torture and national tragedy

Digby writes of torture and says:

At this rather late stage in life, I'm realizing that the solid America I thought I knew may never have existed. Running very close, under the surface, was a frightened, somewhat hysterical culture that could lose its civilized moorings all at once. I had naively thought that there were some things that Americans would find unthinkable --- torture was one of them.

Everyone knows the world changed on 9/11, but it changed in different ways for different people. For me, 9/11 was the day I saw how weak our commitment to morality really was, how quickly we would sell our freedom, how quickly we would kill to make ourselves feel safer, how little we valued the lives of anyone not like ourselves. I thought back to all the years we'd spent lecturing the world on civil rights, morality, and the rule of law, then watched our government round up thousands of people on the barest of pretexts and hold them indefinitely.

And for what? 9/11 was a shocking event, tragic for all those involved. On a national scale, it was a small event. Our reaction to 9/11 has caused far more damage--political, economic, moral, loss of innocent life--than the event itself. If we were willing to inflict this much damage on ourselves after 3000 dead, how much would we sacrifice for 10,000?

the last abortion clinic

Last night, we watched a split screen TV. On one side of the screen, we watched Frontline on abortion access in the deep south. On the other, we watched election returns trickle in, with a measure restricting abortion starting out ahead before eventually falling behind. When we went to bed, Prop. 73 was behind by the narrowest of margins. It was a bit uncanny to watch the architects of abortion restrictions explain their strategy while watching their latest attempt play out in real time. We woke this morning to find that the measure had been defeated, and to read the comments of the measure's backers predicting that eventual success was inevitable.

I'd heard that access to abortion was difficult in some areas, but the Frontline report drove the point home in a way that mere knowing it did not. The fact that only one clinic in the state still provides second trimester abortions--and that that clinic is in danger of being regulated out of existence--was startling. The notion that Mississippi could have legislated all of its clinics out of existence, all without passing a single law that failed the "undue burden" test, was stunning. Perhaps there's a model there for other constitutional rights that make the majority uncomfortable. Instead of attacking the rights head-on, nibble at the edges with lots of small regulations. Make sure that the individual restrictions are so small that no one could reasonably claim that their elimination would threaten the right, but keep adding one small restriction after another, until the right no longer exists.

george bush, bleeding heart liberal

Apparently, Bush thinks accountability amounts to taking a class. What happened to the good old days? The mans's getting weak.

harrowing fiction

Shakespeare's Sister discusses passages from Scooter Libby's novel, and asks:

What kind of mind comes up with this shit, dreams up scenarios where children are raped by animals to train them in prostitution? Oh, right. A conservative one.

I'm pretty sure that conservatives don't have a monopoly on disturbing sadistic and sexual imagiry in fiction, and I'm pretty sure that the ability to dream up disturbing scenes for disturbing effect doesn't mean that the dreamer is disturbed.

Ignoring fiction for the moment, there is a thread in conservative political rhetoric of sexual and social armageddon, an implicit (or sometimes explicit) assumption that the only thing standing between us and the abyss of degradation is law. You see this when nationally syndicated pundits write that without the Law of the Bible, there would be no reason not to murder, that without tbe moral and legal condemnation of society, men couldn't help being seduced by the hedonism of the gay lifestyle. They say these things with such passion, such conviction, that it suggests personal experience, that they either know or are people for whom only strong, enforced law stands between them and dissolution.

I have talked to street corner evangelists, and heard their stories of being saved from hell in the here and now by adhering to God's Law, how they were weak and following the Law made them strong, and I have wondered about the strength of the desires they wrestled with before they found their source of strength, how strong those desires must still be, and I have seen the rage in their eyes when they see people living happy lives without denying themselves pleasures that the Law forbids. And I wonder how much they still want what they deny themselves, and how much that suppressed desire fuels their rage.

gallagher, revisited

A couple weeks ago, the Volokh Conspiracy hosted Maggie Gallagher, who attacked gay marriage because its recognition would attack generitivity, and claimed that a deep understanding of that fact--not animus towards gays--underlay public opposition to gay marriages. The argument didn't seem to hold together. First, it seemed unlikely to me that public opposition was based on such deep analysis. The rhetoric and expressions of those in opposition seem far too visceral to spring from deep analysis. Second, it seemed that if the defense of generativity (as she saw it) was behind, the program would have to stretch well beyond gay marriage, encompassing abortion, birth control, contraception, and extra-marital sex of all kinds. Otherwise, the fragile generative link whose need she asserted would fail.

Imagine my "surprise" when I learned (via Pandagon) of Leon Kass making just such an argument.

it can't be, but it is

Mark Kleiman observes that maximizing shareholder value can't possibly be an acceptable rule for corporate officers, that the result would be absurd in a moral society. He is, of course, correct, and the results are predictably absurd. Defendants in lead liability cases, for example, are duty bound to avoid paying damages on technicalities, even if that means that the victims of lead poisoning go begging.

incompetent design

Mark Kleiman summarizes a talk by a Catholic priest on the fallacies of "Intelligent Design," and says the time has come for organized pushback. One place to start is the National Center for Science Education.

too much credit

Michael O'Hare buries David Brooks and the President in abuse, but somehow manages to fall short. The two problems with attributing the administration's failures to incompetence are that 1) the failures are so broad that it is difficult to imagine that a gang so incompetent could have been elected in the first place, much less re-elected, and 2) that they are not uniform, that failures occur precisely when the failures don't threaten the rich and powerful. That isn't mere incompetence, it's an active campaign to destroy and discredit government, without regard to those who get hurt in the process.

maggie gallagher at volokh.com

The volokh conspiracy was the first blog I ever read consistently, for reasons having to do in part with being a math major at UCLA around 1980. The more interesting discussions have (for me) long since been diluted, and many of the more interesting conspirators have left. The detour into war-blogging left the lingering impression of a group that simultaneously sought to have their words influence the world (even to the point of starting wars) and to claim an academic privilege to conduct thought experiments without regard to the consequences, as if the discussions were merely "academic." Or maybe the basic premise of my visits (that through intelligent discussion, we could find common ground) fractured in the face of unrelenting ideology.

In any case, while I no longer read frequently, I do visit occasionally and today I happened across Maggie Gallagher's defense of opposition to gay marriage (many more articles than might be reasonably linked, but if you're curious and can't find it, start here). I'm sure there are others who have taken on her arguments point by point, others who probably have the time and interest to do a much better job than I. There are, however, a few broad points that seem worth making.

While I concede the point that there may be people whose opposition to gay marriage is driven primarily by concerns over the deep structure of society, and while I am for the purposes of civil discussion willing to assume that Maggie is one of them, I don't for a moment believe the social movement to oppose gay marriage is primarily driven by such concerns. The people and groups who today oppose gay marriage while claiming no animus against gays are the same ones who have opposed every advance in gay rights and recognition. Mrs. Gallagher asks that we not ignore the radicals on the left who seek to remake society and would sanction gay marriage on the way, then asks that we ignore the relatively mainstream arguments of those who blame catastophic hurricanes on our society's immoral tolerance of gay behavior. She asks a great deal.

In my experience, there's little point in "debating" a group or person when the real issue isn't on the table. Even if it's possible to win the current debate, to defeat the rationalization of the day, the only result will be to generate a fresh rationalization. Perhaps this is short-sighted of me. Perhaps every time a debate is won, a few minds are changed on the underlying issue. I cannot, however, escape the impression that I could refute every detail Maggie presented, and it only change the ground of the debate, not the debate itself. It seems to me far more effective to focus on the broad moral issue of social animus towards gays and bank on demographic trends to erode opposition to the resulting particulars over time.

Still, portions of her argument were interesting and revealing. At its roots, she argues that without marriage, people would have sex without babies and babies would grow up without fathers. That happens today, of course, so preventing the recognition of gay marriage doesn't actually fix the problem. She even identifies the cause: In non-industrial societies, children are an individual investment in the parent's future. In industrial societies, there are more effective ways to make that investment, and children become a net cost to the parents. All industrial societies are experiencing the effects of this change to a greater or lesser degree, and I've never seen evidence that the recognition of gay marriage plays any role (much less a significant one) in either hastening or delaying its effects.

If the failure of generativity is the problem and it's already happening, then opposition to gay marriage is clearly not the solution. At best, it would appear to be a small part of a wide program that would include the abolition of divorce, the elimination of contraception, and the re-criminalization of pre-marital sex. If we're to guarantee that people have and raise children in the proper way, and seek to harness "Eros" to achieve that goal, there seems little point in doing so piece-meal. If social incentives around children have inverted, if it's no longer in people's best interests to have children and raise children but social health requires that they do so, shouldn't we recast social incentives to achieve those aims. Isn't denying sex to those who do not follow generative forms a natural way to incentivize generative sex and therefore generativity? That is the position of the Catholic Church, after all--it's certainly an argument with which Mrs. Gallagher is familiar--and there are certainly social conservatives of all stripes who argue that contraception, divorce, abortion, and pre-marital sex will all contribute to the downfall of Civlization As We Know It. If a return to traditional sexual mores, in all respects, is what we need to maintain our society, perhaps we should have that debate. Shoring up the part of a levee that still stands only makes sense if you plan to restore the levee and drain the floodwaters.

If we're not willing to restore and enforce pre-industrial sexual mores and we wish to solve the problem of generativity, we will simply need to find other ways. Nowhere does Maggie even attempt to prove that other solutions don't exist, even though all of her other arguments are based implicitly on the premise.

On the other hand, perhaps we should ask whether the problem of generativity really needs a solution. We live on a finite planet. One needn't be a Malthusian to believe that exponential population growth can't be sustained forever. If industrialization reduces the incentives for individual procreation, that may be a very good thing. Most long-term population control efforts in the developing world depend on precisely that effect. Unless one believes that population control is itself a social evil, the argument that procreation must be universally maintained seems unfounded.

But perhaps the argument isn't that procreation needs to be universally maintained. Maybe the argument is demographic. As Maggie puts it

I’m quite confident that 200 years from now, we’re not going to be living in a world where gay marriage is the norm.

I’m just not sure of the place of Western civilization in that future world.

If we don't procreate sufficiently, others will and we'll lose the race. We'll still be rich, our society will still be industrial and stable (otherwise the disincentives she fears would evaporate), but we'll be overwhelmed by teeming pre-industrial masses, no doubt the same masses that today assault our southern border, the same masses that in previous decades crossed the seas to enter our seaports and airports.

the other bennett

I popped over to Eschaton to catch the latest gossip, and saw a pointer to Wolf Blitzer's interview of Robert Bennett. Unlike Atrios, I'm not surprised to hear that guests are brought on shows to discuss particular topics, and I don't see any way to conclude from the transcript that questions rather than broad topics are agreed on ahead of time. On the other hand, I conclude from Bennett's response

I mean, I suppose I'll get in trouble by saying that it's well established that men are more violent than women and so maybe if we abort all male babies, we would have a safer world. So I think this is really much ado about nothing.

that I was wrong in my evaluation of why the other Bennett's response had legs. It wasn't that he said blacks are inherently more criminal or violent, but that some people really believed he advocated abortion as a cure for the societal problems that resulted. If his problems stemmed from racism, his "good lawyer" brother wouldn't have defended him by emphasizing that the claim about blacks was factual, would he?

Which makes the responses of Kleiman and DeLong even more puzzling. One would think that if Bennett's problem stemmed from a belief he'd advocated abortion rather than his clear belief in the inherent violence or criminality of blacks, his biggest problem would be with the Republican base. Why DeLong felt it was essential to smooth the waters of Republican discontent is a little beyond me, but I understand the compulsion toward intellectual rigor, even in arguments one would otherwise avoid. Kleiman's response ("Bennett was right on the facts") is simply astounding.

Of course, Atrios also thought R. Bennett's annoyance at the question was more important than his confirmation--and indeed personal claim--of his brother's racism. Clearly, I'm just out of my depth.

DeLong, btw, now sees the racist underpinnings of Bennett's comments as indefensible, and has narrowed his defense to, "Bennett didn't actually propose genocide."

bennett, delong, bush, and kleiman

It's weird watching Bennett reveal himself, DeLong defend him for doing so, and Kleiman proclaim that DeLong's defense of Bennett is somehow more admirable than Bush's denunciation of his words.

Let's start from the top.

Bennett did not advocate genocide. Anyone who believes he did is simply wrong. That fact does not make what Bennett said defensible. His crime was not that (as DeLong put it) reductio ad absurdum arguments don't work on talk radio, but that the implicit assumption underlying his argument (that African-Americans are inherently criminal) is abhorrent. That wasn't an accident. That's a belief. Those beliefs are more than deserving of condemnation.

DeLong's defense of Bennett opens by calling him a fungus ("Your honor, my client is worthless scum"), but that still doesn't quite explain why he would say that Bennett's primary mistake was a poor choice of rhetorical technique. Maybe he'd just returned from a journey to the rhetorical forest he mentioned in another post. If he found the racial characterization abhorrent, why did he focus on the genocide as the point on which Bennett needed defense? Wby did he bother defending Bennett at all? Perhaps he focused so hard on the question of whether Bennett had actually argued for genocide that he failed to notice the problem the genocide might solve.

Kleiman then steps in to admire DeLong's careful parsing of a transcript of a radio conversation. Even assuming that such a careful parsing is deserved (I believe, btw, that charity would be more appropriate than precision in evaluating such a transcript), he also misses the point, again suggesting that the genocide that Bennett didn't propose was the reason Bennett has been criticized. Kleiman, regrettably, takes matters one step further, citing statistics to support Bennett's claim on the inherent criminality of blacks. In DeLong's case, it's possible that he reacted to the wrong part of Bennett's statement. Kleiman can't make that claim.

Garance does good job of describing what makes all of this so skin-crawling. If past history is a predictor, a post describing how this free-thinking is what differentiates academics from the rest of us will soon follow.

comedy in an age of censorship

Perhaps it has always been so, but it seems to me that more stories go untold today than even ten years ago, not the obscure but important stories that don't get the play they deserve, but the stories that everyone knows but decides not to talk about: the questions about whether Bush is drinking again, the deliberate underplaying of bad news from Iraq, etc. It often feels like the press sees its collective narrative of the country as the country itself, and worries that if that narrative were threatened, the country itself would disintegrate, that the Fourth Estate sees itself not as a check on government or the powerful, not as a servant of the public, but as the essence of the polity, the Establishment in a more profound and broad sense than any a 60s radical railed against.

Somerby has, of course, documented the political narratives for years. More recently, he's focused more on how the prevailing narrative shapes efforts at educational reform. I don't know journalists well enough to judge his views of journalistic motives, but it's hard to deny the narratives themselves.

It doesn't work, of course. Reality never matches the narrative completely, so the public is never completely fooled. The public may not know which parts of the story to disbelieve, but they know that they're being told a story, they know parts of the story are lies, that even if the facts are verifiable, the narrative that ties them together is not. The public is, of course, complicit in the charade. We may know enough not to trust the narrative, but that doesn't prevent us from craving it, any more that it prevents addicts from craving the poison that may eventually kill them. We choose to watch and read and listen to the voices that reassure us, even though we know they lie.

And that's where comics come in. Stewart, Letterman, and Co. live in the gap between the standard narratives and unfolding events. The NBC Nightly News can't run a story about rumors of Bush drinking. Letterman can tell jokes about it. The Nightly News can't say that Iraq is spinning out of control. The Daily Show can run the tagline Mess O'Potamia for years.

Humor takes the edge off. The question of where truth ends and joke begins allows people to say and hear things that wouldn't otherwise be acceptable. Mark Kleiman and I discussed this in e-mail in the context of Letterman's Bush joke, leading him to comment on the eerie similarity between the role of today's comics and the role of comics in the old Soviet Bloc. Eerie, yes, but hardly surprising when you compare the role played by our media today with the role played by communist media in the days of the Cold War.

not in defense of Bill Bennett

Brad Delong defends Bill Bennett with faint praise:

Bennett is attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument...Never attempt a reductio ad absurdum argument on talk radio. You can't keep exact control over your phrasing in real time, and so somebody is bound to think you are endorsing the horrible absurdity that you are rejecting.

The problem with what Bennett said isn't that he suggested aborting all African-American babies, or that he didn't state strongly enough that doing so would be reprehensible, but that he made the implicit claim that African-Americans are inherently criminal. The problem isn't that he thinks that genocide is an acceptable solution, but that he thinks it's a solution at all.

lagging indicators

I think Kevin got this a bit wrong:

Violence is "above norms" but that doesn't mean things are getting worse. In fact, violence is a "lagging indicator of success"! The more bombs, the better we're doing!

Saying that violence levels were a lagging indicator only means that levels of violence might persist for a while, even with a successful counterinsurgency effort. That's not ridiculous on its face, though the current Pentagon position seems to be that levels of violence may lag success by years or even decades, and in the absence of any leading or current indicators, there's no reason to believe that a successful counterinsurgency effort is in fact under way.

judith miller

I'm probably the only one who finds it strange that Miller's lawyer has been arguing with Scooter Libby's lawyer whether his release of confidentiality was coerced and therefore doesn't allow her to reveal her source. If it weren't Libby, how could that argument be relevant? I suppose it's one of those legal fictions, where Fitzgerald can't legally conclude that Libby was the source based on the dispute over confidentiality. Or perhaps the topic of interest isn't that Libby was a source, but exactly what he said, that he's willing to release Miller from confidentiality so she can reveal that information, but isn't willing to reveal it himself. Or perhaps he has revealed the conversation and the prosecutor is looking for corroboration, in which case Miller went to jail to protect...who knows?

qualifications of justices

As many have noted, the hearings were an empty piece of theatre, a ritual without import, without even the redeeming insights of good entertainment. The goal, after all, was never to enlighten or inform, but to prevent enlightenment and to obscure. As Somerby asked, why would Roberts have to recuse himself for expressing views on legal matters when his future co-justices have done so in legal opinions for years?

To me, however, that is not the crowning idiocy of the process and its groundrules. That I reserve for the view often expressed by the White House that the Senate should only consider whether the nominee is a good lawyer. For example, after Senator Reid announced his decision to oppose the nomination, the White House responded:

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, responding to Reid's comments, said, "Judge Roberts is clearly qualified in terms of intellect, ethics and temperament. Â… The public does not want to see the Supreme Court become an extension of partisan politics."

In other words he's smart, he knows how to argue the law, that's all that should matter.

What little I know of law and lawyers, however, tells me otherwise. Lawyers are trained to argue any side of any case. The better the lawyer, the more ably they do so. Legal competence may be a requirement for a seat on the Court (though I believe there have been Justices with limited legal background), but the more skilled the nominee in the law, the more important it is to know who or what he represents. A nominee with only nominal legal skills may find it much more difficult to write a coherent opinion that radically shifts the legal status quo than a brilliant lawyer will not. The greater the legal skills, the more important it is to know the nominee.

Judge Roberts didn't merely refuse to share his views with the Senate Committee, he refused to share his views with the American people. He didn't merely say that the Senators had no right to know him, he said that no one had a right to know him, even as he sought confirmation for a lifetime position at the top of American law. Conservatives have been known to rail against the Court as anti-democratic and elitist. It is hard to imagine a more elitist stance than that taken by Roberts and other Bush nominees.

anonymous sources

While I don't see the point in protecting sources that have used the cloak of anonymity to lie in the past, it may be too much to expect the press to change its practice in this regard. For one thing, if protection becomes something the press can withdraw, it could become more difficult for the press to protect sources in cases where protection is needed and deserved. At that point, the press would no longer be saying, "We protect our sources," but, "We think this source deserves protection."

Fortunately, "outing" dishonest sources is not required to encourage honesty among background sources. If a "senior administration official" gives inaccurate background information, that fact could be reported with as much prominence as the original story. If such an official repeatedly gives inaccurate information, they could be described as an "sometimes unreliable senior administration official." If an administration or group has a track record of lying or twisting the truth, anonymous comments can be accompanied by disclaimers reflecting that history: "A senior administration official said that the moon is made of green cheese, but such statements from the administration have proven unreliable in the past."

Today, of course, our news outlets do little or none of this. Not only don't they expose dishonest sources, they don't expose their dishonesty, leaving the strong impression that they're more concerned with currying favor with those in power than in informing the public. As long as that perception persists, it will be difficult to generate public support for reporters such as Judith Miller.

the deft use of incentives

From the Red Cross:

Hurricane Katrina: Why is the Red Cross not in New Orleans?

Acess to New Orleans is controlled by the National Guard and local authorities and while we are in constant contact with them, we simply cannot enter New Orleans against their orders.

The state Homeland Security Department had requested--and continues to request--that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

For those who haven't been following at home, I'll translate:

The top priority was to get people out of New Orleans, so the decision was made to prevent aid from entering the city. That would only have encouraged people to stay.

Perhaps the failure to provide aid wasn't merely incompetence. Perhaps it was policy. Perhaps people were dying in sewage and those in charge were more interested in providing incentives than food or water. It would be absurd if it weren't eerily reminiscent of arguments against welfare: "We shouldn't provide food, shelter, and medical care for the poor. Doing so will only encourage them to breed."

the no blame game

I visited the Volokh Conspiracy, as I sometimes do, and came across the following from Prof. Kerr:

I have absolutely no interest in assigning blame. My sense is that the crisis is sufficiently great that we need to be forward thinking right now. Assigning blame looks back; it's something you do when the emergency is over, and you have time to reconstruct what happened and see how you could do better next time.

It seems to me that those in power (and those siding with those in power) use this argument to avoid taking responsibility for their actions when things go wrong. I don't blame the President and the Republican Congress to score political points. I blame them because they have never been serious about governing the country. I blame them because they turned Homeland Security funding into just one more pork barrel. I blame them because they staffed FEMA with cronies. I blame them because they spent money where their friends were instead of where it was needed. I blame them because they were more concerned with finding a country to beat up to show that America was still Number One than with making our country safe.

But this isn't news. These things were true before 9/11, and they've been true ever since. I see little reason to give these guys a pass now, simply because their incompetence and lack of compassion has been on open, painful display. To say that I shouldn't blame them now is to say that now that their corrupt view of government has killed who knows how many people, I should be less angry with them than I already was.

I'll leave that forbearance for their fans, for their teammates who can't afford to believe that their leaders don't deserve the description, much less the job.

sometimes people die

It's small and petty of me, I know, but I can't help wondering whether the New Orleans levees would have gotten more attention had the New Orleans Member of the House been Republican, or had New Orleans voted 4:1 for Bush rather than Gore (assuming the Kerry and Gore votes were similar). There's been a lot written over the past few years about pork barrel politics and the way our governing majority has viewed federal funds as spoils to be distributed rather than tools to build a better country. These decisions have consequences. Sometimes people die.