushes to pour cold water on the coals. He latches on to Saletan's point that Conservatives, at least recently, seem to focus an extraordinary amount of time and energy on bogus or overhyped stories.

To this Williamson retorts, "what exactly was bogus overhyped [sic] about the ACORN stories? Or Climategate?"

Oh, I dunno. Perhaps that the Acorn prostitute and pimp story was fabricated. That widespread voter fraud has not occured in this country in 30 years at least. That the Climategate emails didn't amount to anything more than inside baseball and pettiness. That huge amounts of source data is accessible and can be used to confirm anthropogenic warming.

But I guess you wouldn't know any of that if you never read anything outside the conservative media establishment.

No, Donny, these men are nihilists, there's nothing to be afraid of.

2010-04-08T09:39:00.007-05:00

This needs to be repeated over and over and over again: Those who support any sort of ongoing "war on terrorism" involving overseas operations or "reimagining" the guarantees of the constitution, ARE COWARDS.

Your likelihood of dying in a terrorist attack is lower than the likelihood of dying while crossing the street or getting hit by a meteor. If you are scared of this, you are scared of anything and everything. Developing domestic and foreign policy on the basis of the most irrationally fearful humans on the planet is a mind-bogglingly terrible idea, but that is exactly what we are doing.

This observation is entirely missing from media coverage and political debate. But the fact remains that the leading cause of "getting tough on the terrorists" is a dirty fucking diaper.

cow·ard [kou-erd]

–noun
1. a person who lacks courage in facing danger,
difficulty, opposition, pain, etc.; a timid or easily intimidated person.

–adjective
2. lacking courage; very fearful or timid.
3. proceeding from or expressive of fear or timidity: a coward cry.

When you've swallowed power's cock so hard it tickles your sphincter

2010-04-07T10:32:00.007-05:00

you say things like:

[Killing an American citizen simply] because ... the president says so. That's OK with me

We could probably save millions on administrative costs by having Andy McCarthy and John Bolton tongue-bath our nuclear weapons.

Fuck it Dude, Let's Go Bowling

2010-04-07T10:07:00.007-05:00

Me? If I found myself worrying how the infidelity of a famous guy who wacks at little balls with a crooked stick for kingly sums would detrimentally impact the moral fiber of society and the "important but unnatural social institution of monogomy," I might think about examining some of my premises. Robert Wright? Not so much.

Cut Twice, Then Measure

2010-04-06T09:07:00.003-05:00

As I expected, the liberal legal establishment has decided to fight Citizens United by arguing that a Corporation is a person, except when it is not a person. Good fucking luck you idiots.

This wasn't a problem back in the day....I'm just sayin'

2010-03-31T11:02:00.002-05:00

He does it in his usual roundabout, I'm-a-just-askin', obscurantist way, but is David Brooks, or is he not, saying Sandra Bullock caused her husband to cheat on her by pursuing an academy award?

This is of course in addition to his usual incompetence, as you'll notice that he phrases it as an "exchange" i.e. one OR the other, yet he thinks he's talking about one AND the other.

Wishful Thinking Thursday.

2010-03-25T10:15:00.007-05:00

In case I haven't made this clear over the innumerate times I've mentioned it, let me just reiterate: the single largest political problem, in the world, is the United States' electoral system. Seriously, just bear with me.

Almost every elected office in the United States is established on the basis of single member district plurality voting. That is, whoever gets the most votes, be it 100% or 1%, wins. As has been demonstrated a number of times, such systems almost invariably run toward two-party systems (the exceptions have parliamentary systems and high homogeneity). A third-party can't get a toe-hold until they've already become the most popular. And then if you want to get anything done, you get co-opted by one of the other parties. Take a look at the history of political parties in the US - this is always what occurs. All sides of the political spectrum talk about third parties, but there is literally no reason to think there would ever be a sustained third party in the United States, absent electoral change.

The resulting system breeds conflict instead of cooperation. The entire political establishment becomes entirely oriented toward defeating your primary rival, at the expense of having principles, taking ideas seriously, trying to benefit anyone other than yourself, etc. Good ideas are jettisoned in favor of effective ideas. "Effective" being those that will support reelection, and nothing else. Ironically, because no one has a monopoly on those limited effective ideas (fear, security, money, the other), this turns both parties into mirror images of each other.

Aside from the existence of states, the electoral system is more responsible for the United States' pointless military adventurism, destructive law and order sensibility, and general domestic policy retardedness than any other single factor. At points in the 20th century, some national politicians thought it a bad idea to engage in needless wars, take punishment lightly, or exploit the labor of others for personal benefit. These positions were exposed to claims of national defense necessity, being soft on crime, and socialism. Over time, not only did politicians become unable to argue these positions, America stopped electing politicians who even believed these things. So now the single largest government funded project in the world is the United State military, we regularly engage in aggressive military conflict, we imprison the largest number of people as a percentage of the population as any country on the planet, and we boast far and away the highest number of billionaires, as every measure of societal health, from median income to life expectancy to infant mortality, dwindles. There are plenty of other examples.

And for the most part, both parties give this series of events the thumbs up. Sure you get a lot of fake disagreement - you have to be against someone to win - but take note of the fact that every major policy disagreement is highlighted by the blatant hypocrisy of the opposing side. Ds oppose foreign wars that they voted for. Rs oppose state-run medical systems which they themselves enjoy. I oppose your pork, but I'll take mine. This is almost invariably the case, and there is no reason to believe it will change because it continues to get everyone re-elected (historical re-election rates are 95% in the House, 90% in the Senate).

Almost every single developed country in the world does it differently. In some manner or another, they elect representation proportionally. That is, if you get 3% of the vote, you get 3% of the seats (or some similar configuration). This has the effect of forcing parties to create a majority by forming an alliance or alliances with other parties, which in turn ties electoral success to effective concession and collaboration. To a degree, this awards intellect over bombast. Am I the only one to notice that most party leaders in other countries can actually intelligently discuss foreign and domestic policy?

Imagine if we did that in the U.S. For instance, lets say every state's representative bodies were elected proportionally. Congress would be represented by double digit parties in one election. No party would singularly have a majority. No one could win by just yelling that everyone else supports the terrorists. The republicans would have to form an alliance with the green party to take the majority. Divisiveness would settle just enough for people to give actual thought to the manner in which the citizen's confiscated money is being spent. We wouldn't use history's most powerful military force to attack as many impoverished countries in the name of self defense. We'd stop pretending that you can stop crime by putting everyone in jail. We might even notice that wealth is mostly just dumb-luck and a restrained mob.

Much of the world's necessities are reliant on the health of the United States economy, and the U.S. has essentially militarily occupied half the planet. The long run foreign and domestic policy choices made by the U.S. will have at least as much of an effect on global human wellness as anything short of a meteor. That is, until we run out of oil. Unless you believe that progress is only limited by the human imagination (one of the world's great terrible ideas), the only hope of avoiding massive social collapse and premature death in the next century is by changing the electoral system in the United States.

I wake up an anarchist on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and I am pretty convinced that its too far gone and we've already begun the inevitable decline. But if anyone is actually interested in running a state based on coercion in a manner that does not threaten to imminently destroy itself and prematurely take a good slice of the world's population with it, this has to change.

I'll get back to you when I figure out how.

History for the Taking

2010-03-16T08:53:00.002-05:00

Kind of mind-boggling to me that Iggy Pop is only now being inducted into the Rock and Roll hall of Fame. The Velvet Underground certainly set the stage for Iggy - John Cale produced The Stooges - and he benefitted from some timely intervention from David Bowie, but Iggy was the godfather of punk. The Stones and the Doors started to take the wheels off the Beatles pretty pop sensibility, but it was The Stooges who first popularized the destructive sound that would come to form punk.

The Stooges were virtually unknown at the time, but turn the radio to a rock station, and tell me you hear Abbey Road more than Raw Power.

Meritocracy

2010-03-01T12:03:00.003-06:00

Mostly because he is revered by some, I hasten to point out that George Will is one stupid motherfucker. Set aside the profoundly ignorant tirades against tort law. Ignore the repeated false claims about climate change. He continues to argue that attempts to change the filibuster are at odds with the Constitution and the Senate's right to determine its own procedural rules, while consistently failing to note, or notice, that the filibuster does not appear in the Constitution and is a procedural rule of the Senate. He concludes the latest effusion of purest rhetoric by triumphantly identifying the enemy of such Senatorial procedural change as James Madison; who, its probably worth noting, was the primary drafter the document that specifically provides the Senate with the ability to make its own procedural changes.

When lawyers evoke countervailing authority as support for their proposals, they face monetary and even licensing sanction. Do it for the Washington Post, and you become a famous millionaire.

The Nazis had lawyers, too.

2010-02-26T08:11:00.006-06:00

This is kinda funny. And illuminating. You can launch a blatantly illegal war - killing perhaps a million, all told, and forcing the emigration of 2-3 million perhaps - illegally torture people, illegally cause the death of over 100 prisoners, illegally detain people in war zones without providing them POW status, illegally detain people within your own soveriengty without providing them habeas corpus rights, illegally wiretap people, etc. etc. But if you try to point out how blatantly illegal and antithetical to decent human society those actions are, well, then, you better respect the law.

Bolton's explanation that the invasion of Iraq was legal according to the entire legal apparatus of the US government is a perfect illustration of why La Rana says most lawyers can go fuck themselves. Law is not special. It is a coercive mode of social organization that lawyers have sufficiently reified, deified and manipulated into a self-serving, unaccountable, instrument of power and oppression. It is an indemnification clause for the worlds horrors.

Lawfare!

2010-02-25T15:06:00.003-06:00

La Rana has been called out!

LawFare Denotes the Abuse of the Law & Legal Systems for Strategic Ends

Like by arguing that the multiple national and international prohibitions on torture do not preclude torture so long as you don't call it torture? Or like by housing prisoners away from the battlefield and U.S. in order to avoid treating them like prisoners of war or prisoners of state? Or by arguing that although judges can grant the writ of habeas corpus to order the release of a wrongfully held prisoner, perhaps the single most important legal principle in the western canon, the President does not have to release the imprisoned?

oh:

Distinguished Speakers and Panelists Will Examine Lawfare Tactics As They Are Used To:

- Silence and Punish Free Speech
- Delegitimize Democratic Nations Such as the United States and Israel
- Frustrate the War on Terrorism

You mean legal challenges by people who notice how intellectually bankrupt, dishonest, cowardly and completely full of shit the federal government and its teat-sucklers are; to the point that they hold mendaciously ironic events serving only to obscure the most breathtakingly broad abuse of the legal system that the government has engaged in since they imprisoned all the Japanese half a century ago?

Fucking bet on it.

The Foibles of Preconceived Notions

2010-02-24T11:29:00.007-06:00

Will Wilkinson is one of the most erudite, thoughtful, and interesting young political writers around. He also possesses a rather unfortunate similarity to William F. Buckley. Able to prattle on long enough about the applicable philosophy and the paradoxes in play, you almost fail to notice that when he reaches his point, eventually, it is almost always completely fucked.

The impetus for this-a-here putdown is Wilkinson's second attempt to make sense of the recent Citizens United ruling, after the first made perfectly clear that his philosophical understanding the constitution was the same sort of ad-hoc, paint-by-numbers crap you can find every day on the editorial page (note to Will: every conservative member of the Supreme Court believes the government endows "rights." Start over.). Unable to master the particulars, he has revived this argument by broadening it to apply to a particlar progessive view of government power. But he has to wade back into the Citizens United decision eventually, and thats when it gets ugly.

He chastises progressives for mistaking the ontological nature of corporations, which he describes as merely "a convenient form of social organization that enables large numbers of people to undertake cooperative endeavors." This explanation, while containing a kernal of truth, is so completely devoid of the important particulars that one has to question Wilkinson's sincerity. For instance, one might feel inclined to mention that corporations are a means of limiting liability; or that officers are legally obligated to try to make money; or that corporations are a legal fiction created by the state. This descriptive deceit allows Wilkinson to draw the completely bizarre conclusion that by granting constitutional rights to legal fictions - in effect expanding the rights of state-created entities, which rights are inextricably linked to the freedom-reducing exercise of government power - the Supreme Court has somehow diminished state power.

I am not terribly interested in whether making legal fictions constitutionally anthropomorphic actually expands the scope of state power (I'm more drawn to the fact that it makes no fucking sense, a fabled American tradition), but when you concede that "progressives are right to worry about corporatist government," you have to either huff some glue or at least spin around until you are dizzy before arguing that increasing corporate rights and further enmeshing their operation with that of the state is a step toward ending that problem.

The Port Huron Statement!

2010-02-18T18:07:00.002-06:00

And not the watered down version!

How much glee can one extract from a group of people collectively propounding upon the inherent superiority of America and the exercise of her military power, in a document named by reference to a guy who took significant time out of his last and most famous political address to specifically impugn the malignant forces of factional nationalism and interference in foreign affairs? The most common word is liberty; the most common phrase "limited government;" and yet each author wishes to use the power of the state to prevent the fags from contractin,' among other peccadilloes. Clearly we're not dealing with morons here.

It never ceases to amaze me how little time conservatives must dedicate to actually thinking about their proclaimed political philosophy. Again and again they righteously proclaim their dedication to a particular - albeit broadly defined - set of political ideals, and yet every time they scribble their political theory long-division its an inscrutable mess of contradictions, falsehoods, and 7th grade social studies.

This has got to be the least introspective group of people on the face of the earth.

She chose to risk her life for something she believed in

2010-02-03T14:24:00.005-06:00

And it paid off: witness the hulking man next to her, who is almost too dumb to speak, but has become immensely successful in ramming other large men with his head.

Now let's force every woman like her to risk their lives too.

This, as Justin points out, is more or less the content of the upcoming Tim Tebow ad.

Across this line you do not

2010-02-03T08:15:00.008-06:00

By far the best part of the latest self-same product from the Segregation Argument Generator™ is the belief that a lack of proximity is all that prevents teh gay from sucking your cock.

But I can't say that sentiment seems out of place in a male-dominated heirarchy that teaches grappling and worships power, dominance, and articulated musculature . . . . I'm just sayin'

OMG: DO read the comments:

"the author as well has allowed himself to be beaten in to submission by the liberal cultural by referring to biases against homosexuality. There is no bias about it. The act is just plain evil. and must NOT be granted acceptance in society. And make no mistake, that is what this is about. It isn't about serving ones country. It is about forcing what is considered a conservative institution to accept sodomy as normal. Our own freedoms in this country are now at stake..... nothing less."

It gets better.

Law, what is it good for?

2010-01-23T08:47:00.012-06:00

Fig. 1 Dean Summer hands out diplomas

Law is a series of rules that restrain the freedom of persons and entities through a widely accepted threat of overwhelming force. It shapes a society by limiting and directing the exercise of power. What can a person do to their own body? The bodies of other persons? How are entities organized? What types of transactions may persons and entities engage in, and how are those transactions performed? From this perspective, law is how the world works, to a certain degree.

The complexity that naturally accrues to such an undertaking requires certain structures to organize this mass of information and order this set of proscriptions. These structures frequently overlap, which creates tension as these competing ordering systems are assimilated. It is not unlike the long view of plate tectonics. They can be quite separate, but are sometimes forced together by external forces. They don't quite fit, which results in earthquakes, mountains, and other disruptions to the seemingly insurmountable inertia of such masses. This overlap among structures means that individual principles and concepts in one often affect principles and concepts in another. Likewise, changes to individual principles and concepts can have far reaching effects beyond the utility that gave rise to them, as all adjacent and overlapping structures must be altered to accommodate this new reality.

Lawyers are specially trained to navigate these complex structures. To do so effectively, lawyers must learn to live within these structures, to see the world through the perspective of the organizational logic of whatever legal structures are applicable to the circumstances. A side effect of this is that most lawyers become unable to see the big picture, unable to understand the world from any other frame of reference. In a sense, this also makes lawyers instinctively conservative. Because their existence is predicated on provincial organizational structures and ordering systems, lawyers try to assimilate all structural conflicts and new information into the existing legal structures. Re-imagining these systems of organization and order - not abiding the existing structures - is precisely what lawyers are trained not to do.

This fact of life is currently on display as lawyers (and wannabe lawyers) from all corners of the political spectrum converge to defend the status quo against attacks to a fundamental organizational principle that undergirds several different legal structures. I am here referring to the various responses to the suggestion that corporations should not be considered persons.

Corporations (and by that I include all entities) are considered legal persons in much of modern law. They have long been treated as persons in order to make sense of contractual guarantees and the assignment of liability, among other things. More recently, as in the last century or so, the "person-ness" of corporations has been extended to try to make sense of various applications of the constitution. This has, somewhat counterintuitively and skipping a few steps, resulted in a recognition that Corporations possess certain human rights, as guaranteed by the constitution. Corporations are not considered persons in all circumstances, as one would expect, so they do not (yet) have the right to vote and cannot petition for the writ of habeas corpus. This has resulted in a confusing, illogical, untenable legal structure in which the answer to question of whether corporations are persons is both yes and no. Distinctions frequently rely on differences in form, and because corporations are legal entities created to limit liability, this has provided corporations with most of the benefits and few of the restrictions of being considered a legal person.

This week, the person-ness of Corporations was extended further when a majority of the Supreme Court declared that Corporations are essentially indistinguishable from actual persons in the context of the first amendment's guarantee to "freedom of speech." I responded by writing that we should reconsider the legal dogma that corporations are persons (This idea is fairly common on the fringes of the legal world). This would represent a fundamental change to the legal structures described above. For instance, this is a threat to much of what we currently "understand" about the first amendment, because it would disrupt the manner in which we organize the applications of "the freedom of speech" to reality. And as any practicing lawyer can attest, most legal documents treat persons and entities the same, adding a caveat only to "natural" persons. These structures would become unbalanced, made insecure.

Defenders of status quo responded to this proposal (which was advanced by many) in a number of ways. Some simply stated the myopic point that corporations have been considered legal persons, in one way or another, for a long time. Others misunderstand a related structure of law, which dictates that a grant of permission by the government creates certain rights, which must be evaluated wholly apart from the grant of permission. Most responded in a manner that demonstrates that they have so internalized these various legal structures, which have in many ways developed in accordance with the presumption that Corporations were persons, that they simply cannot imagine these legal structures rewritten to account for this fundamental change. Almost all of these arguments boil down to the same point: corporations are persons, except when they are not, because our current legal structures, which are designed around the presumption that corporations are persons, except when they are not, would have to be redesigned and rebuilt if we pulled out this part of the foundation.

Ilya Somin is a slow moving target, but just read his posts with this in mind. His arguments run in every direction, and are filled with contradictions and question-begging. And keep in mind that this hopelessly confused person is an esteemed law professor. Many of his (and others') arguments rely centrally on the contention that a Corporation's "owners and employees are such persons and that that status enables them to use corporations to exercise their constitutional rights." Did you know that Microsoft's employees are just exercising their freedom of speech when the company gives a million to each party? News to me.

Persons have the freedom of speech. They may exercise this freedom individually, or collectively with other persons. It is unnecessary and problematic to insist that an entity, wholly distinct from the individual persons that own, work for, or represent the entity, is also a person possessed of the freedom of speech. Various legal structures would have to be rethought, reorganized, and reordered, but there is no good reason why we can't make this distinction - only right now it is untenable so long as we perpetuate the historical mistake of treating entities as persons. Right the latter, and you right the former (this may also require us to update our understanding of the freedom of the press, as distinct from the freedom of speech). This would make this structure of law simpler, and more logical and internally consistent. But instead, you have people from all ends of the political spectrum making fatuous arguments about what personal rights a non-person has or does not have if we pretend they are a person.

As for purely normative arguments for reconceptualizing this structure of law, look back at the central defense of the status quo - that denying personhood to Corporations would expose the Corporations that dominate the media to censorship. Maybe, just maybe, legal structures that have operated to couple the dominant exercise of speech in this country to entities legally obligated to be profit-seeking, untethered to personal responsibility, don't represent the optimal utility of law.

What the fuck has anything got to do with Vietnam?

2010-01-21T15:33:00.025-06:00

Supreme court decisions address approximately four types of disputes: novel questions, clarifications, changes in law or practice, and quibbling over the details resultant from a catastrophic error that few people recognize and fewer wish to discuss. Most decisions fall into the first two categories. The third category is rare, and the Court addresses something in the last category about once a term.

Recent examples falling into the lattermost category include cases involving the scope of the commerce clause, like Lopez, Morrison SWANCC, and Raich. In each, whether involving handguns near schools, battered women, water, or weed, the parties and the Court debated the scope of Congress' power under Art. I, Sec. 8, Cl. 3, to

"regulate Commerce . . . among the several States."

Each case broke differently. The rationales of the justices, for and against, varied for each decision, and there is no obvious thread tying the decisions and the views of the justices together. Less astute observers, which is to say 99% of the legal profession, will explain that this has to do with political viewpoints, factual differences, legal standards, etc. etc. They have a minor point, as the justices tend to break along ideological lines in these cases, and they do involve very different subjects. But this misses the big picture. What the justices are really doing is debating the contours of an absurd legal reality created long ago by a catastrophic and obvious error.

Every modern commerce clause case derives, in some manner or another, from Wickard v. Filburn. Filburn, a farmer, had grown more wheat than he was supposed to under the limits set by the federal government. He wasn't selling this excess wheat, but was consuming it. In other words, there was no transaction, and the wheat never left his farm. Nonetheless, the Supreme court held that congress had the power to regulate the production of wheat for personal consumption, because if Filburn hadn't produced the wheat, he would have had to purchase it on the open market. Because Filburn did not purchase such wheat on the open market, this failure "affected" the demand for wheat, and thus the market for wheat, and thus "commerce among the several states."

This breathtaking decision (I mean, really, read that again) meant that "commerce among the several states" meant almost anything, and that therefore congress had virtually unlimited power. This reified the federal governments' aggrandizement of power under the New Deal, and government power grew unquestioned for the next 53 years (and then only to say that congress couldn't stop people from carrying guns near schools). The court has since ratified, deified, and enshrined the rule in Filburn, developing highlarious new "factors" and "categories" and "standards" to analyze whether the rule laid down applies to everything everywhere (logical hat tip: it does). In this way, Wickard v. Filburn is probably the most pernicious court decision in the history of human existence.

I write all of this as an introduction to the news that will bounce around the internets and the teevee for the foreseeable future: McCain-Feingold is no more, and it took a large crater with it. As you've no doubt heard the fallout characterized, "Corporations are now free to spend money on the political process." Which might strike some as odd, seeing as Corporations currently contribute enormous sums to the political process and don't appear restrained in the slightest. When Russ Feingold says that this gives "corporate money a breathtaking new role in federal campaigns," and when Obama says "the supreme court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics," what they really mean is that the fig leaf is gone. Ain't no pretendin' no mo'.

While liberal and conservatives will continue to debate the hollow question of whether this denigrates democracy or elevates free speech, almost no one will ask the only important question: why the fuck are we debating the scope of a Corporation's free speech? Just like the question of whether wheat grown for personal consumption is commerce among the several states, the answer to the question of whether Corporations are persons, and therefore endowed with the freedom of speech, is fucking obvious. Neither a piece of paper, some words, a collection of liabilities, or a group of people, is a person. And yet.

Corporations were first deemed "persons" during the Industrial Revolution. Ever since, Corporations have increasingly become "persons" in almost every aspect of the law. Today, decisions on the issue merely quibble over the details. Can a Corporation have the intent to commit fraud? What are the limits to a Corporation's freedom of speech? I haven't even read the decision, but I can tell you right now that the rationales of the majority and dissent, read together with every other similar case since 1886, make absolutely no sense. They can't, because each side is relying on the counterfactual that a state-generated manner of limiting liability has 23 chromosomes. It is a foregone conclusion.

Neither side realizes how all of these decisions derive from specific historical mistakes, and that all their quibbling is nonsensical politico-babble. So you have conservatives arguing that although "commerce" means everything, it doesn't mean everything, and you have liberals arguing that although corporations are persons, corporations are not persons.

This is the legal profession. This is politics. This is the distribution of power. This is life in America. A series of errors and oversights that empowered the few, and now everyone is scrambling to get their piece of the pie.

UPDATE: Now having skimmed the opinions, I wouldn't change my analysis one bit. I would only add that my comment to YF in the comments --

"Groups of people have the same rights as indivual people, but only to the extent we are talking about the collective exercise of those individual rights. Whether the group has those same individual rights, as an entity itself, wholly apart from the individual rights of the members of the group, is a different question.

-- completely evicerates the nexus of Scalia's concurrence onto which so many dolts have lached.

Are We Gonna Split Hairs Here?

2010-01-06T18:12:00.011-06:00

David Rivkin and Lee Casey, Grand Brigadeers of the Kill-Em-All-Cuz-I-Just-Peed-Myself Brigade, want to make sure we don't forget about war and all its contents. Fearing the impending loss of the right flank in the battle to treat terrorists and criminals differently, they have ordered an audacious rearguard action to declare that terrorists should be treated like criminals after all!

But! but but! Terrorists who belong to groups should be treated differently. You see

In war, the challenge to governmental authority is not individual but collective, and is far more dangerous as a result.

This is the crucial-distinction-high-ground from which the offensive will succeed. Well armed and ruthless groups present issues of scale wholly apart from individuals, that even a properly functioning state will struggle to marshall sufficient force to overwhelm.

Suddenly the most potent foe surfaces! Rivkin and Casey!

the state is overwhelmingly powerful as compared with even the most deviant and potent criminals. This is true even in cases of organized crime and drug gangs. However well armed and ruthless such groups may be, any properly functioning state will be capable of marshalling sufficient force to maintain an overwhelming predominance.

On noes! Evasive maneuvers!

Foreign belligerents have broader means and a stronger motive to disrupt the social order than common criminals do. The power of their armaments and the pervasiveness of their ideology can often be traced to the direct or indirect support they receive from other international players.

Phew! Whereas the Sinaloa Cartel is easily defeated, ya see, due process is all that stands between you and that guy who set his crotch on fire.

Its worth repeating that these two men, who just published something that disproves itself, are highly paid, influential attorneys, with some of the most widely respected educational and governmental credentials obtainable.

Savages

2010-01-06T13:27:00.003-06:00

Judging by the comments, the spammers have devised a new scheme to evade the censors, defacing this erstwhile pristine, family values blog, with promises of penis enlargement and naked ladies, no doubt gesticulating their pudenda in my general direction. If this is what anarchy looks like, then I don't want any part of it!*

*Unless, of course, the penis enlargement thing works out. Update next week.

Hope

2009-12-14T21:43:00.005-06:00

I mean, Obama clearly wants to do the good thing that I believe in. I'm sure of it. Right? It's not like he doesn't. I'm sure its some precedural problem. It's not like he runs Congress!! ha ha. Seriously folks, he wants good stuff like I do. Sure, there was this, that, and the other thing, but you can't expect him to be perfect, and besides he definitely might do some other sutff he talked about. Betrayal is ridiculous. Republicans!!! And those Blue dogs are not helping. Obviously we need more liberal democrats. ya know, the ones who believe like I do. And like Obama does. He just isn't getting enough help. We need more good ones. You wonder if his advisors are screwing this up. I means, seriously, he doesn't think the things I am sure he doesn't think. Is it Rahm? Fire Geithner! People can't be such idealists all the time. You need 60 votes, doncha know. Its the legislative branch that controls the stuff! Its a complete conspiracy theory to think that Obama is doing this, I mean its just outside of his control. He can't do everything. He needs our support. Otherwise he won't be able to do the thing I am sure he might do because I believe that he thinks that way he made me think he does. Pushing him to the left won't do anything! Look at all the other millionaires who vote democrate and run the world. They are democrats, or liberal, or academics, and definitely not interested in money the same way, I mean, they are just trying to help, its just not working out right. Obama is trying. He wants what I want. I'm sure of it.

Non-fiction

2009-12-10T09:17:00.005-06:00

Wednesday, December 9, 2009, over six years after the invasion of Iraq, over eight years after the invasion of Afghanistan, and one week after the decision to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan was announced:

Petraeus commanded U.S. forces in Iraq in 2007 and '08. He often called the situation there "hard but not hopeless." Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he said Afghanistan was "no more hopeless" than Iraq was.

Meanwhile, earlier that morning:

As Iraqi officials prepared to announce a date for delayed national elections, car bombs detonated Tuesday at government buildings and in crowded Baghdad streets, killing at least 127 people and wounding nearly 500.

When they came for me, I put my foot down

2009-11-24T08:22:00.023-06:00

Adam Liptak has a rather hilarious column on the emergent conservative opposition to the monstrosity we call the criminal justice system. First up is former Reagan Attorney General and massively responsible party Ed Meese, who makes the history-denying, irony-free, false-in-every-realm-of-the-multiverse claim that:

“liberal ideas of extending the power of the state” were to blame for an out-of-control criminal justice system. “Our tradition has always been,” he said, “to construe criminal laws narrowly to protect people from the power of the state.”

This is a man who has dedicated his life to nothing so much as fear mongering and putting as many people in prison as possible. He was instrumental in escalating the war on drugs, and once wrote that "If a person is innocent of a crime, then he is not a suspect." Declaring his interest in protecting people from the power of the state is like declaring an interest in pedestrian safety after just running people over with your car.

The next obviously false explanation is offered by Doug Berman:

“Scalia and Thomas are vanguards of an understanding by the modern right that its distrust of government extends all the way to the criminal justice system,”

Anyone who has actually read the criminal justice system opinions by Scalia and Thomas would find that statement somewhat odd, seeing as Scalia and Thomas side with the state in almost every single criminal justice case and are the only two members of the Court to have green-lighted the execution of innocent people. If I were Berman, who is a law professor who focuses on the criminal justice system and must therefore know how indefensible and transparently absurd that claim is, I would excise that quote from my own website, in order to avoid the well-deserved ridicule. [Berman apparently meant that the language used by Scalia and Thomas in framing their constitutional intent arguments may help to persuade some conservatives that distrust of the government extends to the criminal justice system. First up for convicing . . . Justices Scalia and Thomas].

So what's really responsible for this magical turnaround? Here are the three examples of inappropriate use of the criminal justice system offered by the "enlightened" Conservatives:

“A joint on a yacht, and the whole thing is forfeited,”

“People get put in jail for importing lobsters.”

The law, which makes it a crime for officials to defraud their employers of “honest services”

What do they all have in common? 99.9% of the time they are committed by wealthy white people, who just happen to share a skin tone and income quartile with every single person quoted in the article. Hilarious and depressing!

Ed Meese then goes for the quadruple axle, self-awareness-failure coda:

“We picked by accident a time,” he said, “when it was not a very popular topic in light of corporate frauds.”

To his credit, Radley Balko is having none of it.

His Craggy Visage

2009-11-20T11:52:00.007-06:00

Although it won't be recognized as such, the decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City reveals as much about the true nature of the American political establishment as anything in recent memory.

On the one hand, the no-Obamas are frightened that the A-Team will break him out of jail to make some 'splosions, or that a KSM scowl will drive the masses to self-immolate at crowded intersections. It's all rather murky - and pathetic. This need to glorify "the enemy" with a James-Bond-meets-sci-fi mythos in order to aid in the self-delusion that we are the triumphant victors in an existential struggle betrays an astonishing level of insecurity and cowardice. Aside from the rather insane insistence that Goliath is forged through successful middle management skills, anyone who thinks that KSM poses a physical danger to the residents of New York . . . has never lived in New York.

On the other hand, the no-Obamas accurately accuse the yes-Obamas of holding a show trial. As the administration has made plain, these men will either be convicted by a civilian jury - and killed or detained forever, convicted by a military jury - and killed or detained forever, or just killed or detained forever. Yet, if the criminal justice system has any claim to the concept of "justice," it must remain possible that the accussed will suffer no sanction (I don't think that point is arguable). And since that option is not on the table (not killing anyone never seems to be on the table), the trial is simply one aspect of long-form permanent administrative detention. In which case, lets stop with the pretense and throw away the key.

Perhaps the only thing to be gained from the whole GTMO debacle is the truth it reveals about ourselves. Conservatives are cowards, Liberals don't actually care about due process, and this is a country of men, not laws.

I begrudge no woman her scam

2009-11-16T14:26:00.003-06:00

On the impending release of Jackpot: Sarah Palin Gets Hers, let me just say that I don't have much to say, because I don't understand her. Literally. The one thing all Palin supporters seem to have in common is that not one of them has ever attempted to comprehend the words coming out of her mouth.

I'd like to hold off judgement on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.

2009-11-06T11:13:00.004-06:00

17 Hours at the Corner:

5:42 PM - There's no reason to get ahead of the story.

6:13 PM - We don't want to get ahead of the facts, but we have to ask if he's Muslim.

6:39 PM - The media keeps suggesting it was Post Traumatic Stress Disorder instead of Muslimness.

6:39 PM - He was Muslim.

7:14 PM - Yup, definitely Muslim.

7:32 PM - Oh yeah, super Muslim.

11:45 PM - The Media needs to stop trying to figure out why he did it.

6:34 AM - He did it because he was Muslim.

7:40 AM - He did it because he is one of those Muslims who channel generic Islamist fantasies that America is to blame for mostly self-induced pathologies.

8:46 AM - Oh yeah, definitely did it cuz he's Muslim.

9:45 AM - Muslims are uniquely dangerous because they believe in self-defense.

10:21 AM - He must be put to death.

Some Sort of Cosmic Justification That Can Amplify

2009-11-06T08:55:00.005-06:00

See The Corner for all the latest "how-do-we-say-Islam-causes-violence-without-saying-Islam-causes-violence" headscratching. Though they really should retitle the posts with quotes from Dr. Strangelove, IMHO.

Victorious Davidian Hansonustus, deep-thinker of the bunch, declares that the "sane approach" is to recognize that your Commie has no regard for human life, not even of his own. This is a man who styles himself a philosopher, and his conclusion is them thar muslins jus crazay. And if you read him carefully, he's calling for and trying to justify the internment of all Muslims who believe that the Muslim residents of the countries we invade and occupy have a right to fight back. Andy McCarthy, as one might expect, thinks that approach is too circumscribed.

Secular Saboteurs!

2009-10-20T10:34:00.020-05:00

Bill Donahue is awesome.

On the one hand, he's right, so long as we to take the bible and recent interpretations thereof preferred by Bill Donahue to be true. On the other hand, he has the hilarious Platonic tendency of our last caucasian president to believe that a concept exists if you say so. The entire column rests on the possibility that America can be sabatoged, that Western civilization can be "beaten down," that society can be scrubbed, and that religion can also be sabatoged. And thats before you make it out of the first paragraph.

My favorite exhortation comes in the second graph, wherein he states that the "radicals" want to "annihilate American culture, having absolutely nothing to put in its place." What can that possibly mean? Where culture once stood there shall be a void? All human interaction shall be sucked away in the ensuing vacuum? Humanity will forever teter on the event horizon of history? As much as I love the guy, I think he would be scarier if he conjured some nasty eventualities that might actually occur. Hell, I'd settle for something I can imagine.

In any event, I never get tired of rants against sexual perversity from catholic men . . . whose leaders abstain from sex, except a few hundred who rape pre-pubescent boys, and all of whom worship a man who wears dresses and a rather fey hat, and lives in a gigantic gold lame castle.

I gets the giggles.

Libertarians: Thats what we meant all along!

2009-10-16T15:51:00.014-05:00

One half of the 2009 Nobel prize for economics has gone to Elinor Ostrom, an award distinguishable both because she is not a self-proclaimed Economist, and because she is the first woman to win. Ostrom has done a lot of work to solve, and explain community derived solutions to commons problems, which do not require state involvement. So of course Libertarians everywhere rushed to praise her work and catch a few rays from the spotlight, as it were. Only I can't figure out why they've embraced her (to be fair, Reason also saw the problem I'm about to raise).

It seems to me that her work more or less undercuts a fundamental premise of libertarianism, or at least libertarian economic theory. As I understand it, in my absurdly reductivist way, is that libertarian economics rests on a three part bedrock: (1) the state is usually inefficient, to the point of counter-productive; (2) the tragedy of the commons; and (3) yelling HAYEK! The first point I agree with, which is why I find so much common company with libertarians. But this is not really an economics principle, at least not any more than it is a sociological principle or public health principle. It is, more or less, simply an observation about the orientation and use of power. Libertarians also, generally speaking, only take from this principle what they like. See, e.g., Glenn Reynolds and Eugene Volokh, who only trust the government when they say we're in danger, and that we should cut them some slack if we want to stay safe.

The second, the "tragedy of the commons," is the idea that individuals forced to share a communal good will destroy that good and harm themselves, as a result of their own selfishness. The most common example is a communal field, which cattle owned by local farmers can use for grazing. The "tragedy" arises when individual farmers, attempting to better themselves, put so many cattle out in the pasture that it is destroyed, and no one can use it. It is not that one party was responsible for the destruction, but rather that each party was attempting to maximize his or her own benefit, "rationally," and thereby destroyed the commons because it was in no individuals interest to preserve them.

The libertarian solution to this problem is private property (I applaud them for the exercise), on the basis that people endowed with private property will be less inclined to destroy fields with a more direct and immediate impact on them. Private property internalizes the externality. This constant and overwhelming preference for private property is more or less assumed in libertarian economics and is why libertarians have the same answer for every commons problem.

Enter Ostrom. Her most important work, in my limited estimation, has been to explain why and how people around the world have managed common resources without private property and without the coercive force of the state. The libertarian blogosphere, apparently, saw "commons" and "no state," yelled HAYEK! and ran down to the pub to tell all. One economist called her argument "the opportunity of the commons," while fabled libertarian ignoramus Ilya Somin called it "an alternative to traditional libertarian thought."

What none of these libertarians realizes is that she is not proposing a different interpretation of the tragedy of the commons, or a different solution to the tragedy of the commons. What Ostrom has worked to demonstrate is that, in many situations, there is no such thing as the tragedy of the commons. People can, over time, develop mechanisms for successfully managing common property. There is no need for private property enforced by a state.

You know what Ostrom's work is really an argument for?

Anarchy.

Polanski

2009-10-08T13:03:00.007-05:00

In order to preempt the mouthbreathers and those prone to hysterics (no offense to the womenly sort) let me first say that the claim advanced at Chez IOZ is not a defense of Polanksi - the idea that IOZ condones the violence at issue misunderstands the entire corpus of his labors - but rather that the screeching demands that he be punished, through violence of some sort, by the state, in the interests of something called "justice" are empty, hypocritical, moral posturing.

After a couple millenia of wrangling with the concept, the one thing we can clearly say about the word "justice" is that it is an empty vessel, to be filled with whatever metaphysical construction you prefer. Is it rightness? Goodness? Equality? Adherence to rules? Universal truth? Morality? Godly-something-or-other? All of those? None of them? Justice is simply incapable of coherent definition (try to decipher the wikipedia page), and broad claims to its authority are therefore impotent. But lets drill down a little further, ignore the various universal and supernatural claims, and limit our query to the situation at hand.

The question one obviously must answer in calling for punishment as justice, since punishment in this context is the imposition of violence or coercion through threat of the same, is whether such punishment is justifiable. This is a question that has been entertained by Beccaria, Kant, Bentham, Adam Smith, Dostoyevsky, Foucoult, H.L.A. Hart, and in more recent times, Norval Morris, Andrew von Hirsch, and David Garland, among many many others. They have advanced retributive theories - which argue that the crime must be atoned for in some way, either to make society whole, treat the offender as a moral creature, or to counter the advantage supposedly gained by the offender - consequentialist theories, which have advanced from utilitarianism and which argue that society is benefited from the punishment, either through deterrence, incapacitation, order, etc. - and more attenuated theories, such as restorative justice. No one takes rehabilitation seriously as a purpose of the criminal law.

These arguments have gotten too complex to paraphrase in recent decades, as philosophers strain to explain why retributivism is not simply vengeance, and why consequentialism is not simply a sacrifice for the benefit of society, irrelevant to desert. The only conclusion one can draw from this mess is that punishment as justice is similarly an empty vessel, large enough to accommodate every predilection. Setting your moral compass by the imposition of punishment is like building a house on a birling log.

In the context of the criminal justice system, (I would argue) "justice" roughly means the correct or appropriate application of punishment: persons deserving of punishment are punished in an amount deserved. That definition is obviously circular, but lets take it at face value anyway. Setting aside the surprisingly difficult question of who should be punished, we still have the problem of determining what amount of punishment is right. A number of people, groups, commissions, etc., have fairly persuasively sketched ordinal systems of punishment - ranking - but claims to cardinal anchoring - the top and bottom of the ranking - are a fool's game; almost by definition non-sequitors. Which is to say, while we can agree that the punishment for rape ought to be more severe than the punishment for shoplifting, no one can say what the punishment for rape, or shoplifting, ought to be. Should it be old testament equal-and-opposite-reaction punishment? A rape for a rape? 20 years? 2? A slap on the wrist? Any amount? Death? The only amount that seems to make any sense at all, as has been advanced by Andrew von Hirsch, among others, is the amount fitted to the cultural mores of the time. Which, if you pause to think about it, concedes the point (and introduces some rather disturbing corollaries, but we'll get to that another time).

Implicit in the demands that Polanski be brought to "justice" are the claims that justice is served through punishment, and that the punishment sought is the correct amount. Yet, as I've just explained, those claims are literally meaningless; incapable of definition. And we've not even reached the questions of whether vengeance is sought, whether society benefits from the punishment, whether the state is uniquely justified to inflict such punishment, or whether the criminal justice system is representative of any theory or system of justice.

The claim that punishing Polanski is in furtherance of justice therefore falls somewhere between indefensible and meaningless. Advancing that claim without even attempting to explain why that is so, is moral posturing on stilts. And its worse than that. It gives cover to and obscures the operation of social institutions that are responsible for so much needless suffering.

We can't minimize coercion and violence through the systematic institutionalization of the same. We can only hope to do so by deconstructing the mechanisms of power through which it is most easily and most broadly inflicted. We need less punishment, not more. By demanding that Polanski be punished, one only serves to reinforce that which must most urgently be dismantled.

First they came for the right to make 200x as much as another human being

2009-10-05T11:21:00.007-05:00

In case you thought Conservatives were nothing more than apologists for wealthy white men and protectors of the status quo in which wealthy white men control most levers of money and power, Ross Douthout is here to assure you that the real causes of income inequality are . . . . poor people and immigrants!

Those damn unwashed just keep dropping out of school, getting pregnant, and generally not abiding the "traditional" values that existed for a short period between the mid-19th century and mid-20th century. Its not our fault they can't keep up!

But don't despair, for Douthout offers us a solution, albeit not his preferred one: increase the size of the state without raising taxes (he actually says this). Whether he means the physical size of the state, such that it occupies such vast amounts of space that it greets you once out of the shower, or he's just a complete fucking moron, is anyone's guess.

Retirement

2009-09-22T09:09:00.003-05:00

Tired of excoriating the value-laden education system for not describing things without explaining them, Stanley Fish wants us to know that some black dude keeps popping up on the teevee, interrupting Fish's TV dinners. That this man is the single most powerful person on the face of the earth, fifty years removed from a time when a black man could not find any job, is neither here nor there. Why back in Fish's day, Presidents were overshadowed by Vice Presidents whose only public appearances were once yearly speeches at the conservatives-who-love-to-bomb-brown-people-club followed by 15 minutes of scowling at Tim Russert. Way back when, there were other commanding figures in an administration, like the woman who approved Zoloft and the dude who was a piece of Executive Office Building furniture before losing the easiest presidential election in recent memory.

Stanley. Find a comfortable chair, and point it toward a nice window with a view. We'll take it from here.

Cultural Sadism

2009-09-03T11:16:00.008-05:00

The willingness of Scotland to release a dying man from prison, and the unwillingness of the most liberal of American states to release a dying woman from prison, demonstrates something that few social critics are willing to address: Americans are barbarians, utterly adrift in a world aspiring to distance itself from violence.*

Leaving aside our myopic national egoism, all-encompassing xenophobia, and murderous foreign policy, American punishment is draconian in a way almost incomparable to any country this side of Iran and North Korea. Great Britain comes the closest in the developed world (which only adds to irony of the "outrage" at the release of the Lockerbie convict). Whereas many European countries release thousands of prisoners annually, and others regularly seek ways to lighten the brutality that is prison, mercy is a word without content in the U.S.

Read the comments to this post. A need to punish, harm, and cause pain to other human beings predominates. Not only are we unwilling to let a dying woman be released from one prison to the prison of wherever she is lying down, most bristle at the very idea, and recommend more violence and brutality. The reaction in the U.S. to the release of the Lockerbie dude is equally as illuminating / appalling. Apparently justice means the ability to readily locate someone at their moment of death. Add to that the "debate" about torture, and one begins to suspect that the last 100 years transpired without notice in the U.S.

Why Americans think it good, useful, or desirable to inflict so much pain and suffering - even on those unable to defend themselves - has never been adequately explained. This is the best attempt to date, and Michael Tonry is probably the foremost expert on the subject. No one really understands it, though, which suggests to me that its one of those inexplicable symptoms of culture. America has always loved itself some eye-for-an-eye, but in the waning days of the empire, it seems as if compassion and respect for human dignity have been replaced wholesale with a need to dominate, destroy and degrade. Or perhaps, one must consider, it was always thus.

*Violence is obviously still omnipresent, and will be for the foreseeable future of nation-states, but violence has decreased, and continues to decrease, as human society evolves. Even the most barbaric authoritarians claim to be seeking peace.

The End of the inquiry is the answer to this question

2009-07-24T13:50:00.003-05:00

Everyone who thinks Gates was in the wrong believes the police report (the undisputed facts compel the opposite conclusion).

Why?

Gates II

2009-07-23T14:59:00.005-05:00

Undisputed Facts: Police respond to a call about a potential B&E. Gates is inside his home when they arrive. Police demand Gates' ID. Gates provides ID, which indicates that he lives there. Gates demands police ID. Police refuse. Gates exits house. Police arrest Gates.

Obama: I wasn't there, and don't have all the facts, so its too early to say this was racially motivated. Nonetheless, it was stupid to arrest the guy, in his own home, after he proved he lived there.

Crazytown: Obama wasn't there and doesn't have all the facts. Its possible that the cop was blind and Gates used Cane-Fu on him, plus racism can't happen when other black people are around, so its outrageous for him to say this was racially motivated, and shameful to call the police stupid. What a jerk.

Conservatives: Denying racism and seeking freedom with authority's dick in their mouth, since 1865.

UPDATE: Cops: We resent the interference with our ability to arrest anyone, anywhere, for any reason.

Cowardice is the theme

2009-07-22T11:06:00.006-05:00

So I guess when Conservatives babble on and on about freedom, they mean freedom from organic food and tax-funded health care, or something. Because it seems to me that their recommendation to always do whatever authority tells you sorta begs the question of what they want freedom from.

Defeatism

2009-07-16T17:15:00.004-05:00

John Yoo's latest.

In it, he argues that warrantless wiretaps (by definition illegal) are legal because (1) they seem prudent if you are prone to pant-shitting, (2) you lie about what FISA is and does, (3) the country's most famous monarchist might approve had he lived beyond the advent of electricity, (4) other presidents broke the law, handwaving, handwaving, etc.etc. He then advances an interpretation of the seminal Supreme Court case on the limits of presidential power - which he never once mentioned in any of his memos at OLC - that will strike anyone who has read Youngstown as obvioulsy and deliberately false.

All of this in service of the idea that if the president says "national security," he is beholden to no law; an idea so manifestly and self-evidently pernicious and mendatious I can scarcely believe it the product of conscious thought. And yet, as the Democratic Party reamerges - again - as the war party, it is quickly becoming accepted wisdom. From that I can draw only one conclusion. If human beings are this stupid, there is no saving them. We are doomed to mediocrity, enslavement, brutality, and destruction.

Supreme Irony

2009-07-15T13:38:00.006-05:00

Sotomayor has been and continues to be criticised for her oft-expressed belief that a judge's life experiences impact the judge's decision-making. This has been interpreted by the right, not as a self-evident and unavoidable fact of human decision-making, but as an indication that Sotomayor is possessed of inappropriate biases; which is to say she will arrive at her conclusions a priori.

The appropriate method for decision-making, says the right, is to transmogrify the judge into a computer and process facts in binary. This is of course patently absurd, theoretically, philosophically, biologically, physiologically, and from just about every other perspective on human life we humans have yet generated (as the good professor has duly noted). Nonetheless, the right has demanded it be so, and left has responded by assuring us that Sotomayor will be shipped to One First Street only after processing at the local Apple factory.

Sotomayor herself has now indicated - contrary to her previous human-resembling sentiments - that she is possessed of an intel processor, capable only of "applying law to facts."

In response, one Louis Michael Seidman, a liberal law professor who seems reasonably bright, has declared himself disgusted at this about face, both because it resembles perjury and because "First year law students understand within a month that many areas of the law are open textured and indeterminate—that the legal material frequently (actually, I would say always) must be supplemented by contestable presuppositions, empirical assumptions, and moral judgments." In other words, the sentiment demanded by the right, to which Sotomayor has now pledged fealty, is complete nonsense. He even goes so far as to call the "claim that fidelity to uncontested legal principles dictates results" a "lie."

Enter Wendy Long and Ed Whelan, both former SCOTUS clerks and leading lights of the conservative legal movement (no snickering!). Both, not incidentally, are leading advocates of the judge-as-computer model, and have contributed to the pressure under which Sotomayor so recently (likely insincerely) acquiesced. And what do they say to Seidman's retort?? We Agree!!

To recap. Long and Whelan demand something impossible and stupid. Sotomayor agrees to said something. Seidman declares said something impossible and stupid. Long and Whelan agree with Seidman.

And why would they ever agree with an analysis that refutes their asserted core principle and implicitly calls them liars?? Because it supports the conclusion that Sotomayor is bad, which they arrived at a priori!!

Practical Changes In Lieu of Revolution

2009-07-13T18:24:00.002-05:00

This is the culmination of everything Radley Balko does right.

C:\My Predictions\Told-you-so

2009-07-13T18:11:00.002-05:00

New Rule. If the explanation doesn't make sense, they are lying.

Elie Wiesel was right about one thing

2009-07-01T10:19:00.006-05:00

Around the internets we see self-congratulatory plaudits for "handing Iraq back to the Iraqis," ranging in tone from the celebratory to the conciliatory, but nonetheless conveying the distinct impression that something, anything, we've done to and in Iraq is classifiable as "good."

This is proof of exactly one thing: there is no god. For if there were, this nauseating indifference to death, destruction, and cruelty - wrought in ones own name! - would have already led to the cleansing of all human life from the area between Canada and Mexico.

As one considers this greusome back-patting, amidst calls for a repeat, three things should be kept in mind:

1) As a result of our actions, every day for several years, and into the foreseeable future, somewhere in a country the size of Texas dozens of people are exploded into little bits.

2) Iraq is as it is, whatever that is, because the United States of America facilitated the death of a number of human beings so large that the toll is unamenable to precise calculation and yet unquestionably belongs on this list.

3) The United States military has not, nor ever will, leave Iraq.

Best Recent Political Suicides

2009-06-24T14:16:00.007-05:00

1. Mark Sanford.

5. Rod Blagojevich.

27. Larry Craig.

52. Elliot Spitzer.

77. John Edwards.

454. David Vitter. (attempted)

857. John Ensign. (attempted)

A prize

2009-06-24T12:01:00.004-05:00

To anyone who can figure out what the hell VDH is babbling about. Setting aside the fact that he doesn't appear to know the difference between plain and plane or imply and infer, I can't decipher a single cogent point in that J'accuse!; let alone one that is not predicated on a laughably incorrect observation that what's happening in Iran is Democrats v. Theocrats, Royal Rumble VII: Represent or Die!

Let's call the whole thing off

2009-06-22T16:31:00.002-05:00

Fresh off his declared opposition to policies that would equate light skinned and dark skinned people, for that reason, Roger Clegg has denounced the recent congressional resolution apologizing for slavery as an attempt "to keep white people on the hook."

Congressional resolutions are a dime a dozen, expecially as they relate to events decades and centuries past, but when you write for a magazine that explicitly opposed integration and your politics veer toward perpetuating a black underclass that was created by white people who no doubt funded and read said magazine, mebbe ya just let enough alone. Ya know?

Oh, and for goodness sakes read Andy McCarthy. Watching a man slowly lose his mind, in public no less, is fascinating.

On the beguiling inability of conservatives to recognize harm to anyone but people who very closely resemble themselves

2009-06-18T18:20:00.003-05:00

Roger Clegg has taken to the austere digital pages of National Review Online to prevent the possible inconvenience of white people at some point in the future:

Conservatives have warned on these pages that the language used in proposed anti-racial-profiling legislation would drive the police to adopt racial quotas in their policies, because of its use of a “disparate impact” standard and the requirement that the police collect racial data on their stops. Well, here’s evidence from across the pond that we’re right. Lord Carlile, a “Liberal Democrat peer” and “independent reviewer of anti-terrorism laws,” has found that “`there is ample anecdotal evidence’” that the British police are “carrying out the[ir anti-terrorist] searches on people they had no basis for suspecting so they could avoid accusations of prejudice” by “`“balanc[ing]” the statistics.’”

So. Trying to prevent the unnecessary harrassment of minorities on the basis that the small subset of minorities that commit crimes is larger as a percentage of the minority population than the subset of whites that commit crimes as a percentage of the white population, is bad, because then police would also uneccessarily harrass white people in order to compensate for the continued unecessary harrassment of minorities, which we know because some white dude from another country speculated that police abuse their powers only out of a concern for racial sensitivity.

And conservatives honestly believe that minorities vote liberal because they like welfare.

Imperial Letters

2009-06-12T15:30:00.003-05:00

Dear China,

If you want to maintain control of the population without ceding anything meaningful, Machivelli counsels that you allow a minimum amount of freedom. Something token, like, say, access to pornography. The last thing China needs is to force the installation of software that could cause millions of computers to crash. That would feed new resentment against a government already accused of gross incompetence after thousands of children died in the collapse of shoddily constructed schools in the 2008 earthquake. If there's any more resentment against the government, people will stop doing what they're told. Can't let them get uppity, ya know.

All the best,
America

USA:nyt

Tobacco is a plant

2009-06-12T10:28:00.007-05:00

Now I'm certain that Congress's decision to give the FDA regulatory authority over tobacco will serve absolutely no purpose other than to increase the size of the federal government and make tobacco more expensive, but I think we can do better than pornstar cum Corner rep Tevi Troy:

"Tobacco, which would be regulated by the FDA under the bill, is neither food nor drug . . ."

I'd like to see an explanation of that one; from a guy who used to run HHS no less. He's an orthodox jew, so I assume swine is not a food, either.

[inside baseball: Tevi forgot/doesn't appreciate that words have meanings apart from their regulatory definitions]

Freudian Slips

2009-05-29T13:10:00.005-05:00

The National Review is an endless source of material. I could read the Corner all day long. Just today we've got Andy McCarthy lamenting the fact that Sotomayor holds an opinion on impartiality that seems odd in a newspaper quote, but which is shared by just about everyone else in the world who has thought about it for a second; Iaiain Murray trying desperately to explain that people really love American health care and hate universal health care, when almost every metric points in exactly the opposite direction; and Krauthammer, by relay, giving bad legal analysis that any law student can infer was given to him over dinner by a friend who went to law school 40 years ago, but who doesn't currently practice or really remember much.

But today's winner is Jay Nordlinger:

In yesterday’s column, I had an item on a story involving that most beauteous of things: a clash of liberal pieties. I have collected such stories for years. In this particular case, the Governor General of Canada ate the heart of a seal.
(Not sure whether it was a baby seal.) Bad, bad, bad.

But she is a “woman of color.” And she was honoring an “Inuit” tradition. Good, good, good; good, good, good.

What’s a liberal to do?

A reader from Arizona wrote me to share a similar story, and dilemma: There is a Hopi ritual of smothering baby eagles. Hopis and Hopi rituals are good — very good. Smothering baby eagles — not so cool.

One presumes he is unaware of the implication that conservatives love to kill baby animals and hate minorities and their traditions.

If at first you don't succeed

2009-05-29T09:29:00.002-05:00

Another bizarre hit-job on Sotomayor. Pay attention to the forced dichotomies and deliberately misleading characterizations - this is how false narratives are created, and why every conservative in the U.S. is certain that Al Gore once said he invented the internet.

That's "raciaLIST" to you, bub

2009-05-28T11:27:00.003-05:00

Mark Krikorian of National Review rushes to the barricades, prepared to defend our shores from the culture-destroying onslaught of . . . calling non-anglophone people by their names.

The high-stepping logic and murky justifications put forth by people who got the memo that expressions of blatant racial bigotry are no longer acceptable in public discourse, but who nonetheless feel that there is a "us," who are not - and must not become! - the same as "them," is endlessly amusing.

Andrew McCarthy

2009-05-21T18:03:00.007-05:00

McCarthy was an assistant U.S. attorney at one point, and even led the prosecution for some of the convictions stemming from the 1993 WTC attack, so many people listen to his thoughts and advice on matters involving terrorism. Specifically, as he often writes on the matter, he is asked to comment on Guantanamo in a variety of settings. This seems pretty reasonable, given his background, unless you've read McCarthy and have any knowledge of the subjects he covers.

Everything I have ever read of his contains at least one bald-faced lie; a lie so blatant and easily proven that he must know it to be false. Either that or the man can no longer tell the difference. As I've said before, he's among that group - Douglas Feith, Joe Lieberman are notable members - whose brain circuitry was hopelessly rearranged after 9/11; like Terminator when his betters repurpose him. Normally McCarthy sells his falsehoods on the pages of the National Review, but today he appears in the New York Times to offer commentary on Obama's speech. He writes:

"The dig that the [military commission] system only succeeded in convicting three terrorists in seven years conveniently omits the fact that the delay was largely attributed to legal challenges advanced by lawyers who now work in his own administration."

This is false in more ways than one. First, no one in Obama's administration, as far as I know, has ever represented any Guantanamo detainees. Other attorneys in their law fims did - which is probably where McCarthy would retreat if confronted - but the same is true of the law firms that much of Bush's administration recently joined. McCarthy must know this. And yet.

Second, if you have any knowledge of the Guantanamo litigations, as McCarthy pretends to, you would know that the military commissions have been unsuccessful because (a) approximately six prosecutors have quit because the government has been concealing evidence and misleading the judiciary, and (b) because the government has no evidence on anyone and has been dragging, delaying, postponing, renegging, and doing just about everything in their power to prevent any cases under any of the various legal regimes from going forward. Anyone who would suggest otherwise is either lying, or has no idea what they are talking about.

McCarthy continues:

"The commissions, moreover, are now being delayed several more months simply so Mr. Obama can make some cosmetic tweaks that work no real change in the commission process but will enable him to claim that they are somehow a departure from Bush commissions." [emphasis added]

The changes Obama has proposed to the commissions system include removing the presumption that the government's hearsay evidence is reliable - a presumption the detainees would have the burden of rebutting. As the cases against the detainees consist almost entirely of hearsay evidence, there could hardly be a more significant change to the commissions short of removal to a real federal court. McCarthy is an experienced attorney who claims to be an expert in this area, and therefore must know this.

[On Second Thought] McCarthy's point may actually be more revealing than he intends. I had presumed that "cosmetic" was a reference to the administration of justice, but I think I've got the wrong metric. He means "cosmetic" in the sense that none of the changes will change the outcome of the commissions. In other words, the changes are cosmetic in that they will not cause the commissions to deviate from their purpose, which is to find people guilty.

Obama's entire arragement is designed in precisely that manner. Some will get trials, some will get commissions, and some will be indefinitely detained. Lest anyone think otherwise, these measures are not being adopted because they are needed to further any ends involving justice or fairness. They are options for the government to deploy, as needed, to ensure that no one is ever released. With that in mind, any iteration of military commissions is cosmetic.

Torture Apologia Roundup #3

2009-04-20T18:13:00.002-05:00

Some weeks ago, Douglas Feith - locked in a dead heat with Thomas "I was sitting in ___ talking to ____ when I realized ___" Freidman for the dumbest Jew alive - splattered the WSJ with his assessment that unlike the United States:

"In countries run by officials who rule by force, commit aggression, perpetrate humanitarian outrages and stand above and out of reach of any domestic law, leaders are sometimes tried by international tribunals. Such countries' sovereignty is not respected because their own domestic laws -- let alone their international legal obligations -- do not bind their leaders."

He's definitely on to something. Exactly what, he has no idea. It's as if that stupid Orwell quote stood up from the page and penned an Op/Ed.

A Podium To Cover Every Ass

2009-04-20T16:20:00.005-05:00

David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, partners at the same DC law firm, write in the WSJ - ever warm porcelain for torture apologetics - that, wouldn't ya know it, we never tortured all along! Phew! what a relief.

The source of this confirmation? Why, the torture memos themselves! Sure they are almost the least reliable source on the face of the entire fucking earth to find such information (a close second to Op/Eds by war criminals) , and sure much of what Rivkin and Casey rely upon predates what it supposedly absolves, and sure it runs contrary to every other available piece of information not authored by a Bush appointee, but this means No torture! yeah!

Besides - we are informed for the 50th time, ostensibly because the world has not acceded to the flaccid demands of its logic - the torture was designed to not obviously be torture! We took extra care that when we smashed them against a wall we didn't kill them!

Rivkin and Casey are good like that. Just a few years ago they wrote an article stating falsely that the prisoners at Guantanamo are being held as POWs, when they must have known that the only aspect of POW status in effect at GTMO was indefinite detention. Remember that if you ever need a lawyer.

As I come to terms with the fact that some of the most bloodthirsty monsters in the world work just down the street, I am amazed anew that almost no Americans appreciate that nearly their entire governing class is either actively engaged in covering up torture, or bragging about it.

I'm hooked on a feeling...

2009-04-17T09:56:00.004-05:00

Mukasey and Hayden take to the Wall Street Journal to explain that releasing the remaining OLC memos was a bad idea because now it will be harder to torture people. Seriously:

"disclosure of the details of the program . . . assures that the suspension imposed by the president's executive order is effectively permanent. There would be little point in the president authorizing measures whose nature and precise limits have already been disclosed in detail to those whose resolve we hope to overcome."

Stay classy war criminals, stay classy. Then they move on to the obligatory obfuscation and benign characterization of said torture:

"Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens."

"Faux outrage?" Yes, yes, I am only pretending to be mad that the people in charge of the country in which I was born and now currently live flagrantly and obviously violated federal and international law (treaties are US law - read the constitution) in order to inflict pain on other human beings, and then pretend otherwise. How should I say this? Fuck you.

"Contempt of our enemies?" What sort of Machiavellian nonsense is that? The people who are currently trying to kill Americans will hold us in less regard than they already do because we have reaffirmed that we won't torture people, consistent with preexisting and current law? And how exactly is the contempt of people who are currently trying to kill Americans a concern? Who thinks its likely anyone will be "shamed" into nonviolence because The Big Dick® has affirmed that it will once again abide the pre-existing federal and international law?

This isn't even nonsensical - its like non-matter. The only way to comprehend it is to empty the world of all knowledge.

"interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists." Here they are flippantly referring to the Frequent Flyer Program, the most infamous use of which was on a minor - on whom we have no solid evidence and the prosecutor for which has resigned because the government is concealing exculpatory evidence and violating court orders - by waking him and transfering him to a different cell every few hours for several weeks. Weeks.

Next is the carefully worded explanation that the contempt-preventing torture, which is so not a big deal, convinced hard core bad guys to give us information that led to the capture of other bad guys and prevented imminent attacks. Except every single non-political appointee I have ever heard from - La Rana has sources! - states plainly that this is utterly false. Note that no details are offered; just a bland conclusory statement roughly aligned with the timeline. The details must remain secret, Darth Cheney reminds us, because.....well.....uh....they uh....

The rest is just as self-refuting, nonsensical, and sadistic; or "as thorough, well-written, and convincing as any op-ed you will read." It reminds us that this country is bitterly divided - between those who would cover up torture, and those who would administer the torture themselves.

Teabagging!!!

2009-04-16T18:23:00.003-05:00

Must . . . . Catch . . . . Breath . . . . Too Hilarious . . . . To . . . . [passes out from sheer joy]

Heaven comes in 4 colors and three flavors

2009-03-18T08:56:00.002-05:00

In a just world, a man who, on the basis of self-proclaimed allegiances and knowledge that run contrary to all available evidence, spends his time ensuring the expedited deaths of thousands of people, would be caged.

But no. We give him a dress and a rather fey hat.

Americans

2009-03-09T22:32:00.002-05:00

Better times were always behind us.

Who Woulda Thunk It?

2009-03-03T10:27:00.003-06:00

Obama is still fighting tooth and nail to prevent anyone from finding out anything about Bush's domestic spying operation. First he did a 180 on the capaign promise to vote against post facto immunity for the telecoms who colluded with the government, and now he is refusing to obide by a court order to turn over a document which the court already has under seal and which the opposite side has already seen, and is even issuing thinly-veiled threats to physically remove the document from the court's possession.

Why is this? La Rana will tell you. At some point between the day it became clear that Obama would win the primary and the day Obama voted as Senator to approve telecom immunity, Senators Feinstein, Reid, Rockefeller, et al., pulled him into a dimly lit room, and said the following:

They've been spying on everyone. Muslim Charities, Peace Groups, Human Rights Organizations, opposing lawyers, the whole shebang. But it wasn't a secret. They told us everything. We knew ahead of time, hell we were even given numbers on the types of wiretaps issued and why.

This has to remain Bush's issue. If the public finds out that both parties were complicit in spying on Americans we lose a huge political bargaining chip, and worse, it might force us to bring charges, just to show it was them who did it, not us.

So you have to vote for immunity. You can't sink your own party here. We'll go to bat for you, but you must do whatever it takes to keep this hidden. Thanks Barry, we knew you'd understand.

Here We Go Again

2009-02-10T20:02:00.003-06:00

The most irritating aspect of the Supreme Court is that everyone and their mother mistakes the institutionally required prominence of its proclamations for some sort of epistemological claim about the meaning of the arrangement of words that initiated our current political arrangement.

The second most irritating thing is the lack of foresight, institutionally and individually. The history of the court is memorialized by nothing so much as cases they never should have taken. Lochner, NYT v. Sullivan, and Roe are the obvious ones. Honestly, what would - practically - be different, absent confusing and contradictory jurisdprudence? The whole enterprise is a gigantic waste of time.

Which brings me to the immediate, obvious, and completely predictable repurcussion of Heller. What sort of asshole tought that was a good idea? The Court is going to spend the next half century explaining what they thought was so obvious, mark La Rana's words.

The Honorable Thing To Do

2009-02-09T22:00:00.004-06:00

If you are George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, David Addington, John Yoo, etc. etc. etc.

Kill yourself and everyone you know.

An Entire Species, Confused

2009-02-02T22:36:00.004-06:00

It is completely outrageous that third world countries will not sell us their natural resources for much less than market value so as to further prolong our rapacious unsustainable economy.