Comments on: MODOK studies

By: Yesenixan

Yesenixan — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 20:42:59 +0000

“Man’s rights exist only when man obeys God’s law”? Really. Rights are universal—to borrow an adjective, inalienable. Let’s try a restatement: “Only citizens who obey the govenment shall enjoy human and civil rights.” It’s practically the motto of generic totalitarianism. A ‘right’ that is contingent on obedience is not a right at all. It’s a privilege. I wonder if this Bainbridge person knows the difference.

By: nic

nic — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 11:53:36 +0000

Goldsmith officially advocated secretly ignoring laws that he does not advocate publicly abrogating. This is NOT a morally or ethically defensible position for anyone, much less a law professor. jroth, thanks for summing up my point so well. In contrast, I doubt there’s any meaningful number of law profs who advocate pot smoking without advocating its legalization (or decriminalization, at least). There’s simply no comparison, even if one thinks that pot smoking and torture are moral equivalents. Yeah, not to mention, unlike pot smoking, there’s no country in the world where torture is officially legal, and no US state where it’s allowed for medical purposes. But I just knew someone was going to come up with such a ridiculous comparison anyway. What barry says about the winning formula, that’s exactly how it works. An even more outrageous example of the whining from the right wing about the left wing domination in everything from academia to media would be in Italy, the prime minister owns the main tv networks and controls the national tv ones, owns publishing companies and newspapers, his government allies control telecommunications and the postal service, they have their own “intellectuals” and professor spokesmen and apologists, and yet, surprise surprise, you hear the same refrain about there being a disproportionate influence of the left in public life – academics, magistrates, journalists, filmmakers, a cabal of dangerous communists more threatening than Stalin. The message works on the target audience by absolving the government from any responsibility, as everything it does is like a battle won against the worst odds, and everything that it fails to do or does wrong can be blamed on the terrible persecution from the opposition. Which has actually only caved in and is as weak as pathetic as it can get, at political level at least, but reality doesn’t matter, what matters is that the message is hammered into public debate hard enough to stick.

By: Doug

Doug — Mon, 13 Dec 2004 10:55:16 +0000

Jhn Hlb, Thanks for the brief summary. I thought that’s what you meant at 1), 2) and 3), and I am grateful for the confirmation. May I suggest, as I did over at Kvn Drm’s, a title for a proposed academic paper—Toward a Quantum Theory of Blogometrics: How Many Holbovian Lengths Comprise a Sagan?

By: nic

nic — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 20:09:00 +0000

Dan Simon, although I should have learnt from the torture apology thread that it’s a waste of time to reply to you, here’s quickly: no, I’m not arguing for the left’s superiority in academia blah blah, I’m only talking of this case, and no, I wasn’t taking pains to claim that the issue with Goldsmith was only to do with a little technicality. It’s obviously a moral and political issue since we’re talking writing memos and generally supporting the view that international law can be circumvented without adherence to it (and enjoyment of the protection it offers, mind you) being formally revoked. Now that is also a “technical” problem for someone teaching law. Obviously the moral, political, technical aspects are all intertwined, and moral objections have weight in themselves, I was pointing out something that I find frustrating and quite depressing, ie. the failure (in this case, in the article) to state clearly that something being advocated is explicitely outside of the bounds of those conventions the US is supposed to adhere to (and which it has ratified with national laws, too). In the case of a law professor, the hypocrisy becomes very obvious. If he was “only” advocating the US repeal its membership to the GC, then at least there would be some technical coherence with his professional role, even if the obvious moral and political objections would still remain. But why am I bothering, you were busy defending torture yourself in the other thread, in ways that probably Goldsmith hasn’t quite dared to. Goldsmith did nothing at all comparable to advising how to break the law undetected. The memos. The whole Rumsfeldian position on the conventions. Sometimes they apply (ie. during press conferences to deal with cosmetic damage control for Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo), sometimes they don’t (ie. anywhere outside of press conferences). It’s got nothing to do with “hiding things from international policemen”, ugh. It’s got to do with either sticking to a law, or abolishing it, not violating it against other parties while formally demanding the benefit it offers to yourself. Especially for a government, doh. Now, you may think that engaging in this sort of exercise with respect to marijuana is morally respectable, whereas doing so with respect to torture is not. No, you completely missed the point. Oh well. What did I say. Waste of time. But please don’t pretend that your position is a matter of technical competence or professional ethics. It’s about all of those factors, competence and ethics, technical and principle-wise, political and legal etc. It just is amazing that someone advocating the use of torture should teach law. Even more amazing when he is advocating ways to breach an international convention devised after WWII (and again, it wasn’t Mao and Stalin) without even the coherence to renounce its protections. But all of this is not so amazing to you, obviously, Dan Simon. It’s your position—that is, your political position, pure and simple, and you are making agreement with you on it a litmus test for admission into academia. Yes. Me and Berube are busy preparing exactly that kind of screening test for torturophiles, in order to deny them the privilege Goldsmith got. Hearing CIA advisors on torture whine about being discriminated has got to be worth the effort, in terms of fun. Oh so much fun this is.

By: JRoth

JRoth — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 19:51:16 +0000

Since d-squared hasn’t shown up to defend his Welsh ancestry, we can’t assume he’ll come ‘round to tell dan to shove off, so I’ll try to step up in his stead. The simple fact that dan feels the need to get defensive about an off-hand joke about the relative morality of torture and pot-smoking shows just how strong he thinks his position is. Furthermore, his 6:29 post seems little more than a lengthy “NA-NA-NA I can’t hear you.” I don’t see anything in it that acknowledges a simple distinction that nic clearly drew: Goldsmith officially advocated secretly ignoring laws that he does not advocate publicly abrogating. This is NOT a morally or ethically defensible position for anyone, much less a law professor. In contrast, I doubt there’s any meaningful number of law profs who advocate pot smoking without advocating its legalization (or decriminalization, at least). There’s simply no comparison, even if one thinks that pot smoking and torture are moral equivalents.

By: cbl

cbl — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 19:19:39 +0000

To interrupt the current direction of the thread a bit, it seems the current round of griping by conservatives is a bit of a red herring. How so? Consider the plight Berkeley prof. Ignacio Chapela, who was recently denied tenure and dismissed from the faculty for obviously political reasons, despite the vocal support of hundreds of fellow faculty and students. He dared to criticize the increasingly corporate nature of academic research in the sciences, exemplified at Berkeley by a $25 million deal between Novartis and the Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. As I’m sure many of you bloggers here know, he also published research indicating the presence of GM-corn DNA in native strains in Mexico – research which is appropriately bothersome to corporate bioindustrialists who produce GMO seeds and related pesticides. This research was roundly dismissed in a smear campaign, again politically rather than scientifically motivated. I guess from the corporate point of view Capela himself is a MODOK. Or a MODOKP (P for Profits). So this highlights the real discrimination going on in academia, in departments that now depend on corporate dollars because of an ever-shrinking public commitment to research (thanks to a certain “oppressed” academic minority). It is discrimination against anyone who speaks too loudly against the interests related to these dollars, and political pressure comes mainly from the administrators who mind the departmental budgets. So who really cares if there are too many liberals in philosophy and sociology? Conservatives don’t – their complaints seem more like a cynical ploy to deflect attention from the corporate manufacture of truth in disciplines closely connected to the marketplace.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 18:29:05 +0000

Yes, Dan Simon, I would guess marjuana use is probably more “socially acceptable” than torture. What a morally decadent world, eh? Look, I wasn't the one taking such pains to claim that the issue at hand was a matter of technical legal validity, not moral or political judgment. If you want to join those defending the fundamental moral superiority of left-wing politics (whatever that might mean at the moment) as an argument for maintaining the left's dominance in academia, then go ahead. Just don't pretend your criteria are non-political. Let’s suppose further that your academic world is really packed with law professors supporting legalisation of all drugs. Yeah. Are these thousands and thousands of drug apologist professors saying the laws should be changed, or are they producing memos and manuals on how to fool the cops and get away with growing marjuana and opium in your back garden? Goldsmith did nothing at all comparable to advising how to break the law undetected. (For pity's sake, the US government hardly needs a law professor to advise it on how to hide things from nonexistent "international police officers".) Rather, Goldsmith did the equivalent of what countless law professors do all the time: devise elaborate legal theories, many of them of extremely dubious validity, under which marijuana cultivation and use might be argued to be, in fact, legal. Now, you may think that engaging in this sort of exercise with respect to marijuana is morally respectable, whereas doing so with respect to torture is not. (I was under the impression that the legal community as a whole tended to be extremely tolerant of this sort of thing, regardless of the cause being embraced, on the grounds that everyone deserves representation in court, including morally indefensible people for whom harebrained legal theories are the only hope.) But please don't pretend that your position is a matter of technical competence or professional ethics. It's your position--that is, your political position, pure and simple, and you are making agreement with you on it a litmus test for admission into academia.

By: Mark Shawhan

Mark Shawhan — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:49:28 +0000

See, what I don’t quite understand about your position on the First Amendment vs. the Declaration of Independence is how you can assert the overriding philosophical importance of the latter while maintaining (AFAICT) the virtual philosophical irrelevance of the latter. To put it more plainly: if the Declaration of Independence proclaimed that there are definite Truths in the world, the First Amendment argues that the federal government should not be in the business of prohibiting certain ideas because it has concluded that they are not True. It may be only an “addendum” to the Constitution, but it’s definitely worth pointing out that it was only by the promise to add such an “addendum” that the Federalists were able to get the Constitution ratified in the first place. The First Amendment does, after all, derive precisely from the classic republican concern with liberty and the dangers of tyrannical government. If Millian/liberal ideas are alien to our political tradition, why do we have a First Amendment at all? Why shouldn’t the government be able to prohibit certain ideas, if those ideas are False. Why shouldn’t we have one state religion, if that religion is the one True faith? Your position seems to be that the Declaration of Independence said that certain ideas are True and others are false, and that therefore JS Mill (who held that, while certain things are true and certain things are false, the government should not be in the business of telling us what Truth is) is alien to our political tradition. I don’t see how you get from one to the other, or how, in making that logical leap you also hurdle the First Amendment to the Constitution.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:08:18 +0000

You might be right, Barry, but Jesus, what a repulsive thought.

By: Barry

Barry — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 15:00:33 +0000

“Why are conservatives so whiny? They’re winning, aren’t they? And now we have to like them too. But I just can’t. It’s just too hard. Eventually they will have mopped up all resistance in every area, whining all the way. But will they be happy then? No, because then they’ll be forced to realize that they’ve inflicted the worst President in American history on us, and they’ll have to live with the consequences themselves. And by then there won’t be any liberals left to blame. I really feel sorry for those guys. (Second try, ten minutes later)” Posted by John Emerson · John, sometimes I think that that is why the right is winning the political/economic struggles (the cultural one is the one that they are losing, slowly and with some temporary victories). The right figures that when they lose, it’s right and proper to put the boot to the fallen foe. When they win, a backstab of their victorious (doubtless through cheating) foe is called for. When Clinton was elected, they didn’t spend one second ‘getting over it’. They attacked him from the beginning, and will still blame things on him. This had the advantage of putting him on the defensive, and getting a lot of people used to the idea that Clinton must be guilty of something serious, otherwise why would they always be hearing bad things about him? Then, when Bush became president, we heard the right chanting ‘get over it’, and praising him to the skies. Opposition to Bush was equated to treason. It’s a winning formula.

By: jholbo

jholbo — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 14:39:30 +0000

Since he hasn’t checked in so far, I suppose it might be worth mentioning that I reall do know that Daniel Davies is Welsh. Or whatever.

By: Mike

Mike — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 14:33:11 +0000

Shorter John Holbo: There ought to be more conservatives in academia, so it’s a shame that poetic justice as fairness isn’t a deductively valid form of argument.

By: nic

nic — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:52:19 +0000

Goldsmith still got the job, didn’t he? Only three people objected, right? Is that all it takes for a governing right wing to complain about being discriminated by partisan opponents?

By: nic

nic — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 12:47:11 +0000

Yes, Dan Simon, I would guess marjuana use is probably more “socially acceptable” than torture. What a morally decadent world, eh? I was thinking precisely of someone supporting legalisation of marjuana when I wrote the PS. Maybe you didn’t get that point. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that that position is morally equal to supporting torture, so we do away with the nature of moral objections. (I don’t think anyone needs a discussion on which issue is more morally “troubling” and not just to “some specialists”). We just observe there are different positions on both issues, so they both raise objections. The difference I was pointing out is between advocating changing or abolishing laws, and circumventing them. Let’s suppose further that your academic world is really packed with law professors supporting legalisation of all drugs. Yeah. Are these thousands and thousands of drug apologist professors saying the laws should be changed, or are they producing memos and manuals on how to fool the cops and get away with growing marjuana and opium in your back garden? I was under the weird impression that that kind of material was distributed by far more underground “institutions” than American universities, but I’ve never been in a law class in a US college so, what do I know, maybe they do teach that too. While everyone is asleep. The issue, in other words, is Goldsmith’s particular political, rather than legal, point of view, and the non-partisan technical argument against him is simply a cover for naked political bias. Yes, of course, it’s not like the Geneva conventions are laws, after all, they’re just political pamphlets that anyone can re-interpret at will, without going through the unnecessary and counterproductive trouble of formally revoking the existing obligation to adhere to them to the letter. That’s precisely how they were devised. Compliance with laws is a matter of opinion. That’s exactly what law professors are supposed to teach. Funny, from the reputation those conventions are enjoying among right wingers, you’d think they were put together by Mao and Stalin.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Sun, 12 Dec 2004 10:24:39 +0000

[T]he objections have a lot more weight than a mere difference of views on what is moral. They are about a technical inconsistency. Would there be no objections to a criminal law professor taking the view that certain crimes are acceptable, even when existing laws clearly say they are not? Thanks for making my point. The law schools are in fact jam-packed full of law professors who take precisely such a view with respect to certain crimes. (For example, I'd bet you'd be hard-pressed to find a law school without several professors willing to take that position with respect to, say, marijuana use.) But because those particular crimes are of the kind that it is more socially acceptable in legal academic circles to consider non-crimes, the gross technical error of which you speak is glossed over. The issue, in other words, is Goldsmith's particular political, rather than legal, point of view, and the non-partisan technical argument against him is simply a cover for naked political bias.