Damn straight. This particular “citizen of the world” feels no particular reason that I should link arms with any of the football hooligans in my country just because we were born on the same lump of dirt. When I have friends all over the world, why should I align myself morally with those I disagree with, oppose, and don’t even know personally? Why should my connection to Joe Bloggs down the street who votes for the BNP be considered more compelling than my connection to Joe Sixpack in Alabama who voted for the GOP but at least talked to me about it over a beer, just because some bigwigs who died before I was born decided to draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say “you guys on this side are going to fight the guys on the other side, now get to!”

I have an allegiance to democracy, liberalism, freedom and basic human motherfucking decency. If you have this, be you in Germany or England or the USA or Nigeria, then you have more in common with me than the guy next door who does not. So why should my own alliances not reflect that? Why should I blindly swear to pin my destiny to rock rather than to an ideal? Because of some thousand year-old fatally flawed system that doesn’t work but that we haven’t got rid of yet? Because nobody has worked out that you can run a state government as an administrative body and not have to force everyone to be tied to the land with laws and pledges of allegiance?

Frankly, I love England, but I don’t see why any pissant government has the right to tell me I can’t love America just as much. So, yeah, citizen of the world. Citizen of it all. Free to love it all and hate it all, to stand in the bar and say how crap it is or to stand on the podium and say how wonderful it is. You can admire me, bite me, or just get on with your own life and have a drink. But if you’re listening to the beaurocrats and the generals when they tell you it’s the law you’ve got to do this and that because you were born here, not because you decided to like some kind of grown up with a mind of your own, your intellectual high horse is mud. So climb down off it.

Crooked Timber has no claim to be moral arbiter of the blogosphere. It’s a knockdown free-for-all. For God’s sake focus on more influential and targets.

What’s your problem? I understand that this philosophy is different from yours, but otherwise?

Perhaps someone can enlighten me. A citizen of the world has no allegiance to any country and believes this somehow to be praiseworthy.

Oh, that’s just because the Right is actually as diverse as the Left pretends to be.

The Red Cross report from nov. 2004 doesn’t impress me as particularly serious in its attributions. There aren’t random people walking in and out of a US military detention facility in Cuba (“pssst, wanna buy a cigar”). As all the IRC conversations and contacts were certainly recorded, transcribed and annotated in exhaustive detail (the military bureaucracy loves generating paper if nothing else), there’s no clear reason not to attribute sources that the military (and CIA) are able to confirm or discredit.

By playing coy with sources for this level of accusation, even if undertaken with the best intent, they’ve made it easy for the US military to ignore or dispute the charges and hard for others to verify their claims. It’s a fact that there have been abuses in US military detention facilities. It’s also a fact that there have been a tedius number of demonstrably false and bizzare accusations from detainees and supposedly independent observers. The wise default position is probably skepticism on all sides.

I think it’s reasonable to give more weight to attributions and testimonials that are checkable. And therefore would hope that the Red Cross is willing and able to provide sources or additional information that addresses the difference between their original charges and the findings of the military’s investigators. Even giving the IRC guys some slack as non-journalists, they should know better than to be other than literal in leveling a courts martial type accusation (which means all the video and transcipts and logs would be made public).

My experience with Cella was when I read a rather mindless anti-Soros bit of his. I pointed out that Soros, a refugee from Hitler and Stalin, a self-made billionaire, and a man who spent tens or hundreds of millions bringing down the Evil Empire, is not really a guy to dismiss just because he’s anti-Bush.

Cella had said that Soros was morally bankrupt, and when I asked why, he responded that it was because he followed John Stuart Mill (rather than Aquinas).

One of the Red State people got pretty huffy because there was a little hint in my communications that Cella might be anti-Semitic. So it was a relief to everyone to know that the problem was really the odious and detestable Mill.

Anyone know whether Cella ever answered the question of whether he thought atheists should be permitted in public office?

Although, hell, the fact that I can write that in absolute seriousness tells you pretty much everything you need to know…

rilkefan: SH, wish you were writing more at ObWi.

Agreed. You too, rilkefan.

A rude, unbearable pompous, blowhard, that is…

There is a mindset amongst the Democrats, the genesis of which I put with Carville and Begala, where the Democrat masses have been trained to want to hear such over-the-top dimwittery. IT’s not a case of “the public gets what the public wants”; rather, we’re looking at “the public wants what the public gets.”

And this seems to apply not simply to the President and, by extension, elected Republicans; you expect it of, and replicate it for, such institutions as RedState.org.

I wish I were wrong.