Recently, Christopher Hitchens wrote a typically deeply-principled piece in which he accused “most… Democratic activists” of rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan. I would be deeply ashamed anyone supposedly on my side cheering for death and injury to Americans and civilians. Unfortunately, Mr. Hitchens doesn’t help me identify these traitors. He neglects to identify a single Democrat by name, or point to a single incriminating quote. I guess Slate isn’t giving him enough space, or something.

It’s much easier to identify Republicans who have, quite literally, voted for torture. They’re the Republicans in the House Judiciary committee. On party-line votes, they have defeated Democratic attempts to strip out provisions that would allow the Secretary of Homeland Security to deport anyone suspected of terrorism to a country where they could expect to be tortured. This power would not be subject to judicial review. (Katherine at Obsidian Wings has much, much more about specific cases of extraordinary rendition.)

Many of these Representatives are in safe seats, but not all of them. Indiana Rep. John Hostettler is identified by OurCongress.org as especially vulnerable.

I would be pleased if Rep. Hostettler was forced to answer some questions about his votes for torture. I suspect that the best way of making this happen is by contacting the newspapers in his district. Letters to the editor normally have to be accompanied by the name, address and phone number of the writer. They have to be short, and they have to be polite.

The Indianapolis Star has a special Letter to the editor page.

The Evansville Courier can be reached at letters@evansville.net.

The The Times-Mail can be reached at mikel@tmnews.com.

Supporters and detractors of the war in Iraq can agree that the world was a better place after we shut down Saddam’s torture chambers. If we follow up by procuring a time-share option in the torture chambers of Syria, Egypt, etc., history will not be kind to us.

UPDATE: Liddy asks why don’t I include a link to Hostettler’s opponent, Jon Jennings. Good question.

“The Royal Institute of Philosophy lecture series for 2004–5”:http://www.royalinstitutephilosophy.org/lecture_series2005.htm has just been announced and includes several people whose work we’ve discussed on CT (Jonathan Wolff, Mike Otsuka, G.A.Cohen and John Kekes, to name but four).

Jon Snow’s autobiography is being “excerpted in the Guardian”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/extracts/story/0,6761,1319059,00.html . The would-be future leader of Ewekip puts in an appearance:

bq. Meanwhile, we found our cause: anti-apartheid. Liverpool was effectively Tate & Lyle’s British capital. The university had sizeable investments, and a goodly portion found its way to investments in South Africa, where Tate was still big. “Disinvest from South Africa” became our clarion cry. One of the most active staff members was Robert Kilroy-Silk, a junior lecturer in the politics department. In those days, Kilroy was a rabid revolutionary.

A little later on ….

bq. Three days later, 10 of us, mostly elected officers of the students’ union, were charged by the authorities with bringing the university into disrepute. Of Kilroy-Silk, so voluble at the start, there was no sign.

Following up John Quiggin’s follow-up to my first post on Silenced and Left Behind-style tribulit generally, a couple quick links and thoughts.

[click to continue…]

“Atrios”:http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/10/cancel-it.html linked to “this discussion”:http://www.xoverboard.com/blogarchive/week_2004_10_03.html#000967 of the rather odd claim that in 164 different TV shows, what we’re seeing is not what is really happening in the fiction, but what happens in the mind of a small character from _St. Elsewhere_ called Tommy Westphall.

The argument for this claim, what I’ll call the Westphall Hypothesis, is based around a rather impressive bit of research about “crossovers in TV-land”:http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html. (The site seems to be based in Victoria, so I have some natural fondness for it.) The reasoning is as follows. The last episode of _St. Elsewhere_ revealed that the entire storyline of that show hadn’t really (i.e. really in the fiction) happened but had all been a dream of Tommy Westphall. So by extension any story involving a character from St. Elsewhere is really (in the fiction) part of Tommy’s dream. And any story involving a character from one of those shows is also part of Tommy’s dream, etc. So all 164 shows that are connected to _St. Elsewhere_ in virtue of character sharing are part of Tommy’s dream.

It’s a nice little idea, but there are half a dozen things wrong with it.

[click to continue…]

There are always comments on The Daily Show that I want to blog, but then never get around to doing so. I did want to make sure to mention this one though, from last Wednesday (Sept 29), since it’s blog related. Jon Stewart was talking to Ed Helms about the next day’s presidential debates. Helms read out the notes he would be using to report on the debates, that is, he had already written them up a day before the debates.

Stewart: “What if any actual news happens?”
Helms: “That’s what bloggers are for.”

A propos TDS, America (The Book) is absolutely hilarious! I highly recommend it. I didn’t realize it was written in the form of a textbook. It’s got lots of little inserts, quotes on the sidebar and illustrations like most American textbooks good for those with attention problems. Not that you’ll have any such problems while reading this book (unless you’re trying to multitask and do something else at the same time in which case the other activity will get none of your attention). I don’t know if reading anything has ever made me laugh out loud as much as reading this book has.

“Tom Friedman returns”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/opinion/03friedman.html?oref=login in his new guise as Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief Sassanian Senmurv’s Sub-Deaconry Baldachin Polisher in the Noble, Ancient and Hermetic Order of the Shrill:

bq. Sorry, I’ve been away writing a book. I’m back, so let’s get right down to business: We’re in trouble in Iraq. I don’t know what is salvageable there anymore. … This war has been hugely mismanaged by this administration, in the face of clear advice to the contrary at every stage, and as a result the range of decent outcomes in Iraq has been narrowed and the tools we have to bring even those about are more limited than ever. … For all of President Bush’s vaunted talk about being consistent and resolute, the fact is he never established U.S. authority in Iraq. Never. This has been the source of all our troubles. We have never controlled all the borders, we have never even consistently controlled the road from Baghdad airport into town, because we never had enough troops to do it. … Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology. More troops or radically lower taxes? Lower taxes. Fire an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army or not fire him so as not to anger the Christian right? Don’t fire him. Apologize to the U.N. for not finding the W.M.D., and then make the case for why our allies should still join us in Iraq to establish a decent government there? Don’t apologize – for anything – because Karl Rove says the “base” won’t like it. Impose a “Patriot Tax” of 50 cents a gallon on gasoline to help pay for the war, shrink the deficit and reduce the amount of oil we consume so we send less money to Saudi Arabia? Never. Just tell Americans to go on guzzling. Fire the secretary of defense for the abuses at Abu Ghraib, to show the world how seriously we take this outrage – or do nothing? Do nothing. Firing Mr. Rumsfeld might upset conservatives. Listen to the C.I.A.? Only when it can confirm your ideology. When it disagrees – impugn it or ignore it.

Whew! Did ole “Airmiles”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001614.html finally run into “Daniel”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001153.html in a 1st Class Transit Lounge somewhere? Perhaps Tom is realizing that, thanks to the Bush Administration, he may get the “twenty year occupation”:http://bodyandsoul.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_bodyandsoul_archive.html#88706640 he told _Oprah_ viewers to gear up for last year.

Chris Brooke has “an entertaining discussion of this year’s IgNobel prize for Medicine”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368/weblog/2004_10_01_archive.html#109670769406562944 (“Effects of Country Music on Suicide”). A perusal of “all the winners over the years”:http://www.improb.com/ig/ig-pastwinners.html reveals some really good stuff. It turns out that the 1999 prize for physics was shared between Len Fisher — a former student of mine — who calculated the optimal way to dunk a biscuit and Professor Jean-Marc Vanden-Broeck of the University of East Anglia who worked out how to make a teapot spout that doesn’t drip. I know I’m risking the ire of at least two of my CT colleagues here, but I can’t help having the thought that Vanden-Broeck’s researches potentially represent a greater contribution to human happiness than those of the majority of winners of the real Nobel prize for economics.

While I was thinking about the role of blogs, I came across an observation (which I can’t locate again), that many Internet users may read blogs from time to time but don’t distinguish them from other kinds of websites. This was certainly true for me – it was only after I started blogging that I realised that kausfiles and Brad DeLong’s Semi Daily Journal, which I had visited quite a few times, were blogs and (at least in Brad’s case) part of a much larger blogosphere.

The experience of reading these sites is different for me as a result. I wonder if others have had similar experiences? And I’d be interested to hear about the relationship, if any, between the way in which people find their way around the Internet and the way that they use and interpret the sites they visit. For example, does a site reached through a portal appear different from the same site found through Google? I imagine Eszter will have something to say about this.

[click to continue…]

An old Buffalo Daughter album, “New Rock”, has recently conquered my iPod. Quirkier-than-thou Japanese post-rock something or other. Shonen Knife able to play their instruments meets Sonic Youth, produced by Brian Eno. For the youth of today. You think it’s pastiche, then listen again and it’s not. I must get their new album, “Pshychic”. Says Cornelius: “What I feel from Buffalo Daughter’s music is; although it’s connected to all music, it’s not like any music at all. It’s white that is almost transparent. A very graceful sound. I wish I can make music like that.”

If that reminds you of the scene in which Bill Murray is being told how to drink his whiskey, if you liked Lost in Translation – I certainly did – you will want to watch the video for “Cyclic” on the band’s site; also, the streaming audio for “303 Live” is good.

You can download a free track and listen to a couple more here. Long live The Emperor Norton.

A few noteworthy items as I catch up with other blogs.

If anyone has a copy of “There’s No Land Like Poland” from _Not the Nine O’Clock News_ in convenient MP3 format, this would be a good time to send it to me.

And why should we care? I’ll leave this question for later and take a look at some numbers

There have been quite a few attempts to measure the growth of blogging. As this site devoted to the topic notes, Technorati passed its 4 millionth blog a week ago. Both Blogger and Livejournal claim over 1.5 million users, and a broadly similar estimate can be obtained if we take this Pew Study from 2003 and make the reasonable assumption that numbers are doubling annually.

But these are almost certainly overestimates.

[click to continue…]

Katherine has a significant post on the potential legalization of outsourcing torture. Opponents of the provision include the American Bar Association, the 9/11 Commission, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch. This isn’t over.

The office of Edward Markey has sent a letter to President Bush on the provisions of the bill in question. UPDATE: The whole letter is below the fold. Here it is in .pdf form.

[click to continue…]