Does law professor Glenn Reynolds need me to explain why this is a bad idea?
UPDATE: He’s responded to my email in a responsible way. Good show.
Steve at No More Mister Nice Blog is correct- this really is astounding:
It’s McCain vs. Hastert on meaning of sacrifice
A 2-month-old House-Senate standoff over the 2005 budget burst into public acrimony Wednesday, when House Speaker Dennis Hastert questioned Sen. John McCain’s credentials as a Republican and suggested that the decorated Vietnam War veteran didn’t understand the meaning of sacrifice. …
On Tuesday, McCain gave a speech excoriating both political parties for refusing to sacrifice their tax cutting and spending agendas in a time of war. At the Capitol on Wednesday, Hastert shot back: “If you want to see sacrifice, John McCain ought to visit our young men and women at Walter Reed (Army Medical Center) and Bethesda (Naval Hospital). There’s the sacrifice in this country.” …
First: Hastert isn’t making sense. McCain is not asking for cuts in the military budget. He’s asking for legislators to put their other legislative wishes, specifically tax cuts and new spending, on hold in response to the deficit. Hastert seems to think that the federal government has no obligation to balance revenues and expenditures, as long as he can point to the existence of wounded soldiers.
If Hastert believes what he’s saying, he should quit his post and go write for the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He certainly has no business in my government.
Second: I’m not the first, and I won’t be the last, to read this and say, “McCain spent five and a half years in a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp. Where the hell does Hastert get off lecturing him on sacrifice?”
Third: Why are the grown-ups in the Republican party the ones who get spanked?
UPDATE: Digby has a little more on the man being lectured on “sacrifice”.
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In today’s Financial Times William Shawcross and Emma Bonino have “a worthwhile piece”:http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1084907689070&p=1012571727085 on the murders, rapes and village-burnings being committed in Darfur by the Sudanese government.
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Like many others, I’ve been re-reading George R.R. Martin’s ‘Ice and Fire’ series while waiting for the long-delayed next book, ‘A Feast for Crows’. Henry was in Paris last weekend and we three (he, me and our youngest sister Eleanor, aka Nelly) spent several dinners discussing our theories of how the next three books will pan out.
My favourite aspect of this series is the many hints Martin drops about his characters’ side-plots and back stories but that he never bothers to confirm. This makes me feel like a very clever reader (at least about the ones I’ve figured out). For example, we can infer that Jeyne Westerling, Robb Stark’s frisky young bride, is being fed contraceptives by family members during her doomed marriage. And the Knight of Flowers, beautiful Loras Tyrell, is in love with and loved by Renly Baratheon, a pretender to the Iron Throne. So we all had a grand old time running through the evidence for these and other revelations.
Then Nelly’s theory of how the next three books will go blew us away. It’s all there already in the first three, but for some reason I’m the only one who thinks old George has given us so much to chew on, he can relax and let his readers write the rest of the books ourselves.
Over to Nelly:
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I’ve just finished reading the “Haaretz coverage of yesterday’s incident in Gaza”:http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/429687.html , when the Israeli army fired tank shells into a demonstration. Nor is this an unprecedented event, as some of the commentary elsewhere in Haaretz recalling the Qana massacre reminds us. It is a common trope in the “blogosphere” to write of symptomatic silences, to accuse people of indifference or lack of balance for failing to mention some event or incident. I’ve read endless outrage in the blogosphere condemning the BBC or whoever for putting the work “terrorist” in inverted commas. Stupid comments by Jenny Tonge or whoever excusing suicide bombers generate thousands of words of commentary. (And lest there be any doubt, I have always and will always condemn actions such as suicide bombing which target civilians.) I’ve looked at a lot of blogs this morning — the usual suspects, the leftie warbloggers, the boy-wonder journalists, the distinguished lawyers, economists and political scientists, and so on. Of events in Rafa, not a mention.
[Update: not total silence. “Jonathan Edelstein”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/025206.html , as so often, is worth reading on this.]
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What happens if you think the “eggs”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3724497.stm are overdone?
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I don’t really want to make this look like a Hitchens pile-on, but one cannot allow things like this to pass without comment. Via Roger Ailes, we have Christopher Hitchens making the following claim:
I think my quarrel with the media would be different from yours. I think what isn‘t conveyed enough is the sheer evil and ruthlessness and indeed brilliant organization of the enemy. The media cliche about the war is that it‘s like Vietnam. The Vietnamese were a very civilized foe and if they had had weapons of mass destruction, for example, wouldn‘t have used them and didn‘t target civilians, did use women as fighters and organizers, were not torturers and mass murderers and so forth.
Shall we say that this is quite radically at odds with most mainstream histories of Vietnam? Hitchens may here being confusing the North Vietnames Army and the Communist Party of Viet Nam with some other force which fought a purely heroic war of liberation in a gentlemanly manner and had no links to totalitarianism. Perhaps he was thinking of the Hobbits, or somebody. It makes you wonder why several hundred thousand boat people decided to take their chances on the open seas rather than live under such a “civilised” regime.
Meanwhile, if it’s comparisons with Vietnam you’re after, this historic document (Col. Robert Heinl’s Armed Forces Journal article on the collapse of morale) is pretty good on the long-term consequences of being stuck with no hope of exit in a war nobody really wants to fight. It is profoundly to be hoped that things won’t be allowed to get this bad again; it took years to rebuild the US Army as an organisation.
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“John complains”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001872.html that the version of the two-envelope paradox I give is not theologically accurate. I was trying to come up with a more theologically accurate one, but I couldn’t really. Still, the following is intended to be a little closer to theological reality.
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Via Juan at Philosophy617 (who doesn’t think much of the proffered solutions, and probably won’t like this one) I came back to this version of the two-envelope problem put forward by Brian, a bit before I joined CT.
In this case, once you observe that Brian’s angel is giving you faulty theology, it’s easy to show that you should reject his[1] mathematics, and his offer. At the end of the problem, the angel says “It’s purgatory,” says the angel, “take all the time you want.” But the whole point of Purgatory is that it’s finite – you purge off your sins one at a time until they’re all paid off. Since we now have a finite problem, the solution is straightforward.
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Christopher Hitchens has just put up a piece in Slate. It’s a response to Sy Hersh’s most recent New Yorker story about the connection between Abu Gharib and Rumsfeld’s policies. Here’s Simpler Christopher Hitchens:
What Went Wrong: The flaw in Seymour Hersh’s theory.
I, Christopher Hitchens, present Sy Hersh’s story as such: Rumsfeld was frustrated at the legal obstacles that (for example) prevented combat forces from firing at a convoy that they believed contained the Taliban leader Mullah Muhammed Omar. Rumsfeld loosened the rules. The loosening of the rules led to the torture of Iraqi prisoners.
I, CH, believe that this is an incoherent story. There is no necessary link between overruling the combat restrictions that I have highlighted and prison abuse. Furthermore, regardless of the decisions of Rumsfeld, there would still have been bad apples in the military.
Shouldn’t opponents of the war have some explaining to do? Now they say that the Bush Administration should have killed the leaders of al-Qaeda. I believe that, had the Bush administration taken the steps necessary to take out the leaders of al-Qaeda during major combat operations in Afghanistan, they would have opposed them. Therefore, they are hypocrites.
The struggle against terrorism will be long and difficult. Rumsfeld should treat the soldiers who abused the Iraqi prisoners as traitors and enemies.
P.S. I’d like everyone to look at the bomb with sarin in it, and the uncovery of a mustard gas weapon in Iraq.
If anyone thinks I’ve misrepresented Hitch, please pitch in in the comments. Because if I understand him correctly, this is a truly shameless piece of misdirection.
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In the wake of the “insta-criticism”:http://www.instapundit.com/archives/015583.php of the film “The Day After Tomorrow”:http://www.thedayaftertomorrow.com/ because it is a silly big-budget action movie and not a policy briefing paid for by the coal industry, CT will be providing further movie criticism along these lines. Reel in shock at _The Fast and the Furious_ for its inaccurate picture of driving conditions in Los Angeles! Be outraged at _The Pricess Bride_ for its whitewashing of the reality of aristocratic forms of government! Fume at _Godzilla_ for ignoring basic facts about radiation and the typical size of lizards! And get ticked off at almost every movie ever that suggests that you eventually get the girl. Or that girls even look like that in the first place.
*Update*: Re-rading this post in a more non-jetlagged state than when I wrote it, I think I was a bit unfair to Glenn Reynolds. I still think carrying on a debate about global warming through the medium of the people who brought you _Godzilla_ isn’t a good idea, but let that be a general principle rather than a criticism of Instapundit.
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If I were to criticise James Wolfensohn as a World Bank President, then I’d say that if he has a failing, it’s probably that he errs on the side of being a worthless globetrotter far more adept at schmoozing politicians than getting his hands dirty with policy issues, blaming his staff for failures while taking personal credit for successes and that his nine years at the WB have been associated with a general slump in morale that would make Field-Marshall Haig look like Anthony Robbins. Apart from that, he’s pretty much sucked.
So when I saw his name in the story linked above, I thought to myself “I wonder if this might possibly be a plausible-sounding think tank idea which pushes a lot of currently popular political hot-buttons but which is regarded by anyone who knows a bit about the subject area with abject terror?”. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you the concept of “Rights-Based Lending”.
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Nottingham today, and I eventually found wireless access in the lobby of a rather better hotel than the one I’m staying in. Just time to note that, in the light of last weekend’s Eurovision song contest, my “network analysis of voting”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001852.html is now both confirmed and redundant.[1] The introduction of the Eastern European bloc of countries has had striking structural and cultural effects. Structurally, political voting for neighbors is now blatantly obvious love fest and openly commented on by the returning officers for each country. When Russia its _douze points_ the Russian announcer said highest marks went “to our great friends, Ukraine.” “We used to be so close,” Terry Wogan commented on the BBC. Culturally, the “Euro Heritage” type song also seems to be eclipsed and the contest has returned to its roots as a festival of tat and pap, thanks mainly to the fashion and musical tastes of the breakaway republics and former Yugoslavian countries. From sub-Britney to proto-Xena to quasi-Miami Vice, there’s clearly no sleaze like Balkan sleaze.
fn1. That was real data, by the way. I abused it but I didn’t make it up.
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Today, I will be attending a conference workshop in New York on Measuring Search Effectiveness: The User Perspective. I will be presenting some findings about What Makes an Expert Searcher? Evidence from User Studies. (That paper is not ready for distribution, but I will take this opportunity to link again:) to the paper that presents the coding scheme I used to analyze most of the data.) The workshop is being held in conjunction with WWW2004, the Thirteenth International World Wide Web Conference.
I am reminded of my attendance at The 4th International World Wide Web Conference in Boston in 1995. I was a senior in college writing a thesis on the unequal international spread of the Internet. I went to this conference with the hopes of learning what research was being done about the social implications of the Internet. There were very few sessions on the program that were about any aspects other than technical. After one of the few sessions where panelists discussed some philosophical questions related to the Internet, I walked up to someone to ask whether they thought the government was doing anything about the Web. His response: “Yes, I think they have a Web page now.” This wasn’t exactly what I was getting at. I had hoped to see some sessions discussing policy implications. But this was still the era when many people thought the medium was somehow going to evolve in a vacuum, in isolation from existing social institutions.
Looking at this year’s program, it is clear that technical questions are still the overwhelming topic of this particular conference so perhaps it was a mistake to look for other types of content at WWW4. But this is easy to say today when the conference scene is littered with meetings discussing all aspects of IT. Back in 1995, there weren’t too many meetings you could go to where people would care to discuss any aspects of the Web.
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Brian Leiter has a “nice response”:http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/001241.html#001241 to an article in the _Village Voice_ on “the job market in the humanities”:http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0417/kamenetz.php. I mostly agree with Brian’s points, though I have one or two nits to pick.
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