Talking of higher education and athletics, I want to recommend to people that they read Leveling the Playing Field. It’s is a terrific book, and a wonderful model of how to do applied normative philosophy. It pursues hard and interesting normative questions in the context of detailed and careful empirical analysis of the situation in higher education. The philosophy guides, but does not get in the way of, the empirical exploration; it is also obvious that the authors are steeped in the empirical evidence and institutional detail of the area they are investigating. In the areas where I know the empirical literature in detail they consistently introduced me to new, and more up-to-date findings than I had to hand.
From the monthly archives:
May 2005
Some interesting posts at Non Prophet, the Colorado Springs-based blogger who previously revealed that Focus on the Family had distributed Michael Moore’s home address. He’s been writing about Soulforce, a group that protests against the use of religion to condemn gays from a Christian perspective.
Soulforce protestors recently attempted to deliver this letter to Dr. James Dobson at Focus on the Family’s Colorado Springs headquarters. The Reitan family were arrested for trespassing when they entered the premises with the letter (photos here.)
Non Prophet was on the ground to interview the Reitans after they were released. Check it out.
I watched Rosemary’s Baby over the weekend. I don’t know who I’m typing SPOILER ALERT for, but I don’t want to hear any whining.
After reading Kevin Drum, Julian Sanchez, and Glenn Reynolds, I’ve come to the following conclusions:
1. It is too much to say that “democratization of the Middle East” argument was only seized upon by the Administration after the failure to find WMDs. It’s not hard to find pre-war quotes from Bush where he pitches the benefits of a democratic Iraq. So there’s a reasonable argument that the quote which arouses Reynolds’ ire (“The only plausible reason for keeping American troops in Iraq is to protect the democratic transformation that President Bush seized upon as a rationale for the invasion after his claims about weapons of mass destruction turned out to be fictitious.”) is misleading, if you interpret “after” as “only after”.
2. However, it’s impossible to make a straight-faced argument that democratization was the main argument, or even an important argument, behind the Bush Administration’s case for war.
Over and over again, Bush insisted that we were giving Saddam the chance to avoid war. He assured his audiences that Saddam could prevent an invasion by disarming. Not by democratizing, not by ceasing his brutal tactics, and (until hours before the invasion) not by leaving power. In fact, Bush makes this promise in just about every speech linked in Reynolds’ “link-rich refutation.”
If the U.S. was willing to cancel the overthrow of Saddam’s brutal, undemocratic goverment in the event that he could show proof of disarmament, then neither democracy promotion nor human rights could have been the reason for the invasion. I can’t see any way to square this circle.
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There seems to be some discomfort among a couple of commenters (and perhaps in the blogosphere more generally) with the argument that the US is itself culpable for torture when it hands prisoners over to a regime that the US State Department and the UN describe as a “systematic” torturer. A historic analogy might help clarify matters. On June 21, 1964, three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner were arrested by the police in Nashoba County, Mississippi. They were then released by the police at night, on the side of a rural road, where they were picked up by the Ku Klux Klan and then murdered. Now, there’s no evidence that the police told the Klan to beat these young men to death. But they certainly had good reason to expect that something horrible was going to happen to the civil rights workers. Unless you are prepared to maintain that the police weren’t culpable for the deaths of Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, it’s hard to argue that the US isn’t culpable for handing prisoners over to regimes where they have good reason to believe that these prisoners will then be tortured (especially if, as seems to be the case, the US then expects and receives information from these prisoners’ interrogations).
There is one difference, but it turns on an empty legalism. The US apparently seeks assurances from the regimes to which it sends prisoners that they will not torture them. To return to the historical analogy – if the police had gone to the Klan before releasing the young men, and asked the Klan for an assurance that they would not be murdered, would this get the police off the hook? Hardly; any assurances that were granted would have been incredible. Just as they are in the case of extraordinary renditions – there is overwhelming evidence from the testimony of Maher Arar and elsewhere that these prisoners are indeed tortured. As, indeed, the US fully expects they will be. One of the interrogation techniques used at Guantanamo and elsewhere was to threaten prisoners that they would be rendered to their home governments if they didn’t cooperate; evidence that the US fully understands that these prisoners will be tortured if they are shipped abroad. Nor is there any remotely plausible alternative explanation that I’ve seen of why the US is shipping these prisoners to regimes known for torturing their prisoners rather than keeping them within its own system of prisons and shadow-prisons (where it could presumably interrogate them itself).
This just came through on Drago Radev‘s IList:
I was visiting a government office recently and I noticed the following sign at the entrance:
"NO FOOD
or
NO DRINK"
I was tempted to walk in with a can of soda and absolutely no food on me but I eventually decided against it :)
D.
Orlando Patterson and Jason Kaufman trail their forthcoming American Sociological Review paper on why cricket failed in the United States in today’s New York Times (it seems to be subscription only). Their thesis is that the egalitarian culture of the US caused elites to be extremely insecure, and therefore to hog cricket to themselves; which in turn helped out the entrepreneurs who were able to sell baseball as a game for the masses. In contrast, the self-confidence of the colonial elites in northern India and the Carribean enabled them to share cricket with the masses. This, of course, undercut any potential market for baseball, cricket being intrinsically superior (sorry, that last comment was from me, not them). You can hear them discuss it with Laurie Taylor here. In the interview, by the way, Kaufman claims never to have seen a game!