by Chris Bertram on July 14, 2005
Following the London bombings, the British “left” pro-war sites “are”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html “busy”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/kingdom_of_the_blind.php “drawing”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2005/07/14/the_problem_we_face_in_a_nutshell.php “battle lines”. The line they are concerned to draw is between themselves and the likes of Seumas Milne of the Guardian. David T at Harry’s Place goes so far as to call Milne a Quisling. (Given who Quisling was, I think this would make David T a Holocaust denier if the argument of “this”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/11/talking_down_th.html Eve Garrard post at normblog were correct. But since it isn’t, it doesn’t.)
“Dickhead” and “idiot” are two of the politer epithets I’m inclined to apply to the hapless and unpleasant Milne and those like him such as our regular commenter abb1, but since there are lines to be drawn, and it is important that we do so, I’d prefer not to draw them there. We now know, that there are Muslim extremists in the UK who are willing to kill us in large numbers. If we are to stop them we need a politics that isolates them from their co-religionists rather than providing them with an environment to swim in. That means talking to, and trying to include on “our” side, all kinds of figures from within that community. That means doing what the Metropolitan Police have done in inviting Tariq Ramadan to speak. That means engaging with a whole bunch of people who have repellent views on topics from Israel to homosexuality. We should say what we think of those views, but we should talk, we should include. Because an isolated and frightened Muslim community, unwilling to talk to the police, unwilling to engage with wider British society would provide a place for the real nutters to hide and recruit, whereas a Muslim community with whom bonds of trust exist provides our best means of fighting the crazies. Ken Livingstone has come in for a lot of flak for his meetings with Sheikh al-Qaradawi. Maybe some of it was justified. But Ken, with a political sureness of touch that eludes the bloggers I mentioned at least know both that we need to draw some lines and draws them in the right place: between those who are disposed to plant bombs on the tube and those who can help us to stop them.
Addendum:
Norman Geras and Eve Garrard, in the course of treating us to “a lecture on drawing battle lines against Milne et al”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/07/apologists_amon.html , also attempt a lesson on blame and moral responsibility. Since I agree with them that the terrorists who planted the bombs are responsible for those bombs and that Blair is not, I am reluctant to quibble overmuch. But as a general rule it seems to me wrong to rule out a priori that those who create the conditions under which bad things are done share responsibility for those bad things. One of their examples concerns rape. Of course rapists are responsible for what they do, but suppose a university campus with bad lighting has a history of attacks on women and the university authorities can, at minimal cost, greatly improve the night-time illumination but choose not to do so for penny-pinching reasons. Suppose the pattern of assaults continues in the darkened area: do Geras and Garrard really want to say that the university penny-pinchers should not be blamed for what happens subsquently? At all? I think not.
Rove wasn’t talking to journalists yesterday. He was just talking to FOX News, where notorious dignityphobe John Gibson argued that Rove deserves a medal for exposing Valerie Plame. Here’s what he said (any transcription errors are my own):
I say give Karl Rove a medal, even if Bush has to fire him. Why? Because Valerie Plame should have been outed by somebody, and nobody else had the cajones to do it. I’m glad Rove did, if he did do it, which he still says he didn’t.[1] Why should she have been outed? Well, despite her husband’s repeated denials, even in the face of a pile of evidence, and conclusions of a joint investigation of Congress, it appears that all evidence points to Joe Wilson’s wife, the spy Valerie Plame, as the one who recommended him to the job of going to Niger to discover Saddam was trying to buy nuke bomb material.
Why is this important? Because Wilson was opposed to the war in Iraq, opposed to Bush policy, and pointedly and loudly said so. Consequently, there was some interest in how he got chosen for the sensitive job, which people at the time might have thought would be a fulcrum point in the decision about the war. You wouldn’t send a peacenik to see if we should go to war, if we need to go to war, now would you? That’s exactly what happened. As they say in the news business, enquiring minds now want to know how the heck did this happen.[2]
Well, it turned out little wifey did it.[3] She touted husband Joe, her CIA bosses bit, and off Wilson went to completely knock down any notion that Saddam wanted Niger’s nuke bomb making stuff, which is called yellowcake. Problem is, reporters say many in intelligence said the information said no such thing. In fact, it was still a bit of a mystery, and Saddam could might have been trying to buy the nuke bomb material.[4]
So why should Rove get a medal? Let’s just assume that spy Valerie Plame knew her husband’s attitude toward the war in Iraq. She was married to him. Then sending him off to Niger could be regarded as an attempt to influence national policy. Where I come from, we want to know who that is. We do not want secret spy masters pulling the puppet strings in the background. That is something that should be out in the open, and the person doing it should be identified and should own up to it. So, Rove should get a medal, even if he did do what he said he didn’t do. And that is my word.
This is idiotic. Even if I were to grant Gibson every element of his argument- even if I stipulated that Wilson was a biased “peacenik” who did a shoddy job, and that Plame shouldn’t have recommended him because of his anti-Administration views- all I’m granting is that Plame used bad judgement in suggesting her husband.
Gibson is forced to argue that a covert CIA agent who shows bad judgement in a personnel suggestion should be exposed, rather than (say) ignored, reprimanded or even fired. Exposing Plame didn’t just hurt her and her family: it exposed all of her foreign contacts and all of her CIA colleagues “employed” by the same cover firm. Republicans can wag their fingers at Plame all day long. But unless they’re prepared to state that she deserved exposure, they’ve got no argument. She obviously didn’t. The cost to national security is far too great.
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by John Holbo on July 12, 2005
I’ve been on sabbatical from CT, working on the Valve and, by extension, pushing pet notions about academic publishing reform. These notions have now born fruit in the form of a book event, conducted more or less on the model of similar events pioneered at CT – massive, multi-thinker online reviews. The book is Theory’s Empire, an anthology of essays critical of Theory – the ofless stuff, mostly indigenous to English departments. Several posts up so far, and several bloggers – inside and outside the Valve – lined up to participate over the next several days. Please feel free to drop by and join the conversation if this sounds interesting. Next month we’ve got a different book lined up: The Literary Wittgenstein. I wrote a long review of it for NDPR about a month back. Under the fold, some general thoughts about academic e-publishing.
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1. Karl Rove’s defense lawyer has been pushing the story that his client identified Joseph Wilson’s wife as a covert CIA operative simply to discourage Time from printing that Joseph Wilson’s trip had been authorized by CIA Director George Tenet or Vice President Dick Cheney. (Wilson never claimed that it was.)
“Rove did not mention her name to Cooper,” Luskin said. “This was not an effort to encourage Time to disclose her identity. What he was doing was discouraging Time from perpetuating some statements that had been made publicly and weren’t true.”
What I’d like to ask, if I were in a position to do so:
If Karl Rove believes that it was appropriate to mention that Joseph Wilson’s wife was a CIA agent in order to improve a journalist’s work product, will he continue to reveal the identities of other covert CIA agents if similar opportunities present themselves?
2. Holding an old-fashioned pity party about the media’s anti-Bush bias would be a lot more convincing if that same media hadn’t completely sat on this story, despite possession of all relevant facts about Rove, for two years through an election cycle.
by Henry Farrell on July 12, 2005
“Jordan Barab”:http://www.nathannewman.org/laborblog/archive/003203.shtml writes about a quite appalling story at Nathan Newman’s blog today.
bq. Last week federal immigration officials took into custody dozens of undocumented workers from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador and Ukraine at the Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in Goldsboro, North Carolina. How did they lure them into the trap? None of your business, says the federal Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). “We’re not going to discuss how we do our business,” Sue Brown, an immigration and customs spokeswoman in Atlanta, said last Thursday.
bq. However, Allen McNeely, head of the state Labor Department’s Occupational Safety and Health division, said the workers were lured into the arrest by a flier announcing a mandatory Occupational Safety and Health Administration meeting.
bq. McNeely said one of the contractors who employed the immigrants faxed him a copy of the flier. It is printed in English and Spanish. It tells all contract workers to attend an OSHA briefing at the base theater and promises free coffee and doughnuts. … “Federal immigration officials say they have the right to round up illegal immigrants in any manner they see fit — even if it means impersonating Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials.”
Jennifer Gordon wrote an “article”:http://bostonreview.net/BR30.3/gordon.html a few months ago which explains exactly how badly undocumented workers are screwed under the existing system of workplace safety regulation. They rarely know their rights, are reluctant to complain about abuses for fear of deportation, and as a result are killed or maimed far more frequently in workplace accidents than they should be. This utterly, utterly shameful operation will make undocumented workers even less likely to contact OSHA about workplace safety than in the past – and as a result will lead to more cripplings and deaths.
Update: See also this “NYT story”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/13/national/13janitor.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=a5044eb5a15dd403&hp&ex=1121227200&partner=homepage
by Eszter Hargittai on July 12, 2005
I have accumulated quite a list of fun sites. So far I have protected CT readers by only posting these occasionally. But I have so many now that I think I am going to make it a weekly feature. As additional warning, I have created a little button to signal these posts. The point of the button is to note: you have been warned, I take no responsibility for the amount of time you end up wasting due to clicking on these links.
Planarity Flash Game
Your job is to reposition the nodes so the links do not overlap. After posting a link to this on the SOCNET mailing list yesterday, a friend of mine remarked: “LOL! That is why we have software Eszter!”. Afterward, a serious discussion about visualization software ensued. Who says games are just for wasting time?
After level 10 I decided it was time to get back to work. [UPDATE: I’ve now gone to level 13, see link to images in the comments section.] That amount of game time made me start seeing the dots and lines even when not at my computer. You have been warned.
Tuesday may not be the best time to post such links, I realize, maybe I will make it a weekend feature in the future.
by Chris Bertram on July 12, 2005
This morning’s post brought with it a package from Cambridge University Press containing a copy of “The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0521609097/junius-20 , co-edited by Crooked Timberite Harry Brighouse (with Gillian Brock) and including papers by both me and Jon Mandle. With such a heavy contribution from this blog, I hardly need point out that it is the duty of all regular readers to buy themselves a copy (as well as supplementary copies for friends and family)!
by Chris Bertram on July 12, 2005
The usual suspects are getting exercised again about the fact that the “BBC’s guidelines”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/edguide/war/mandatoryreferr.shtml tell its reporters not to use the word “terrorist” as part of a factual report unless it is in the mouth of someone else. Melanie Phillips goes one better and “accuses them of censoring”:http://www.melaniephillips.com/diary/archives/001320.html Tony Blair’s use of the word:
bq. The BBC’s censorship of the ‘t’ word gets worse and worse. In his statement to the Commons today, the Prime Minister repeatedly referred to terrorism. BBC Online’s account of this speech excised those references almost entirely, with only one reference in a quote to ‘the moment of terror striking’.
Perhaps she should have checked whether Blair speech is “reproduced in full on the BBC website”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/4673221.stm , as it is, before sounding off.
by Chris Bertram on July 12, 2005
From the (not at all anti-American) “Daily Telegraph”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/07/12/nusaf12.xml&sSheet=/portal/2005/07/12/ixportal.html :
bq. All 12,000 American airmen based in Britain have been banned from going near London because of the bombings.
bq. The directive, issued on Friday, indefinitely bans USAF personnel, most of them based at the huge airfields at Lakenheath and Mildenhall in Suffolk, from going inside the M25.
bq. Families of the servicemen and women are being “highly encouraged” to stay away, too.
bq. While Ken Livingstone, the mayor of London, was boarding an Underground train yesterday and declaring that “we don’t let a small group of terrorists change the way we live”, a USAF spokesman said the ban was “a prudent measure”. Its aim was to ensure “the security and safety of our airmen, civilians, their families and our resources”.
bq. Westminster city council accused the Americans of playing into the terrorists’ hands.
UPDATE: The “ban has now been lifted”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4673987.stm .
Haedro: Socrates, it hurts when I do this.
Socrates: Can I suggest that you don’t do that?
Plato, Philosophy Phunnies
Chris has done a good job of capturing much of the commentary on the London bombings, but I’d like to point out one more ignoble classification. I’m going to pick on Michelle Malkin. It’s certainly not an exclusively right-wing thing, but she’s a professional writer who really ought to know better.
I’m going to assume that Ms. Malkin would have heard about the attacks around breakfast time. By lunch, she had worked through sorrow, anger, grief, and gotten to the healthy point of dumpster-diving. She had taken the time to troll the comments at Democratic Underground and Daily Kos to collect the most appalling, indefensible comments by such pillars of the left as “plcdude”, “talex”, “pyewacket1”, and “TheSnorp”. (Et tu, TheSnorp?) This post was helpfully titled “THE 7/7 ATTACKS: REACTIONS FROM THE AMERICAN LEFT”, and earned her 36 trackbacks.
What’s the point of this? I understand that there are plenty of chuckles to be had by visting Bedlam at Free Republic or Democratic Underground, and occasionally there’s a geniune point to be made. (For example, I thought that No More Mister Nice Blog wrote an interesting post that isn’t just a freakshow.) But I’d suggest that the exact same post (“DERANGED RANTERS RANT”) has been written enough times by now. On a slow day, it’s just hackish and unconvincing; the response, “what about FR/LGF/DU?” always remains the same. But on a day of tragedy, it’s really inappropriate, and it would do us good if we would just knock it off.
UPDATE: I almost forgot Roy Edroso’s response to Michelle Malkin: “DU-oh! I’ma run out and gather me some Free Republic quotes in retaliation. That’s the secret of the blogosphere: it’s self-incorrecting.”
With the decline of the tech boom, we saw the death of a number of remarkably good professional comedy sites, such as Suck.com, Modern Humorist and Timmy Big Hands (no link, alas). (I still email around MH’s preview of Radiohead’s Kid A every once in a while.) Gelf Magazine has conducted a funny meta-interview with two of the founders of Modern Humorist, possibly better known from the VH1 show Best Week Ever. They’ve interviewed John Aboud, then let his co-founder, Mike Colton, mockingly comment over it, Mystery Science Theater-style. Check it out.
by Henry Farrell on July 11, 2005
Kelly Bedard and Olivier Deschênes have an “article”:http://www.eco.utexas.edu/papers/sem20050422a.pdf forthcoming in the _American Economic Review_ providing strong statistical evidence that service in the US military is bad for your health – but not (only) for the obvious reasons. Even apart from combat mortality, old soldiers tend to die younger; 2 million veterans from the 1920-1939 cohort (generation) died prematurely. The effects of this, measured in terms of “years of potential life lost,” were roughly as bad as those of the total number of combat deaths in World War II and the Korean War combined. Why so many dead? The authors’ evidence points to one key factor: smoking. During World War II and the Korean war, soldiers were issued cigarette rations, and could buy more cigarettes at subsidized prices. Tobacco companies donated cigarettes to the troops, in part so that soldiers would get hooked on their product, building a long term customer base. Excess veteran mortality after the age of 40 is most pronounced for lung cancer and heart disease, both of which are strongly linked to smoking. Bedard and Deschênes calculate that 36-79% of the excess veteran deaths through lung cancer and heart disease can be attributed to military-induced smoking for veterans from World War II and Korea. The military no longer supplies cigarettes to soldiers as part of their rations. However, tobacco products continue to be sold at subsidized prices at army base PXes. As Bedard and Deschênes argue, this is very bad policy indeed.
(thanks to “Erik”:http://home.gwu.edu/~voeten/ for the link).
by Chris Bertram on July 11, 2005
Talking-up the good things about the English national character is all the fashion in the wake of last week’s bombs: stoicism, stiff upper lip, mustn’t grumble, etc. As it happens last week I also read Kate Fox’s pop-anthropology participant-observer account of the English. Funny and well-0bserved in parts is my verdict on the 400-odd pages of “Watching the English”:http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0340818867/junius-21 , though it was getting a bit crass and tedious towards the end. Still, the book has its moments, most of which have to do with class. The most memorable being the ironic-gnome rule:
bq. I once expressed mild surprise at the presence of a garden gnome in an upper-middle-class garden …. The owner of the garden explained that the gnome was “ironic”. I asked him, with apologies for my ignorance, how one could tell that his garden gnome was supposed to be an ironic statement, as opposed to, you know, just a gnome. He rather sniffily replied that I only had to look at the rest of the garden for it to be obvious that the gnome was a tounge-in-cheek joke.
bq. But surely, I persisted, garden gnomes are always something of a joke, in any garden — I mean, no-one actually takes them seriously or regards them as works of art. His response was rather rambling and confused (not to mention somewhat huffy), but the gist seemed to be that while the lower classes saw gnomes as _intrinsically_ amusing, his gnome was amusing only because of its incongruous appearance in a “smart” garden. In other words, council-house gnomes were a joke, but his gnome was a joke about council-house tastes, effectively a joke about class….
bq. The man’s reaction to my questions clearly defined him as upper-middle, rather than upper class. In fact, his pointing out that the gnome I had noticed was “ironic” had already demoted him by half a class from my original assessment. A genuine member of the upper classes would either have admitted to a passion for garden gnomes … or said something like “Ah yes, my gnome. I’m very fond of my gnome.” and left me to draw my own conclusions.
