Chris Bertram

Euro elections tomorrow, and I, for one, am still at a loss for what to do. Here in the UK’s south-west constituency (bizarrely including Gibraltar!) we have full slates of candidates from all three main parties plus the fascist BNP, the Greens, the “Countryside Party”, UKIP, and RESPECT (the unprincipled alliance of Gorgeous George Galloway, the Socialist Workers Party and the Muslim Association of Britain). I’m definitely not going for any of the fringe parties, nor for the Tories, so it is down to Labour or the Lib Dems. I usually have no time for the Lib Dems, but I’m tempted this time. I’m tempted because Blair has clearly reached his sell-by date, and I think that’s largely independent of how history will judge him. Time for a swift and painless transition to Gordon Brown as party leader, and a bad Euro result may do the trick.

“Eve Garrard has responded”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/06/amnesty_revisit.html to “my post”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001962.html suggesting that she had misunderstood some recent statements by Amnesty International. I should like to note, for the record, that my post didn’t amount to an endorsement of the claim that I took Amnesty to be making, namely, that the current attack on principles of human rights is the worst for the last fifty years. Nevertheless, I have some bones to pick with Eve’s latest. The scope of the claim that Eve attributes to Amnesty varies somewhat through her piece. Sometimes Eve seems to be suggesting that Amnesty is restricting blame to America or to the liberal democracies. There may indeed by statements by Amnesty officials with this character, but the “most relevant report”:http://web.amnesty.org/report2004/hragenda-1-eng does refer explicitly to “governments around the world” and explicitly mentions a number of countries not best described as “liberal democracies” (Russia, China, Yemen, to name but three). Additionally, Eve singles out the Patriot Act as being at the centre of any charge that human rights principles are being undermined. No doubt it forms part of any such case, but I’d have thought that such matters as the legal limbo of Guantanamo, the export of a detainee for torture by Syria, and the recent legal advice on the admissibility of torture and the (non) applicability of the Geneva conventions, make up a significant part of the picture. Finally — and I’m picking nits now — Eve writes that “the idea that the force of an argument should be materially altered by an (allegedly) misplaced comma is … delightful and charming.” It may be, but my complaint focused not on the _force_ of the argument but on its _meaning_ , and it is pretty commonplace that commas can and do alter the meaning of sentences: “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1592400876/junius-20 .

The debate going on between “Eugene Volokh and others”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_06_07.shtml#1086708760 is worth checking out (as “Henry”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001987.html notes), though some of the background assumptions are pretty odd, to my way of thinking. [1] But sticking to the central issue of positive and negative rights, the discussing sent me scurrying to look at Allen Buchanan’s seminal paper “Justice and Charity”:http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0014-1704%28198704%2997%3A3%3C558%3AJAC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-A (accessible if you’ve got JSTOR, otherwise, tough). In a small section of the paper, dealing with positive and negative rights, Buchanan points out that — as in this debate — those seeking to argue that all rights are negative attempt to show (or at least claim) that any positive rights will lead to “unacceptably frequent and severe disruptions of individuals’ activities as rational planners or to intrusions that are intuitively unjust.” But, as Buchanan argues, that’s a pretty implausible move to make.

[click to continue…]

bq. Well, the first thing I want to say is.”Mandate my ass!”

The demise of Ronald Reagan made me dust off my copy of the magnificent Gil Scott-Heron’s B-Movie/R-Ron (double-A-side-single). I’ve not managed to find even the lyrics to Re-Ron anywhere on the web, but B-movie is “here”:http://olrajtovics.atw.hu/nujazz.html (right sidebar) and you can download the music too (with what legality I can’t say).

Eszter’s post has put me in mind of the excellent Financial Times preview of the latin oration on the (hypothetical) occasion of Bill Clinton assuming the Chancellorship of Oxford University:

bq. Sed Eheu! Magnum disastrum suscepit sua maxima culpa. Per noctem, Novembre MCMLXXXXV Alia Occidentalis Domus Albus laborante, sibi pizza donata est a Monica Lewinsky, puella pulchrissima, sensuosa californicante, fellatrix superiore.

bq. ‘Non coitus est cum hac femina,’ dixit. Sed, per laborem longus et penetrante Kennethi Starri, procurator independentus, et senatoribus Republicanis agitates, testimonia inculpata; togam maculatam, cigarrus grandus, revelata sunt. Domus Representatis imperator Clinton defenestrare tentavit. Senatus, 50-50 divisa est, absolvit.

The “full text is here”:http://www.memefirst.com/article.php?story=20030109203721830 .

Check out the “speech”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1230169,00.html made by art critic Robert Hughes at Burlington House last night, and note the following judgment:

bq. I don’t want to disparage dealers, collectors or museum directors, by the way. But I don’t think there is any doubt that the present commercialisation of the art world, at its top end, is a cultural obscenity. When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

I wonder what they’ll make of that over at “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ ?

Eve Garrard, who figured prominently in our comments last week on my posts discussing Amnesty International (“here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001924.html and “here”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001935.html ) has written “an impassioned criticism”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2004/06/the_biggest_att.html of AI over at Normblog. You should read what she says, although I happen to disagree with her claim — which I regard as obviously misguided — that the universal applicability of a principle entails that all who violate it are equally blameworthy for so doing (penultimate paragraph). The most serious criticism to be made of Garrard’s post, though, is that it seriously misrepresents what Amnesty said.

[click to continue…]

Apart from going to the Rivals, the bank holiday weekend was something of an Almodovar fest for me. I watched “All About My Mother”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0185125/ on Friday and “Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095675/ on Sunday, capping it all with a visit to “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ at the cinema last night. “Bad Education”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/ really is a terrific film, and the main device of a film-within-a-film (and a script-within-a-script) works well. I won’t post any spoilers, but I will say that it contains one great cinematic moment and that Hollywood would deal with the sexual abuse of boys by priests rather differently. Highly recommended.

On Saturday night we went to a performance of Sheridan’s “The Rivals”:http://www.bibliomania.com/0/6/284/2000/frameset.html at Bristol’s “Old Vic”:http://www.bristol-old-vic.co.uk/ , which has some claim to being the oldest working theatre in Britain (a claim that is carefully qualified to exlude some rivals, though). A very enjoyable evening, complete with a reminder that anxieties about the corrupting effects of new media (internet, the telephone etc) had been fully awakened by the 18th century. Libraries were identified as the cause of moral decline in this exchange between Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute:

bq. Mrs. Mal. There’s a little intricate hussy for you!

bq. Sir Anth. It is not to be wondered at, ma’am,—all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Nay, nay, Sir Anthony, you are an absolute misanthropy.

bq. Sir Anth. In my way hither, Mrs. Malaprop, I observed your niece’s maid coming forth from a circulating library!—She had a book in each hand—they were half-bound volumes, with marble covers!—From that moment I guessed how full of duty I should see her mistress!

bq. Mrs. Mal. Those are vile places, indeed!

bq. Sir Anth. Madam, a circulating library in a town is as an evergreen tree of diabolical knowledge! It blossoms through the year!—And depend on it, Mrs. Malaprop, that they who are so fond of handling the leaves, will long for the fruit at last.

I just read “a particularly egregious column from Jonah Goldberg”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,482-1126901,00.html in the London Times. The Times is only freely available to people within the UK, so I thought I’d surf over to the National Review Online to see if the content was also posted there. I didn’t find the Times piece, but I did happen upon “Goldberg’s take on the Instapundit-Yglesias spat”:http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/04_05_23_corner-archive.asp#032783 which concludes:

bq. Yglesias would improve his arguments if he stopped his recent habit of increasingly asserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with.

Back to the Times, where Goldberg begins thusly a column aimed at critics of the administration’s Iraq policies in general and Anthony Zinni in particular:

bq. HERE we go again. It is time to blame the Jews. That seems to be this month’s explanation for the Iraq war. Obviously, this is hardly a new idea on either side of the Atlantic, particularly for readers of, say, The Guardian or Le Monde. But in America, the emphasis on the theory has reached almost French proportions

“[A]sserting bad motives on anyone he disagrees with” ?

My post the other day “about Amnesty International”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001924.html generated some comments, as I expected. It also led to “Jacob Levy”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_21.shtml#1085602703 over at the Volokh Conspiracy getting excited over the following statement by AI:

bq. AI is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. It does not support or oppose any government or political system, nor does it support or oppose the views of the victims whose rights it seeks to protect. It is concerned solely with the impartial protection of human rights.

Now I happen to think that’s a reasonable thing for an organization like Amnesty to say. Libertarian Cain and Socialist Abel may disagree on a lot of things. Cain believes that socialized medicine is the first step on the road to serfdom and Abel believes that the capitalist system inevitably leads to exploitation and oppression. No matter. They can work together to protest against torture, extrajudical killing and so on — which they agree are _bad_ things. An organization that insisted the everyone sign up to an analysis of underlying causes would be sectarian and ineffective. But because the smart thing for an organization like Amnesty to do is to stay out of the business of root causes, that doesn’t mean it is committed to the positive view that “Jacob now attributes”:http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2004_05_28.shtml#1085771781 to it in a further post. To whit:

bq. I emphasized the organization’s institutional stance that no system of government is preferable to any other, that human rights abuses just kind of happen rather than being matters of official policy in some cases and not in others. This requires a pose of believing in equivalence among liberal democracies, theocracies, military dictatorships, and so on.

No way is such “equivalence” entailed by the Amnesty statement of aims that Jacob quoted and it is lazy of him to suggest that it is.

(I should add that Jacob does have a point about the emphasis of some of Amnesty’s up-front press releases, but it is absurd to suggest as Frida Ghetis does in the “TNR piece”:http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=ghitis052804 that Jacob approvingly links to that Amnesty “has decided to stop doing its job” — since it demonstrably continues to produce the many detailed country-by-country resports that are its staple.)

This may well be an idea that has already occurred to most of you, but I hadn’t heard it before. Ingredients: a laptop with a DVD-drive, a data projector of the sort widely used for PowerPoint presentations, a large flat white wall. Yes with just these three items (and connecting cables) you can project your favourite movie in a rather more stylish manner than on a wide-screen TV.

Congratulations to Chris Brooke, whose funny, informative, enlightening (and splendid) “Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/blogger.html is now three years old. In my experience the third birthday party is the one where hordes of children turn up, are abandoned by their parents for several hours, grind jelly and crisps into the carpet and play at sticking their heads through the cat-flap. So I’m imagining the Stoical attitude Chris is displaying to such mayhem at Magdalen Towers even now.

Via “Lance Knobel”:http://www.davosnewbies.com/2004/05/24 I see that Jim Moore has started a blog to encourage more coverage of the unfolding tragedy in the Sudan, “The Passion of the Present”:http://passionofthepresent.org/ .