by Henry on June 20, 2009
Via Arthur Goldhammer, this is a very interesting post.
The French military tortured systematically from the beginning to the end of the war, most spectacularly during the “Battle of Algiers” in 1957. They used all the classic methods: electricity, simulated drowning, beatings, sexual torture and rape. …The FLN’s use of terrorism—in particular their targeting of European civilians at popular clubs, bars, and so on in urban bombing campaigns—served as the rationale for this “exhaustive interrogation” of “suspects.” … The Algerian War was a war of independence, a war of decolonization. In that sense, it cannot and should not be understood as analogous to, or a direct precursor to, the United States’ “war on terror.”
As an American today, what I find really significant about the use of torture in the Algerian War is what it did to France, which underwent a profound crisis of democracy as it attempted to hold on to Algeria. … what torture did do was poison the public sphere: to conceal the fact that the military was torturing, French governments turned to censorship, seizure of publications deemed deleterious to the honor and reputation of the Army, paralyzing control over the movements of journalists, and prosecution of those who nevertheless continued to publish evidence that torture was going on. … The reason all the government censorship was necessary was that a small but incredibly passionate, intellectually high-powered anti-torture movement developed in France from late 1956. … historical comparison can function as illuminating intellectual practice. … cell phone cameras really changed the world. Because the main reason the French torture-defenders didn’t argue that stuff like simulated drowning was no big deal was because they didn’t have to: they didn’t have to admit simulated drowning was happening AT ALL. In the absence of certain forms of highly-circulated, red-handed visual evidence, like the Abu Ghraib photos in Bush-era America, “deny, deny, deny” (even if massive, overwhelming proof actually does exist) remains a plausible public-relations strategy. … Denial that these things happened at all, which will always be the first line of defense, is no longer possible. And that is encouraging, despite everything.
by Harry on June 16, 2009
by Michael Bérubé on June 16, 2009
So I’m back from the AAUP national meeting, and I’ve decided that I’m a bad person for not blogging about Garcetti v. Ceballos or Hong v. Grant (.pdf) until now. (Marc Bousquet was all over it more than a year ago.) The Hong case is just one example of what I call the Children of Garcetti, and if you teach at a public university in the United States (or if you know someone who does), you should know about Garcetti.
Here’s the Oyez summary of the case. Since Garcetti involves the fate of a deputy district attorney in Los Angeles who was whistleblowing with regard to what appeared to be a fraudulent affidavit, most people didn’t realize that it might have implications for academic freedom. Ah, but not the AAUP’s legal staff! They were on the case, so to speak, from the start (here’s a .pdf of the brief). Which is yet another reason you all (if you’re college professors) should have joined the AAUP by now, because (a) the AAUP sees these things coming when most of the rest of us don’t and (b) helps to fight ‘em in court. Indeed, the AAUP/ Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression brief seems to have caught the attention of David Souter, who, bless his retiring heart, wrote in dissent:
This ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today’s majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write “pursuant to official duties.”
In response, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion, citing Bugs Bunny, replied, “ehhhhhh … could be!” Though the actual language was this:
There is some argument that expression related to academic scholarship or classroom instruction implicates additional constitutional interests that are not fully accounted for by this Court’s customary employee-speech jurisprudence. We need not, and for that reason do not, decide whether the analysis we conduct today would apply in the same manner to a case involving speech related to scholarship or teaching.
In other words, we’re leaving that door open, thanks—if any lower courts want to walk through it, just make sure they wipe their feet on the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom.
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by John Holbo on May 30, 2009
This is a follow-up to the distinctly non-sober but not wholly unuseful thread attached to my post on the Boston Review piece on Malhotra and Margalit’s survey research on anti-semitism and the financial crisis. The authors have asked for a chance to explain themselves, and their methodology, which has come in for a lot of criticism of an unavoidably speculative sort in comments to my post. Let’s hope this clears a few things up. Let’s try to be civil, shall we? The following is, obviously, not by me but by Malhotra and Margalit. And not edited by me in any way. – John Holbo
We are glad that our article generated thoughtful discussion, and we would be happy to address some of the questions people raised in the comments section. If our responses do not specifically address your particular comment, apologies in advance. Our goal here is to touch on some of the main issues. [click to continue…]
This common trope (this particular example is taken from Marc Ambinder) in discussions over the auto industry seems to me to be based on faulty logic.
Bondholders are kicking and screaming, but it appears as if General Motors Corp. is headed for an orderly bankruptcy, and the Obama administration is about to be handed the keys to a venerable corporate institution. Again. And again, the administration seems to be rewriting the rules of capitalism to fashion a deal to its liking. Purists—and virtually every academic economist one happens to encounter—wonder what happened to the once inviolate principle of rewarding risk-takers. Unsecured creditors will get less of a stake in the new GM than its employees, and you can forget about poor unadorned stockholders.
As I understand it (commenters may have different rationales), the idea that people should be rewarded for taking risk is that people making risky investments should receive higher returns on those investments in order to compensate for those risks. In capitalist systems, you often see the argument being made that the owners of capital should receive high returns on their capital to compensate them for the risk that the companies they have invested in go bust. But this does not mean that capital owners should have first bite at the cherry if the company does go bust. The risk that the company goes bust – and that capital owners lose their shirts in the process – is precisely the risk that they are supposedly already been compensated for. In other words, you can’t have it both ways – getting special compensation for the risk that you will lose your money if the firm goes bust implies that you shouldn’t get special compensation in the event that the company does go bust. Or you wouldn’t have been taking any risks in the first place.
So I simply don’t see that this cod-Schumpeterian argument makes any sense. A real Schumpeterian, I suspect, would be saying that no-one should get compensated at all, either capitalists or workers, and that the companies should be allowed to go bust (but that of course is a quite different argument). You could perhaps make a case on normative grounds that people who took a higher risk should get a bigger share of whatever is left. But you would have to take account of the fact that it isn’t only owners of capitalists who take these risks. Workers in GM have made risky investments themselves – in specialized skills that are difficult to sell on the market – and these risks were arguably greater than the ones taken by capitalists (bankers and investors, for all their travails, are surely doing better than unemployed auto workers).
by Kieran Healy on May 26, 2009
I’ve only seen the headlines, but I expect all the clowns put on their clown suits this morning and are presently climbing out of their clown car at the studio. I’m thinking liberal, activist, Puerto Rico isn’t even a state and the Bronx isn’t either, law-into-her-own-hands, affirmative action, closeted lesbian, the guy in front of me at Dunkin D’s said she wasn’t too bright. On that last point, it’s well known amongst alums that whereas the Princeton Sam Alito graduated from in 1972 was a bastion of civilized learning, the Princeton Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from four or five years later was a hippie “learning cooperative” where minorities got a coupon book of “A” grades upon admission to use up as needed, were all given the Pyne Prize automatically, and the concept of truth was rigorously suppressed by the leftist faculty.
Clive Crook positions himself as a reasonable moderate between the extremes of Republican torture-and-detention-porn crazies, and people who, you know, who take civil rights seriously.
The left’s complaints make far more sense than Mr Cheney’s. Mr Obama is adjusting the Bush administration’s policies here and there and seeks to put them on a sounder legal footing. This recalibration is significant and wise, but it is by no means the entirely new approach that he led everybody to expect.
Mr Obama is in the right, in my view, but he owes his supporters an apology for misleading them. He also owes George W. Bush an apology for saying that the last administration’s thinking was an affront to US values, whereas his own policies would be entirely consonant with them. In office he has found that the issue is more complicated. If he was surprised, he should not have been.
The signature intellectual defect of the non-compromisers on each side of this debate is an inability to recognise conflicting ends. The Democratic party’s civil libertarians seem to believe that several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects. There can be no trade-off between freedom and security, because the freedoms they prioritise trump everything. To many on the other side, no trampling on the liberty of ordinary citizens, no degree of cruelty to detainees, no outright illegality is too much to contemplate in the effort to stop terrorists. On this view, security trumps everything.
The “seem to believe” is a weasel-phrase, which would (to use his own dubious phrasing) “seem” to be nicely calculated so as to allow him to make very nasty insinuations and accusations without having to prove them, and the “several medium-sized US cities would be a reasonable price to pay for insisting on ordinary criminal trials for terrorist suspects” bit is a common-or-garden shameful and disgusting slur. If Crook has any substantial evidence that ‘several medium sized cities’ have been put at risk, or are likely to be put at risk, because of civil libertarians’ tiresome insistence on trials and such, I invite him to produce it. And no, hypothetical ticking bomb scenarios don’t do it, thank you very much.
The underlying claim of this shoddy exercise, such as it is, has three parts. First, that the people who are insisting on civil liberties in the GWOT are wild-eyed and extremist zealots, fundamentally similar in kind to the members of the lock-em-up-and-torture-em-to-death crowd on the other side. Second, that a difficult balance has to be struck between civil liberties for terrorists on the one hand and the need to avoid the destruction of medium-sized American cities on the other. Third, that the only people capable of making the necessary complex choices are sceptical moderates like Clive Crook who realise, as others don’t, that differing ends are incompatible, there are unavoidable trade-offs in life &c&c. In its fully fledged form, this might be described, after the example of Isaiah Berlin, as High Table Liberalism – that anguished and serious engagement with the difficulties of political choice in a world of irreconcilable and competing values which occurs somewhere between the end of the main course and the serving of the port and Stilton. But it reminds me even more of a radio comedy sketch I remember from my youth in Ireland, where a punter representing the Plain People of Ireland and a nun are discussing how best to deal with football hooligans. The punter says that they’re a pack of bastards, and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. The nun says no, we need to think too of the principles of charity and forgiveness, of Christian love etc – and the only solution is to chop off their goolies. Clive Crook is taking the part of the nun here.
by Jon Mandle on May 15, 2009
On her show last night, Rachel Maddow provided a genuine service. [tip: TPM] She reviewed Bush Administration claims about the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq (with clips) and ran that alongside a time line concerning the use of torture. This took about six minutes. Then she interviewed Charles Duelfer, former head of the Iraq Survey Group, who says that “Washington” suggested using stronger interrogation techniques against an already cooperative Iraqi official, and Robert Windrem, who reports that two sources confirmed to him: 1. the suggestion was to use waterboarding; 2. it came from the Vice President’s office; 3. the purpose was to find a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq.
Duelfer doesn’t exactly say that he was told to find a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. But that’s the strong suggestion of his comments, and he doesn’t object when Maddow draws that inference. (He does object to the characterization of his being ordered to use more aggressive techniques. It was more of a suggestion – one which was not acted on.)
At the Becker-Posner blog
The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the surge of prosperity worldwide that marked the global triumph of capitalism, the essentially conservative policies, especially in economics, of the Clinton administration, and finally the election and early years of the Bush Administration, marked the apogee of the conservative movement. But there were signs that it had not only already peaked, but was beginning to decline. Leading conservative intellectual figures grew old and died (Friedman, Hayek, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Buckley, etc.) and others as they aged became silent or less active (such as Robert Bork, Irving Kristol, and Gertrude Himmelfarb), and their successors lacked equivalent public prominence, as conservatism grew strident and populist.
By the end of the Clinton administration, I was content to celebrate the triumph of conservatism as I understood it, and had no desire for other than incremental changes in the economic and social structure of the United States. I saw no need for the estate tax to be abolished, marginal personal-income tax rates further reduced, the government shrunk, pragmatism in constitutional law jettisoned in favor of “originalism,” the rights of gun owners enlarged, our military posture strengthened, the rise of homosexual rights resisted, or the role of religion in the public sphere expanded. All these became causes embraced by the new conservatism that crested with the reelection of Bush in 2004.
My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising … By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.
Discuss.
by John Holbo on May 9, 2009
by Henry on April 30, 2009
Since my first attempt to critique Clive Crook on torture seems to have ended rather badly, here’s a second go. NB that this post is not an obviation of the apology below for my initial misunderstanding and mischaracterization of his position. That stands – if I screwed up in reading him, I screwed up in reading him, and am perfectly prepared to take my lumps. It is, instead, a reflection of the fact that my perplexity has in part increased as he has sought to explain himself and his position further. I am quite confused about the logical connections that are supposed to pull key parts of his argument together. Now this confusion could be a reflection of my ‘remarkable incompetence’ as a reader, or alternatively of my ‘total lack of good faith.’ Or it could be a result of incoherencies either in Crook’s views themselves, or in his presentation of same. Because I simply don’t get the argument that he is making (and from the evidence of our comments section, at least some others are similarly confused). And I’ll try to present my understanding of it as non-snarkily as possible in the hope that if I don’t use words like ‘reprehensible,’ he won’t continue to suggest that I am an idiotic hack and a disgrace to the legacy of the blessed Isaiah Berlin, if indeed he bothers to reply at all. [click to continue…]
by John Quiggin on April 23, 2009
American adults under 30 are almost evenly divided on the question
Which is a better system – capitalism or socialism?
37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. For the US population as a whole, only a bare majority prefer capitalism (53% prefer capitalism, 20% socialism, and 27% are undecided.)
Granted that socialism can mean anything from “Policies adopted by Joe Stalin” to “Policies deplored by Joe the Plumber”, these are quite striking results, and certainly help to explain why the invocation of the socialist bogy by JTP and other Republican hacks has been so ineffective (to the point that JTP has recently taken to adding a “neo” prefix, which certainly made both “liberal” and “conservative” scarier).
Update SNAP!
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by Henry on April 15, 2009
From Hilzoy.
If you have been reading public health blogs for a couple of years, you probably know, and miss, Confined Space, a blog about worker health and safety issues. If you don’t, you missed a great blog, the kind that really educates you about an issue that it’s hard for non-professionals to learn about otherwise. … Confined Space closed up shop a bit over a year ago when Jordan Barab, who wrote it, went to work for the House Education and Labor Committee. … From the Effect Measure post that I linked above, which is aptly titled “Miracle at OSHA”:
“Jordan Barab has been named Deputy Assistant Secretary for OSHA and until a permanent OSHA Director is named he will be Acting Assistant Secretary (i.e., OSHA Director) (…)If you go back through the archives of Confined Space you’ll find post after post taking the Bush administration OSHA to task for falling down on the job of protecting workers’ health. Now the hand that typed those posts will be running the agency. The bottom line here is that workers who would have died under the old regime will now live. Mirabile dictu!”
Indeed.
by John Holbo on April 9, 2009
by John Quiggin on April 5, 2009
It’s a bit late to be reporting April Fools* hoaxes, but this one at Salon has to be the best ever. The premise is that the US conservative movement has gone so completely insane that David Horowitz (!!) is now, in relative terms, the voice of reason.
This sounds as if it would be impossible to pull off, but whoever Salon has writing as “Horowitz” sounds very much like the real thing, for example, “Obama has flexed the leftist muscle so nakedly and unmistakably that there isn’t a conservative left who will vote Democratic in the next election”.
The piece then quotes material supposedly sent to “Horowitz”, in which Obama is compared to Mussolini, Charles Manson and so on, and denounced as the antichrist. It looks convincing at first, but surely no serious representative of the conservative side of politics would regard Obama as comparable to Mussolini, a traitor to the United States, and so on. And the general tenor of “Horowitz” piece, while it looks sober and sound at a first reading, carries the obviously absurd implication that the leading thinkers of US conservatism are hysterical loons.
*Note: I’m sure that the piece originally appeared with an April 1 dateline, but it now has April 2.
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