August 2005

Spotted yesterday morning at the Amish Market in Battery Park, NYC.

!http://nicoleandhenry.smugmug.com/photos/32473971-S.jpg!

So “we now know”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4157892.stm that the young Brazilian electrician gunned down by police as a suspected suicide bomber was not wearing a heavy jacket, paused to pick up a newspaper on his way to the tube, used his travelcard to pass the barrier, did not run from the police, who did not warn him, found a seat and was restrained before being shot. This, in addition to having been allowed to board a bus earlier.

What did Sir Ian Blair know when “he said that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707509,00.html the Metropolitan Police were “playing out of their socks” ? If he knew at that stage that this was an disastrous catalogue of incompetence then he surely ought to resign. And who told the papers, and with what authority “that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707779,00.html de Menezes

bq. decided to run away from police, vaulting the ticket barrier and running down to the platform. ?

They ought be identified and made to resign too.

I’ve gone through the “comments”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/08/12/trahisons-des-clercs/#comments to my previous post, and found a quite considerable number of people who appear to have made egregious claims about opponents of the war rooting for the other side. I’ve excluded people who don’t fit the criteria for being well-known etc (including a couple of bloggers). I’ve included both Glenn Reynolds and Hindrocket of Powerline, who both seem to me to qualify as well-known individuals beyond the blogosphere. Where there’s some real degree of ambiguity, I’ve not included the links; where (as with the _Wall Street Journal_ editorial board’s slur-in-passing), I think that any reading other than the obvious one is simply making excuses for the inexcusable, I’ve included them. Which is not to say that I don’t fully expect some of our regular commenters to engage in aforementioned excuse-making, special pleading etc. The links are below the fold.
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Good catch from Tristam Shandy– Bob Dole’s tears for the persecuted journalists, and his grave concerns that “dozens of whistle-blowers [won’t be able to] share information about government wrongdoing”, are of quite recent vintage. (Apparently, the term “kerfuffle” hadn’t yet been adopted by Republicans when Dole made his Watergate speech.)

Not being an American, I’ve followed the whole Cindy Sheehan thing from afar. I’d been noting, with growing disgust, the whole slime-and-defend operation mounted by O’Reilly, FrontPageMag, Michele Malkin and points rightwards. Now I see that Christopher Hitchens “has joined in”:http://www.slate.com/id/2124500/fr/nl/ and that his invective against Sheehan has been “endorsed by Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/ventriloquizing.html . I guess there are two views on this kind of thing. There’s the view that citizens, whatever their background, are fair game for personal attack as soon as they open their mouths and should be treated in the same hardball manner as any machine politican or professional pundit. And there’s the view that grieving mothers should should be shown consideration, kindness and respect. Geras and Hitchens clearly take the first of these views.

Just over a year ago “I posted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/26/katharina-blum/ about Schlondorff’s film of “The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ and commented:

bq. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events.

[There’s good coverage of earlier episodes of the anti-Sheehan slime campaign at the Media Matters site: “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508100009 , “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110002 and “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120006 . ]

I’m a firm believer that the pictures are normally much better on radio. But today I’d rather be where Norm is, lucky sod.

UPDATE: if you’re not watching or listening, and you can, you must.

Britain, France and Germany are busy trying to persuade Iran to abandon efforts to develop nuclear weapons, so far with little success. Cajolery and bribery having tried and failed, how about a bit of leadership by example? Two of the three parties in this effort have nuclear weapons of their own, even though they don’t face any conceivable threat of invasion[1]. Perhaps if they agreed to disarm themselves, the Iranians would be impressed enough to follow suit.

OK, I’m joking about Chirac and France. There’s no way that France is ready to admit that it is no longer a Great Power, and certainly Chirac is not the man to start the process. But, why shouldn’t Blair do something like this? It’s a perfect example of the non-ideological willingness to embrace radical alternatives to established dogma that New Labour is supposed to symbolise. And even if it didn’t produce any immediate payoff with Iran it would have to help the cause of non-proliferation in the medium term.

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Bribery is a good thing because it helps the bribed to learn what is best! So argues law & economics professor Thomas W. Hazlett “in today’s Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/61a388f6-0ce3-11da-ba02-00000e2511c8.html :

bq. Payola was made famous by scandals in the 1950s, when “cash, drugs and women” were traded to rock and roll disc jockeys in exchange for airtime, but the practice has a richer history. In both Britain and the US, 19th- and early 20th-century performers ­collected side-payments from music publishing houses for singing their songs.

bq. Ronald Coase, the Nobel Prize­winning economist, explained the practice in 1979. Radio stations own something valuable: songs played more tend to sell more. Competition for airtime develops, but how one conducts the best auction – given that station revenues come primarily from selling audiences to advertisers – is complicated.

bq. One view is that radio stations should be faithful to listeners and make choices based only on their DJs’ honest musical appreciation. But how do they know what gangsta rap track is top quality? Payola helps them learn, because record companies will tend to value airtime the most for releases for which they have the highest expectations of future sales.

I’d love to read commentary on this over at “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ . Tyler?

A little bird forwarded this to my mailbox, and I’m pretty sure that it’s completely untrue. Still, it seemed too hot to bury. Enjoy.

Hugh,

I think that we’ve got a buyer for Unfit To Grieve: The Real Cindy Sheehan. Regnery is already covering their bases with a quickie by Michelle Malkin- In Defense of Public Stocks. I guess that Crown Forum is cashing in by retitling Michael J. Totten’s pop-up book (sorry, “3-D photo-Fisking with interactive elements”- whatever!) “LOOK, BAD SOLDIER MOMMY”.

But Joanne at Sentinel HC is very, very interested. If you can have an outline by Monday afternoon, and a manuscript by Sunday, they can send it to print before the end of August. (Jonah says he can guest-host your show next week, if you need him.) I know I don’t have to tell you this, but make sure to spellcheck thoroughly before you send it on- they don’t check shit there.

You’re a pro, and you’ve got Nexis, so I’m not worried. You’ve got a bunch of angles: the flip-flops, problems in her marriage, the Israel thing, the groups supporting her, the rumors surrounding Casey’s conception, the dirty hippies camping out with her. Karl’s got his hands full (obviously), but he’s trying to QUICKLY get his hands on her tax records. Plus, Ed Klein emailed to say that he’s got some dirt on Casey! I’m forwarding his contact info if you don’t have it. (Who luvs ya?)

I know you read PowerLine; I think the frame of “The Good” and “The Bad” is a strong one that readers can identify with. We’ve got the rights to about twenty pages’ worth of funny photoshops of Michael Moore, so we can always fall back on that if need be.

Best,

Lucianne

About a month ago, Chris noted a new book that our own Harry Brighouse co-edited. Well, I’m here to tell you there’s more Brighouse that you should read! Specifically, Harry’s new book Justice published by Polity, as part of their “Key Concepts” series. Here’s a US link to it on amazon; here’s a UK link. (Disclosure: I just finished a book for the series that should be out early next year on Global Justice.)

This is simply the best introduction to contemporary philosophical accounts of justice around. So if readers of this blog want to learn about or brush up on their Rawls, Sen, Nussbaum, Nozick, Kymlicka, Jerry Cohen, et. al., you couldn’t do better than to read this. Best of all, it is written in a very accessible style that doesn’t presuppose any philosophical background. Really!
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Noted without comment:

I points the fingerbone of scorn at those inhumanly cruel Republicans who drink puppy blood for breakfast. When I consider the sharp, tiny milk-teeth of those puppies, protruding from gums now white with blood loss, I am filled with a righteous and long-abiding anger. In fact, the mere thought of a pure-bred English Bulldog puppy, its throat slit with a dull buck knife, its precious life-blood draining into a glass pitcher soon to be enlivened with worchestershire sauce, gin and Tabasco–the lot soon to be poured into a glass garnished with a pale green stalk of celery from the inner part of the bunch, in the manner of some cut-rate third-season Dr. Who–well, my gorge rises. Just saying, is all.

UPDATE: Some e-mailers have objected that not all adherents of the GOP refresh themselves with puppy blood of a morning–I would have thought that was obvious.

UPDATE 2: Falsely claiming that someone (or the majority of some group) drinks puppy blood is indeed egregious misbehavior. (Accurately claiming that, of course, is not egregious.) I haven’t bothered to investigate whether any Republicans in fact drink the blood of innocent puppies, so I can’t speak to the merits of any given case, but to the extent that my opponents uncover and condemn false claims of this type, they are doing reasoned debate (and basic decency and fairness) a great service.

UPDATE 3: I find it odd that so many Republicans who do not–and in fact have never been accused of–drinking puppy blood felt it necessary to object to my claims. Perhaps each of these people should look in his own heart. No matter how small the number of Republican puppy-blood drinkers is, so long as it is >1, then clearly this “group” should be denounced. I find it difficult to see how any fair-minded individual could object to this. Also, any readers who can supply links to prominent Republicans advocating the de-lumptious quaffing of puppy blood would be much appreciated. Please note that anonymous emails sent to K-Lo will not qualify.

Nicholas Gruen at Troppo Armadillo is unimpressed by Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation. Nicholas argues that the whole idea is an unnecessary and unhelpful, since we can justify concerns about animals suffering from the simple observation (the basis of Jeremy Bentham’s argument for laws against cruelty to animals) that animals suffer. He says

What does the term ‘speciesism’ add to this? If Oscar Wilde had nothing to declare but his genius, Peter Singer’s book and its central concept of speciesism had nothing to declare but its circumlocution.

I haven’t got a fully consistent position on all this, but I think that, however ugly it is as a word, speciesism is a meaningful concept, and I’m in favour of it. That is, in opposition to Singer’s views on the subject, I’m in favour of treating all human beings, from birth to brain-death as having specifically human rights, simply by virtue of the fact they are humans, and whether or not they are self-aware and capable of perceiving themselves as individuals. I’d argue for this on rule-utilitarian grounds, which I understand to be Singer’s general viewpoint, though the same conclusion could be reached in other ways.

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Eugene Volokh “responds”:http://www.volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_08_07-2005_08_13.shtml#1123863417 (or so I take it; for some reason he doesn’t provide a link) to Ted’s post below by requesting that his readers send in instances of “Western commentators who defend the Iraqi insurgents, or at least justify their actions as being a supposed campaign for self-determination, allegedly justifiable rage at Western misbehavior, and so on.” Fair enough, to an extent. As one of his commenters notes, he’s moved the goalposts from Taranto’s quite specific “those Westerners who side with the ‘Iraqi resistance’ against America and its allies” to a much more ambiguous category of statements, but perhaps he feels that there’s a “slippery slope”:http://www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/slippery.htm leading from the latter to the former style of argumentation. In any event, in the spirit of Eugene’s appeal, I’d like to put out one of my own. I’d like instances in which commentators make egregious claims that a substantial section of those who opposed the war are, in fact, rooting for the other side. As per Eugene’s rules, please provide the name and brief description of the person (who should be a journalist, official or famous person), the exact quote, and the URL at which the original article is to be found. This _Dolchstosslegende_ style hitjob on the vast realist-liberal-internationalist-conspiracy, by famous neo-conservative intellectual, Norman Podhoretz in the February 2005 issue of _Commentary_, URL “http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html”:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/special/A11902025_1.html is the kind of thing I’m looking for.

bq. Before November 2, some realists had feared that Bush’s reelection would, in Hendrickson’s words, “confirm and ratify the revolutionary changes he has introduced to U.S. strategy.” Having calmed down a bit since then, they are now hoping to avert the apocalypse through another possible outcome that some of them envisaged before November 2: namely, that “once revolutionary zeal collides with hard reality, . . . the Bush policies . . . will end in tears.”

bq. One can only admire Hendrickson’s candor in admitting what is usually hotly denied: that even many leading realists, along with many liberal internationalists, are rooting for an American defeat. Direct action not being their style, they will not participate in the “mass demonstrations and civil disobedience” advocated by Tom Hayden, who advises following the playbook of the “peace” movement of the 60’s (of which he was one of the chief organizers) as the way to get us out of Iraq. But neither will they sit back passively and wait for “hard reality” to ensure that the Bush Doctrine “ends in tears.”

bq. Instead of taking to the streets, the realists and the liberal internationalists will go back to their word processors and redouble their ongoing efforts to turn public opinion against the Bush Doctrine. Mainly they will try to do so by demonstrating over and over again that the doctrine is already failing its first great encounter with “hard reality” in Iraq.

(Podhoretz is here patching together quotes from a review article in a deliberately mendacious fashion to make it appear as if the article’s author is saying things that he very clearly is not. For the article which he is abusing, see “here”:http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/articles/wpj04-1/hendrickson.html and especially the last two paragraphs; for a response by the article’s author to Podhoretz, see “here”)

Ralph Luker writes to tell me that 15 other US presidential historians “have joined”:http://hnn.us/blogs/entries/13998.html Rick Shenkman’s blog, to form a presidential history conglomerate. A nice addition to the academic blogosphere.