The Irrationalist

2005-03-01T13:11:00.000-08:00

SCORE!

After posting this, I emailed it to The Corner at National Review Online. Today? This.

But no love from K-Lo, or anyone else. Blogus.

-DBrown

2005-02-28T15:05:00.000-08:00

What the Hell?

Don't know how long this will be around. But it's hard to believe.

Here's Ayman al-Zawahiri:

And here's the caption (minus links):

Picture dated 08 November 2001 shows Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri at his hideout at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.

Dissident? Dissident? You mean like Lech Walesa? Like Alexander Solzhenitsyn?

-DBrown

2005-01-25T13:00:00.000-08:00

I Know It's Shallow

But Yuschenko earns bonus points for having the hottest Prime Minister in the world!

Yowza!

-D. Brown

2005-01-25T11:30:00.000-08:00

Multinational Coalition Update

Ukraine, it seems, is preparing to leave Iraq. CBS News (Consider the Bloody Source) notes that

Ukraine has 1,650 troops in Iraq, the fourth-largest contingent in the U.S.-led military operation. Outgoing President Leonid Kuchma has ordered them withdrawn by the end of June and Yushchenko has said he will stand by that.

The rationale of newly/finally-elected Viktor Yuschenko is that their mission is complete (will there be a banner?) and that "Politicians, diplomats and businessmen must replace them."

I'd say this isn't anything to laugh at. The political (as opposed to actual) consequences of a "New European" ally leaving Iraq, especially as it could be played in the MSM, will make it more difficult for those nations still participating in Iraq to remain. Losing the troop strength is not much of an issue, but the symbolism is more significant. Just as the Spanish withdrawl following the Madrid train bombings and the election of Jose Luis Rodriguez Mr. Bean Zapatero was perceived both in the US and the Arab world as weak-kneed western capitulation to terrorist demands, so will Ukraine's or any other nation's departure signify a weakening of Western will. This despite the fact that no one will notice they are gone.

I only have one comment to make about this. Since, as everyone knows, Yuschenko is in office because of the behind-the-scenes influence of US-trained agitators, or whatever, you'd think he'd owe us. You'd think, in other words, he would have been sufficiently bribed and coerced, not to mention bought and extorted. Here's what I'm guessing: Yuschenko announces withdrawl in Oct 2004 but nothing actually happens until mid-2005 at the earliest. Thus he gets the domestic regional political gain from announcing the withdrawl, but makes nice with the US by delaying it until the end of the year.

-D. Brown

2004-12-23T15:31:00.000-08:00

Living off the fat of the land Paul Zimmerman, Sport Illustrated, 12/23/2004

The subject is fat guys in the NFL, particularly fat defensive linemen.
...
Tony Siragusa was a serious, technically correct, run-stopping 296-pounder when the Colts signed him as a free agent in 1990. He had something to prove. I remember covering an Indianapolis practice in his second or third year and he approached me in the locker room and asked, "Can I talk to you for a minute?"

So we went into the weight room and a minute stretched into 40, and we went through almost all the keynote interior defensive linemen in the league -- which one was a dedicated run-stopper, who worked hardest, who was merely a sack artist who didn't bother with the run. It troubled him that this area of the game was so neglected, that people didn't really understand who was working at his trade and who wasn't. He wanted to be known as a guy who worked it.

Fast forward to January, 2001, Super Bowl week in Tampa, Wednesday media session. The Baltimore Ravens' Siragusa, his 350 pounds occupying what looks like half the interview table, is holding court. They are packed around him two deep. He is a personality, in quotes, king of the one-liners. Someone asks him if this is the best defense ever.

"Well, who was better?" he says.

"Steel Curtain Steelers," I say.

"What are you, from Pittsburgh?"

"No, from Jersey, same as you."

They switched the topic and afterward Siragusa came over to me and said, quite annoyed, "What are you trying to screw up my act for?"

"You don't remember me, do you?" I said.

"No, should I?"

"Not really. Just asking."

The article really nails Tony Siragusa to the wall. The transformation from young hungry rookie to Fat New Jersey Tony apparently didn't take too long.

The article is really worth reading, however, to get a sense of how big these guys are getting.

Posted by DOC

2004-12-20T09:25:00.000-08:00

Betterware

Firefox Plugin List (not exhaustive)

If you're not using Firefox, you're missing out.

Posted by DOC

2004-12-20T09:18:00.000-08:00

But he's just a hippie, so *his* rights don't matter...

Grateful Dead's former lyricist finds tough fight against searches By Mary Anne Ostrom, Sun, Dec. 19, 2004 Contra Costa Times

San Mateo County Deputy District Attorney Aaron Fitzgerald argued that Barlow "was on a fishing expedition" in his attempt to open up the government's policies and procedures. Two government attorneys representing the federal agency sat directly behind Fitzgerald, arguing several times that witnesses could not answer defense questions because information such as how X-ray equipment is used and how workers are trained could "make it easier for terrorists." The judge sided with the prosecution at nearly every turn.

Sure, Barlow was on a fishing expedition, in an attempt to uncover some of the lunacy that surrounds the joke that is airport security. I've been to LAX twice quite recently, and as far as I can tell the only thing that screeners are taught to do properly is drool. Somewhere, this generation's Oscar Wilde is busy skewering this nonsense.

Posted by DOC

2004-12-18T15:38:00.000-08:00

Great Rant About Blogging Generally and Moveable Type in Particular

Why your Movable Type blog must die By James A C Joyce

My favorite bit:

You are fucking stupid
[...]
Congratulations, you dumb bint. You've just equated the useless babblings of millions of ostentatious retards around the world to a valuable free source of information available to all. Crapflooding is nothing like ripping up most of the books in a library. It's more likely scribbling on several thousands of pieces of paper and then stuffing them all into the "Comments and Suggestions" box hung up on the wall. This will hardly interfere at all with the experience of other library (blog) users. So shut the fuck up before you make a fool of yourself again by making nonsensical comparisons.

Via slashdot

Posted by DOC

2004-12-18T11:20:00.000-08:00

Skidmore has been a magnet for trouble By SCOTT CANON and RICK MONTGOMERY The Kansas City Star (Reg. Req., but excerpts follow)

SKIDMORE, Mo. –– How, wonder the people still left in this small town getting smaller, could such horrible things happen in a place they treasure for its friendly rural charms?

First came the notorious “Skidmore bully,” Ken Rex McElroy, whose death made national headlines. He had so terrorized the town that when somebody gunned him down in broad daylight in 1981, nobody would admit to seeing a thing.

Then on Oct. 16, 2000, pretty Wendy Gillenwater was stomped to death by her boyfriend. Locals take comfort in knowing the killer is serving life in prison.

The next year, a 20-year-old resident vanished. Many think he was murdered.

And now the police cars and media crews are back. Somebody on Thursday killed 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, butchering her body to pull out the little girl due next month to be Stinnett's firstborn.

“Why do they all come to Skidmore to do this?” decadelong resident Pauline Dragoo asked on Friday, her 91st birthday. “I'm going to move out of this town.

When I lived in Kansas City in the 80's and 90's, the Ken McElroy incident was widely discussed, especially in light of the book In Broad Daylight by Harry MacLean. The consensus at that time was that Skidmore's residents were essentially complicit in a massive conspiracy of silence about the murder of McElroy.

Some of these small midwestern towns are truly miserable places. Skidmore appears to be no exception. Reading the opening quote about what a great place it is to live feels akin to reading a quote from someone about how the guy next door who just went postal was really quiet, and always kept to himself. It's never "all he could talk a bout was killing Buckwheat."

Seriously, though, is there a citizen in American that won't tell a reporter how great it is where he lives?

Posted by DOC

2004-12-15T15:44:00.000-08:00

More Tolerance From The Left

Hatred is a powerful motivator, and these Christian soldiers will march onward, fighting tooth and nail for the theoretical hand in marriage, to protect marriage. "You'll get this bouquet when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers." Although the Republican party doesn't openly endorse prejudice, if it results in more votes, then no one is complaining. It really is genius, harnessing hatred in order to further your own political party. We wish that democrats would have thought of it first, but even if they had, the plan to introduce prejudice as an enlistment strategy doesn't work with the ethical ideals of the party. Compassion really does block the way to power.

What is deeply distressing is the incredible numbers of people who are vehemently opposed to equality, and the need for them to deny equal rights to others simply because they cannot bear the thought of equality. It isn't like anyone who is against marriage equality would be directly affected by the existence of it. Not unless they were part of the wedding industry, and then they could reserve the right to refuse service anyway. More likely, they would welcome the extra revenue. Gay marriage would create a huge boon, and it is doubtful anyone would turn away cold hard cash. Greed remarkably has no bias. This is evidenced in the way that Republicans will pander to this creepy Christ crowd and allow the asinine, the atrociously unfit and the morally repugnant to swell their ranks because it means more for them, and more is where it is at if you are a Republican.

I'd advise her to go back to being obscure and unfunny. Sheesh.

Posted by DOC

Via Celluloid Wisdom

2004-12-14T16:04:00.000-08:00

But how essential were "values" for voters?

Are Newspaper Readers Going Republican, Too?
Editor & Publisher, 12.14.2004

But the interesting final paragraph says

Another Gallup poll also released today showed that, contrary to many press reports, “values” ranked well behind the war in Iraq, terrorism and the economy as a prime concern of Americans.

Well, did they change their minds or their priorities?

Posted by DOC

2004-12-14T15:23:00.000-08:00

Test Your French Defeat Knowledge

Posted by DOC

2004-12-14T14:24:00.000-08:00

I know all about reporters by Howard Owens

Please, just don't call them "professionals."

Posted by DOC

2004-12-14T13:30:00.000-08:00

The Roots of the Word "Fan"

c.1525, "insane person," from L. fanaticus "mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god," originally, "pertaining to a temple," from fanum "temple," related to festus "festive" (see feast). Current sense of "extremely zealous," especially in religion, is first attested 1647. The noun is from 1650, originally in religious sense, of Nonconformists.

Posted by DOC

2004-12-14T13:21:00.000-08:00

Social Issues Shock Dems by John Leo

Democrats tend to overlook or discount social issues. At a dinner party in New York a month ago, a dread moment arrived: Someone asked me to tell the whole table why I was going to vote for President Bush, which is deeply eccentric behavior in these parts. My fellow diners listened with the same polite detachment they would have shown if I were explaining that my hobby is torturing iguanas. I said the Democrats had lost me years ago on the social issues, not just because of the stances themselves but because of the coercion, intolerance, and contempt for dissenters in the party and for ordinary Americans who live in the middle of the country and thus fail to have East Coast or West Coast opinions. I said the last straw came in 1992 when the Clintonites wouldn't allow Gov. Robert Casey of Pennsylvania, a strong liberal on nearly every issue but abortion, to speak at their convention. To rub it in, hard-line feminists managed to invite a Republican speaker who was a pro-abortion opponent of Casey's.

Doors were slamming in the Democratic Party. Almost all dissent from elite opinion on social issues gradually became positioned as a human-rights violation of some kind. (On the cable shows last Wednesday, backers of traditional marriage were denounced several times as gay-bashers.) I told my dinner companions the Republican Party is a weak vessel, with lots of movers and shakers who seem to care only about greed, but now, on the broad array of social issues, it is the only game in town.

This is a -- dare I say it -- reasonaly nuanced article. Most serious Republicans don't strike me as broadly tolerant people, but most serious Democrats often strike me as even less tolerant.

Posted by DOC

2004-12-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

Coerced, Obviously

Japan has re-enlisted in the Coalition of the Bribed and Coerced. I admit it's a little disconcerting to this anglophone that the Japanese defense minister's name is "Ohno."

-D. Brown

2004-12-09T14:23:00.000-08:00

Cold Turkey

Yes, I've cut myself off from reading The Nation. It's an experiment. My time is finite, and I had been spending far too much of it at the same website. So what am I doing with my time? Well, I've apparently become a biotechnology blogger. Not my intention.

But this Slate article by Wm. Saletan helped fill in some of the details of the Ponnuru piece I linked earlier. In fact, having read it, I'm less inclined to agree with Ponnuru. The scary graf:

It sounds perfect, until you look up at the projection screen. Hurlbut has modeled his recipe on "aberrant products of fertilization" and teratomas, which, he explains, are "germ cell tumors that generate all three primary embryonic germ layers as well as more advanced cells and tissues, including partial limb and organ primordia." Limb and organ primordia? Yep, that's what's on the screen: a ball of tissue, grown inside some poor creature, full of bits and pieces of what would have been a body. Another slide shows an X-ray image of somebody's back. To the left of the spine, you can see a cluster of white spots that look like teeth. And that's exactly what they are, all dressed up and no place to chomp. You wanted disorganized development? You got it.

Gilbert Meilaender, linked in this space yesterday, also worries about the consequences of the technology, mainly as the potential top of a slippery slope. Like I said, I'm predisposed to agree with Ponnuru, so we'll see what he writes tomorrow.

-D. Brown

2004-12-09T10:57:00.000-08:00

Quid pro Quo

Ramesh Ponnuru agreed with me the other day, and I thought I'd return the favor. This article at TechCentralStation (hat tip to K-Lo) discusses some possibilities in embryonic stem cell research that those of a pro-life persuasion may find more palatable than the deliberate creation of embryonic human beings with the intention of destroying them.

It's interesting that Ponnuru shares my distaste for American fertility practices. I haven't met many people who do. Then again, all of the Catholics I know are thoroughly (and somewhat proudly) lapsed. Anyhow, the article promises another installment tomorrow. I'll be watching for it.

-D. Brown

2004-12-08T14:35:00.000-08:00

"The Vice of Compassion"

Given the tendency of bioethicists to hold the corporations that employ them to a very flexible, if not low, standard of ethics, it's good to know that the author of this essay sits on the President's Bioethics Council.

It's a long essay. Here's one of the strong points:

No one can be against compassion, of course, and no one should be against it when it is properly understood. But the debased currency of compassion in our public discourse today is by no means the real virtue itself. The meaning of compassion has been isolated entirely from any larger moral framework which might give it direction and set limits to what can be done in its name.

Glenn Reynolds, take note.

DOC will be glad to know that his favorite author is invoked.

-D. Brown

2004-12-08T11:44:00.000-08:00

John Kerry Could Tell Us

Were they bribed or coerced?

The guy is smiling. Must have been the bribe.

-D. Brown

2004-12-07T16:12:00.000-08:00

The Good News

You'll be relieved to read that, according to its about page:

The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect, or body. It will, on the contrary, make an earnest effort to bring to the discussion of political and social questions a really critical spirit, and to wage war upon the vices of violence, exaggeration, and misrepresentation by which so much of the political writing of the day is marred.

Whew! So it won't be long until The Nation, in its unremitting war against partisanship, exaggeration, and misrepresentation, conquers such articles this one, which was published three weeks ago. May I quote it at length? Thank you.

. . . [T]he strict-father family model assumes that evil and danger will always lurk in the world, that life is difficult, that there will always be winners and losers and that children are born bad--they want to do what feels good, not what's right--and have to be made good. A strict father is needed to protect and support the family and to teach his kids right from wrong. That can be done in only one way: punishment painful enough that, to avoid it, children will learn the internal discipline necessary to be moral. That discipline can also make them prosperous if they seek their self-interest and no one interferes. Mommy isn't strong enough to protect the family and is too soft-hearted to discipline the children. That's why fathers are necessary.

Apply this, via metaphor, to the nation: We need a strong President who knows right from wrong to defend the nation. Social programs are immoral because they give people things they haven't earned and so make them undisciplined--both dependent and less able to function morally. The prosperous people are the good people. Those who are not prosperous deserve their poverty. Taxes take away the rightful rewards of the prosperous. Wrongdoers should be punished severely. Government should get out of the way of disciplined (hence good) people seeking their self-interest. The President is to be obeyed; since he knows right from wrong, his authority is legitimate and not to be questioned. In foreign policy, he is also the absolute moral authority and so needs no advice from lesser countries.

The so-called "moral issues" are affronts to strict-father morality. Strict-father marriage cannot be gay; it must be between a man and a woman. For a wife to seek an abortion on her own or a daughter to need one is an affront to strict-father control over the behavior of the women in his family. They are not the main moral issues in themselves; rather they are symbolic of the entire strict-father identity as applied to all spheres of life. That's why they are so powerful for conservatives.

The battle is joined, and soon the exaggeration, misrepresentation, and partisanship represented by this recently published article will be excised from The Nation's pages forever.

Of course, the promise to eliminate the stuff was made in 1865. And Katrina vanden Heuvel isn't too hot on Wars against Abstract Concepts (see below).

-D. Brown

2004-12-07T15:29:00.000-08:00

vanden Heuvel: Uncanny, Unhinged

I've been after The Nation since I started blogging. Probably 80-90% of my entries have been related to something from either The Nation or the International Herald Tribune. That probably won't change.

Here, for instance, is Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel's latest entry in her blog (I decided against the sarcastic quotation marks), "The Editor's Cut." She is the editor of this periodical. This is her first paragraph:

Music for America (MfA) is Example A of why the future is for the young and MfA-type organizations who are inspired now more than ever to continue to effect positive change. Twenty-one million Americans under the age of 30 cast ballots, 4.6 million of them were new voters. This was the highest youth turnout since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972, and its an important example of what went right in the campaign.

Now, in a sidebar we are warned to "expect no major manifestos or sweeping pronouncements." Would it be too much to expect a coherent paragraph? One with a lead sentence that scanned?

She compounds her difficulty in the second paragraph by beginning:

If only 18, 19 and 20 year olds had been permitted to vote in this election, Kerry would have carried Ohio, Florida and Missouri, defeating Bush by more than 200 electoral votes.

Read that sentence as many times as you need to. I'll wait.

Should she continue writing thus, vanden Heuvel may someday wake to find that "The Editor's Cut" has ceased to be a noun phrase and has become a short declarative sentence.

-D. Brown

2004-12-07T12:44:00.000-08:00

Two Views of Politics, and an Application

Otto von Bismark famously described politics as "the art of the possible." This epigram admits of two, and possibly more, interpretations. The sense in which Bismarck probably meant it is that politics is essentially realistic rather than idealistic, dealing in the choice of possible actions (or refraining from action) in a specific situation. The other possible interpretation that I see is its opposite: that politics is tasked with realizing - and making - possibilities.

A recent editorial by Thomas Friedman (via IHT), taking the latter view, suggests a bold vision for the second Bush administration:

If President George W. Bush is looking for a legacy, I have just the one for him - a national science project that would be our generation's moon shot: a crash science initiative for alternative energy and conservation to make America energy-independent in 10 years. Imagine if every American kid, in every school, were galvanized around such a vision.

Energy independence, he argues, would have far-reaching geopolitical effect beneficial to American interests. Specifically, the development of non-fossil-fuel (and presumably non-nuclear, since this this is an alternative energy source that he doesn't consider) energy options would expand the American economy and, by ending the blank check of oil reserves now held by nations in need of reform:

You give me an America that is energy-independent, and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran. Yes, deprive these regimes of the huge oil windfalls on which they depend and you will force them to reform by having to tap their people instead of oil wells. These regimes won't change when we tell them they should. They will change only when they tell themselves they must.

* * *

If Bush made energy independence his moon shot, he would dry up revenue for terrorism; force Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia to take the path of reform - which they will never do with $45-a-barrel oil - strengthen the dollar; and improve his own standing in Europe, by doing something huge to reduce global warming. He would also create a magnet to inspire young people to contribute to the war on terrorism and America's future by becoming scientists, engineers and mathematicians.

Now, I agree that American energy policy should include a commitment to the development on non-fossil fuel energy sources, in addition to more efficient use of existing non-renewable resources. I think we should be open to cleaner-burning coal power, to a cautious resumption of nuclear power, and to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve. There does need to be a national push for the development of renewable and non-polluting energy sources, in which federal planning and funding would have a necessary role. Energy independence for the United States will strengthen its position in the global economy, and will reduce the capital available to terror groups.

Friedman's forecast, however, is too sunny by half. Infatuated, perhaps, with the "possible," he seems to overlook the law of unintended consequences. "You give me an America that is energy-independent, and I will give you sharply reduced oil revenues for the worst governments in the world. I will give you political reform from Moscow to Riyadh to Tehran," he writes. I'm afraid that if I gave Friedman what he asks, I'd get in return not reform but instability. This instability would possibly lead to needed reforms in these oil-producing states, but nothing is guaranteed.

The destabilization of these regimes, despotisms many of them, doesn't amount to an argument against the push that Friedman advocates. I'd view it as part of the case for energy independence, as does Friedman. But alongside an investment in science education, we'd need to prepare for this instability by educating diplomats, policymakers, and intelligence officers in the history and politics of the Middle East. This is something we're far from doing now, as Stanley Kurtz has been reporting for ages. Reform is possible in an unstable Middle East, but wouldn't it be better if the friends of democracy were prepared to help?

I can't say that Friedman is wrong, or even that I disagree with what he's written. I think, however, that he would have written better if, at the top of his page, he had quoted Galbraith's response to Bismarck:

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

-D. Brown

2004-12-02T16:11:00.000-08:00

Anticipation

I see that Ramesh Ponnuru agrees with my appraisal of Beinart's New Republic piece.

UPDATE: Jonah Goldberg also liked it. Both Ponnuru and Goldberg are realistic about the difficulty the Democrats will have becoming the party Beinart describes. And I have to agree with them.

-D. Brown

2004-12-02T13:38:00.000-08:00

vanden Heuvel: Uncanny

By way of contrast, Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel clears her lungs and offers this charming bit of sputum:

But while Ridge made us feel less secure at home, Donald Rumsfeld and his fellow Chicken Hawks actually did make us less secure abroad with a "fight them over there" strategy that has worked all too well. Two years, 150,000 soldiers, and tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives later, and we have yet to secure Baghdad's airport road. Each month the number of casualties rises. November was the worst of the entire war.

What was sold as an easy battle in our latest War On An Abstract Concept has become another dreaded "quagmire"--a black hole for American prestige, treasure and blood. This is tragedy replaying itself as farce. And we have the men who avoided service in Vietnam to thank.

If vanden Heuvel would prefer to call it the War on Militant Islam, we can accomodate her.

-D. Brown

2004-12-02T10:49:00.000-08:00

Beinart: Canny

Peter Beinart of The New Republic does some soul-searching about the future of American liberalism. I like Beinart and his magazine. Almost he persuadest me. Almost. He opens with a stark assessment of the left's response to the terrorist threat:

Today, three years after September 11 brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally reshaped" by the experience. On the right, a "historical re-education" has indeed occurred--replacing the isolationism of the Gingrich Congress with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might. But American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s--a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda--even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

He compares this to the left's response to the communist threat during the Cold War. (Yes, Katrina, there was a communist threat.) While he underplays the ignoble aspect of the American left's involvement with Soviet communism (which stretches from, say, 1917 to, oh, 1989) he correctly sets Schlesinger, Galbraith, and other anti-communist liberals as the model for their ideological descendants.

He deals harshly with the left's failure to distance itself from dimwits like Michael Moore and organizations like Moveon.org. Case in point:

What they do not recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore, terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?, he says it plainly: "There is no terrorist threat." And he wonders, "Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?"

Rejecting the stupid elements within your own camp is the only way for American libeerals to rejoin rational society. Or, in Beinart's words:

The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.

Do read the whole thing. Registration is required, but don't worry, even though registering will put you on a terrorist watchlist, Ashcroft and his thugs are really quite polite. They wipe off their boots on the mat before they stomp on a human face, forever.

-D. Brown

2004-12-01T11:03:00.000-08:00

I Hope You Can See This, Because I'm Doing It As Hard As I Can

Today's edition of The Editor's Cut, Katrina vanden Heuvel's occasional wheeze at The Nation, is typical. Apparently the editor of America's Best Communist Weekly didn't recognize the regrettable irony of this opening:

A Russian friend once said to me, "You Americans are an odd people. You love our liberals, but you don't like your own liberals." He added, "You should support your local liberals too."

If this makes sense to you, you are from the Moon. To be momentarily peremptory, if you can't distinguish between an American liberal and a Russian one, you have no business writing about either. Of course, one pities vanden Heuvel's Russian friend, since a lifetime spent under Soviet communism would tend to soften the brain. For vanden Heuvel, only contempt. Wordless, astonished contempt.

The next two paragraphs are rich:

My friend's words came to mind this past week as I watched the extraordinary street protests in Ukraine. Anyone who cares about citizens fighting corrupt regimes can't help but be moved by scenes of thousands of demonstrators, many of them students, standing for hours in Kiev's Independence Square in sub-zero temperatures--waving banners, chanting and protesting what they believe is a rigged election.

When the Bush Administration rushed to celebrate the protesters' courage and tenacity, I thought--what rank hypocrisy. These same officials have shown no respect for American pro-democracy protesters, and, if they have their way, they'll probably lock their political opponents out of central Washington when Inauguration Day rolls around.

Then the piece gets tedious. A bit about how Bush has stolen two elections. Questioning the authenticity of the protests because they have had American support. Read it for yourself. And then remind yourself that she has used the term "pro-democracy" to describe protestors whose core agenda enjoy so little support that they have to get 300 discrete causes together to have a 600-person protest. On one hand you have people who refuse to be defrauded in an election and on the other people who wish to impose an unpopular agenda on an unwilling majority, and will break every Starbucks window in the country if that's what it takes. And to Katrina vanden Heuvel they're all pro-democracy protestors. To paraphrase Bill Guarnere in Band of Brothers: We've got an editor with her head so far up her [obscenity] ass that lump in her throat is her [profanity] nose.

-D. Brown

2004-12-01T09:23:00.000-08:00

Let's Riff Again

Lileks writes:

Went to Sam’s Club, where the clerk made the fatal mistake of telling me I did not need to show my card to shop at the liquor annex. “Anyone can shop here,” she said. “Thank you!” I said, ecstatic at the thought that my membership would lapse and I would never again feel compelled to trawl the halls of the Sam’s Club itself, wondering if I should take advantage on these great deals – hey, Chicken Soup in 32-gallon drums. Stock up! No, I can just drop by every other week and stand in amazement: one liter of Maker’s Mark for twenty dollars.

Cheaper than ink. There’s something wrong here. Something very wrong.

Now, taking on the mighty Lileks (whose name I have always instinctively pronounced correctly) is far from my intention. Especially on life-is-good themes, Lileks reigns supreme. But there's something wrong here? Is there? From where I'm sitting (desk at work), pixels are free and passable bourbon is two cents a milliliter. Life is good.

Although it feels like biting down on aluminum foil to measure bourbon in milliliters. Alcohol, it seems, should come in traditional measurements. Wine I would except from this requirement, since France, home of the great wines, was invented in order that metric would always have a home. But beer comes in pints, and bourbon in ounces or, if you would have my love, fingers.

-D. Brown

2004-11-30T13:05:00.000-08:00

Is Turnabout Fair Play?

The Corner at National Review Online is always lively reading, but occasionally it yields a gem like this:

Read the explanation that follows. And here's my question: granted that 1. Horowitz is not a racist and (ad argumentum) that 2. The title of Franken's recent book ought to have been saved for his autobiography, is Horowitz's response justified? And, if justified, wise?

The answer to both is, I think, no.

Not justified because Mom happened to be telling the truth when she said that two wrongs don't make a right. Not wise because to use Franken's slanderous technique implies a parity between Franken and Horowitz that is not there and which works only to Horowitz's detriment. DH should take probably just go with his initial reaction and let it go. Or, if he must, superimpose "Lying Liar" over Franken's photo, which would have at least the advantage of being true.

-D. Brown

2004-11-24T16:43:00.000-08:00

Just Noticed

It's interesting that David won't drink Bushmill's, because it's "Protestant whisky," but will have a big band of orange at the top of the blog that he designed. Not that there's anything wrong with Jameson. Just an observation.

-DBrown

2004-11-24T16:20:00.000-08:00

The New, Improved Self-Satirizing Internet

The Internet is becoming an increasingly joyless place. The reason? The left has come completely unglued. And many have come unglued in such a way as to make satire impossible. Consider this:

Or this:

Or, lest I be accused of picking on people with unusual hair, this:

When those with whom one disagrees satirize themselves, deliberately or not, what is one to do? Thank God for Rainbow Six.

-DBrown

2004-11-18T18:16:00.000-08:00

People's Republic of Alquaedistan v. USA, Bitch!

To counterweight Doug's thougtful approach to the election, here's a stupid, gloating link.

Posted by DOC

2004-11-18T17:56:00.000-08:00

Casualty Information

Another good war information source: Iraq Coalition Casualty Count

I'd love to give to origin of this link but I can't remember and my browser history is no help. Attribution later if I can find it. Meanwhile, apologies to anyone offended.

DOC

2004-11-18T17:52:00.000-08:00

Three Frenchmen

Three Frenchmen killed fighting US in Iraq

I'd be curious to find out the number and origin of all non-Iraqis fighting against Coalition forces.

DOC

2004-11-18T11:08:00.000-08:00

Post-Election Question

There's been a lot of press about the CNN poll which found that the most important issue for 80% of Bush voters was "Moral Values." And while there may be a degree of significance to this finding, can I be alone in suspecting that for these respondents "moral values" may be just another way of saying "the issues that are most important to me?"

And if I'm right, does this poll prove anything other than that most Bush voters are moral realists?

- D. Brown

2004-11-04T08:58:00.000-08:00

A House Divided

Ramesh Ponnuru, one of the most intelligent people writing about politics today (and a friend of a friend, making me instantly almost-cool), has some common sense to contribute to the post-election theme of "a bitterly divided America":

Accountability requires choice, and choice implies the exclusion of some possibilities. It can therefore be "polarizing." Perhaps Bush could have governed in a way that left the country less polarized — although that is not as clear to me as it seems to be to others. But while gratuitous offense and incivility are always to be avoided, political harmony is not an important goal in its own right.

As somebody once said, read the whole thing.

-D. Brown

2004-10-15T01:00:00.000-07:00

2004-10-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

What I'm Reading Now, or, Yet More Bookblogging!

The Legacy of Greece, ed. M.I. Finley
Begin Here, Jacques Barzun
Aeschylus and Athens, George Thompson
A World Lit Only By Fire, William Manchester
On The Origins of War, Donald Kagan

Reports to follow.

Posted by DOC

2004-10-10T17:47:00.000-07:00

Parallel Lives Updated: Marcus Cato and Robert E. Lee
Like Leuctra and Adrianople, Thermopylae was the location of several famous battles, in 480, 279 and 191 BCE since it served as a vital, mountain pass along the eastern coast between Thessaly in the North and Athens. Plutarch in his chapter on Marcus Cato, also known as Cato the Elder, describes Cato’s efforts in 191 to find a mountain path and surprise the troops of the Syrian King Antiochus in the same way the Persian King Xerxes surprised the Spartan troops in 480 BCE:

“Now Antiochus, having occupied with his army the narrow passages about Thermopylae, and added palisades and walls to the natural fortifications of the place, sat down there, thinking he had done enough to divert the war; and the Romans, indeed, seemed wholly to despair of forcing the passage; but Cato, calling to mind the compass and circuit which the Persians had formerly made to come at this place, went forth in the night, taking along with him part of the army. Whilst they were climbing up, the guide, who was a prisoner, missed the way, and wandering up and down by impracticable and precipitous paths, filled the soldiers with fear and despondency. Cato, perceiving the danger, commanded all the rest to halt, and stay where they were, whilst he himself, taking along with him one Lucius Manlius, a most expert man at climbing mountains, went forward with a great deal of labour and danger, in the dark night, and without the least moonshine, among the wild olive-trees and steep craggy rocks, there being nothing but precipices and darkness before their eyes, till they struck into a little pass which they thought might lead down into the enemy's camp. There they put up marks upon some conspicuous peaks which surmount the hill called Callidromon, and, returning again, they led the army along with them to the said marks, till they got into their little path again, and there once made a halt; but when they began to go further, the path deserted them at a precipice, where they were in another strait and fear; nor did they perceive that they were all this while near the enemy. And now the day began to give some light, when they seemed to hear a noise, and presently after to see the Greek trenches and the guard at the foot of the rock.”

Compare this to Douglas Southall Freeman’s account of Captain Robert E. Lee in August 1847 finding a path to a road that would outflank a strong position to the North at San Antonio and Churubusco held by the Mexican Army during the Mexican War. The path was through five to six miles of a lava field south of Mexico City known as the pedregal. He led a force of several hundred soldiers and engineers to widen a mule path through to the western side of the pedregal in order to attack a Mexican garrison at Valencia to the west and then move north and behind the Mexican army that blocked the road on the eastern side of the pedregal at Churubusco. After reaching the western edge, Lee had to go back to tell the commanding General Winfield Scott, whom Lee thought was three miles to the east at Zacatepec (not on the map), the status of the army’s position on the western side.

"It was near eight o'clock when Lee left San Geronimo with a few men and started down the hill toward the pedregal. He had been over that part of the route only once, and it was too densely dark for him to observe any of the landmarks. There was nothing to guide him but his singularly developed sense of direction, and an occasional glimpse of the hill of Zacatepec when the lightning flashed. Groping his was along, step by step, he reached the road and crossed it in safety....
”…Lee plunged into the pedregal. Around great blocks of lava he felt his way, and across crevasses he was forced to jump in the dark. When the lightning showed an abysm over which he could not spring, he had to skirt it, with every risk of losing his direction. There were fully three tortuous miles of this, in unrelieved night. At last, drenched and sore, Lee stumbled to Zacatepec only to find that Scott had returned to San Augustin.
“…Tired legs and bruised feet would have to carry him three miles through the pedregal…Three miles must have seemed thirty, and Lee’s strong body was close to exhaustion when finally he saw dim lights in the houses at San Augustin….
"Seven officers whom Scott had sent out in turn to carry messages to General Smith had all returned without reaching him.... Before the orders could be given two other callers were announced--General Twiggs and General Pillow. These division comanders had started from Zacatepec for San Geronimo during the evening, but had lost their way and had barely escaped falling into the hands of the enemy. "

Around 3 a.m. Lee then led reinforcements back across six miles to San Geronimo on the western edge of the pedregal where US forces were waiting to attack.

S. Schudy

2004-10-05T16:34:00.000-07:00

Gratitude

Thanks, David. We couldn't remember the greatest song in the world.

-D. Brown

2004-10-05T15:25:00.000-07:00

That may be, Doug, but THIS is greatest song in the world!

DOC

2004-10-05T14:18:00.000-07:00

10 Questions for Dick Cheney

John Nichols, author of Dick: The Man Who Is President, has "10 Questions for Dick Cheney. Since Cheney is probably too busy at the moment to read The Nation, I thought I'd do him a solid and make some attempt at answering them.

1.) When you appeared on NBC's "Meet the Press" on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, you announced that, "We will be greeted as liberators." In light of the fact that more than 1,000 young Americans have been killed, while more than 20,000 have been wounded, in the fighting in Iraq, do you think you might have been a bit too optimistic?

We were in many places greeted as liberators. Ask the Kurds. Ask Iraqi interim Prime Minister Allawi. Cheney was never so naive as to expect that we would be greeted universally as liberators. Terrorists (e.g. Abu Abbas) and committed Ba'athists who knew what the consequences of American success would be both for them, for Iraq, and for the region were never expected to greet us with anything but hostility and violence. That's why we went in with Marines instead of UN peacekeepers.

2.) Why were maps of Iraqi oil fields and pipelines included in the documents reviewed by the administration's energy task force, the National Energy Policy Development Group, which you headed during the first months of 2001? Did discussions about regime change in Iraq figure in the deliberations of the energy task force?

I'm going to have to leave this one for Cheney. I never followed this story closely. One should note that in this story about those maps it's also noted that "Maps of oil fields and pipelines in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and a list of energy development projects in those two countries are also included." I'm sure that Nichols doesn't think that's the Iraq maps were there for the same reasons. But I'll also bet that he wouldn't be happy if the answer were that Cheney brought in the pictures to give scale to the discussion of the oil reserves in ANWR.

3.) When the administration was asking in 2002 for Congressional approval of a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, you told the national convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars that Saddam Hussein had "resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons." You then claimed that, "Armed with an arsenal of these weapons of terror, and seated atop 10 percent of the world's oil reserves, Saddam Hussein could then be expected to seek domination of the entire Middle East, take control of the world's energy supplies, directly threaten American friends throughout the region, and subject the United States or any other nation to nuclear blackmail." Several months later, when you appeared on "Meet the Press" just prior to the invasion of Iraq, you said of Saddam Hussein, "We know he has reconstituted these (chemical weapons) programs. We know he's out trying once again to produce nuclear weapons, and we know that he has a long-standing relationship with various terrorist groups, including the al-Qaeda organization." As it turned out, you were wrong on virtually every count. How did you misread the signs so completely? And why was it that so many other world leaders, who looked at the same intelligence you had access to, were able to assess the situation so much more accurately?

There's evidence that each of these illegal programs was ongoing under Saddam's rule. It's not the dramatic evidence of stockpiled ordnance, but there is documentary evidence that Saddam either had or was developing programs for chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. Furthermore, there is a strong case to be made that he did in fact have such weapons. There is persuasive evidence that Saddam's illegal weapons are now in Syrian hands - read here, here, here, and here.

4.) Considering the fact that your predictions about the ease of the Iraq invasion and occupation turned out to be so dramatically off the mark, and the fact that you were in charge of the White House task force on terrorism that failed, despite repeated and explicit warnings, to anticipate the terrorist threats on the World Trade Center, what is it about your analytical skills that should lead Americans to believe your claims that America will be more vulnerable to attack if John Kerry and John Edwards are elected?

This seems to be an accusation of negligence on the part of the Bush administration - a failure to repond to clear, "actionable" evidence of an imminent terrorist attack on 9/11. Hard to build a case for it. Ask Michael Moore. Nichols here seems to be referring to Cheney's remark that "If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that'll be devastating from the standpoint of the United States, and we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mind-set that these terrorist attacks are criminal attacks and we're not really at war." The plain sense of this is that "the danger is [that] . . . we'll fall back into the pre-9/11 mindset." The "we'll get/be hit" clauses establish a possible timeline. But the danger Cheney here anticipates in a Kerry administration is not that of an attack. We live today with that danger. On the other hand, the probable Kerry policy of not pursuing a pre-emptive policy in the war on terror would clearly result in an easier operational environment for terror groups, and would inevitably increase the risk of another attack on the territorial US. On either interpretation of this sentence, Cheney is correct.

5.) Speaking of intelligence, were you or any members of your staff involved in any way in revealing the identity of Valerie Plame, a CIA operative who was working on weapons of mass destruction issues, after her husband, Ambassador Joe Wilson, angered the administration by revealing that the president made claims about Iraqi WMD programs that he and his aides had been told were unreliable?

Again, only Cheney can answer this one. But the answer is probably no. And speaking of Joe Wilson, has anybody told Nichols that the man is a proven liar?

6.) During your tenure as Secretary of Defense, you and your staff asked a subsidiary of Halliburton, Brown & Root Services, to study whether private firms could take over logistical support programs for U.S. military operations around the world. They came to the conclusion that this was a good idea, and you began what would turn into a massive privatization initiative that would eventually direct billions of U.S. tax dollars to Halliburton and its subsidiary. Barely two years after you finished your service as Secretary of Defense, you became the CEO of Halliburton. Yet, when you were asked about the money you received from Halliburton -- $44 million for five year's work -- you said, "I tell you that the government had absolutely nothing to do with it." How do you define the words "absolutely nothing"?

Likely answer: in the normal way. When Cheney was appointed as Secretary of Defense, the mandate was for restructuring and cost-cutting in the aftermath of the cold war. Privatization of services is one means of doing so. Nichols needs to do two things: 1) Ask a better question, and 2) find something better to ask a question about.

7.) No corporation has been more closely associated with the invasion of Iraq than Halliburton. The company, which you served as CEO before joining the administration, moved from No.19 on the U.S. Army's list of top contractors before the Iraq war began to No. 1 in 2003. Last year, alone, the company pocketed $4.2 billion in U.S. taxpayer dollars. You said when asked about Halliburton during a September 2003 appearance on "Meet the Press" that you had "severed all my ties with the company, gotten rid of all my financial interest." Yet, you continue to hold unexercised options for 233,000 shares of Halliburton stock, and since becoming vice president you have on an annual basis collected deferred compensation payments ranging from $162,392 to $205,298 from Halliburton. A recent review by the Congressional Research Service describes deferred salary and stock options of the sort that you hold as "among those benefits described by the Office of Government Ethics as 'retained ties' or 'linkages' to one's former employer." In the interest of ending the debate about whether Halliburton has received special treatment from the administration, would you be willing to immediately surrender any claims to those stock options and to future deferred compensation in order to make real your claim that you have "severed all my ties with the company."

This is about all there is to be said on the subject. Nichols seems to be coming a bit unhinged a propos of Halliburton.

8.) You have been particularly aggressive in attacking the qualifications of John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, to serve as commander-in-chief. Yet, you received five draft deferments during the 1960s, which allowed you to avoid serving in Vietnam. In 1989, when you were nominated to serve as Secretary of Defense, you were asked why you did not serve in Vietnam and you told the Senate that you "would have obviously been happy to serve had I been called." Yet, in an interview that same year, you told the Washington Post that, "I had other priorities in the sixties than military service." Which was it -- "proud to serve" or "other priorities"?

This question starts its tour of logical fallacies with a non sequitir and brings it home with a glaring false dilemma. The first sentence should be thrown out as irrelevant to the remainder. It would seem, by virtue of the fact that Cheney was given draft deferments five times, that the military agreed with Cheney's valuation of his "other priorities." Should there have been disagreement, the military would have denied him a deferment. In this case, we may assume until Nichols produces evidence to the contrary that Cheney would have been "proud to serve." Such evidence might take the form of borrowing someone else's medals (ribbons) to throw over the White House fence. Someone who did that could fairly be viewed as "ashamed to have served."

9.) Nelson Mandela says he worries about you serving in the vice presidency because, "He opposed the decision to release me from prison." As a member of Congress you did vote against a resolution expressing the sense of the House that then President Ronald Reagan should demand that South Africa's apartheid government grant the immediate and unconditional release of Mandela and other political prisoners. You have said you voted the way you did in the late 1980s because "the ANC was then viewed as a terrorist organization." Do you still believe that Mandela and others who fought for an end to apartheid were terrorists? If so, are you proud to have cast votes that helped to prolong Mandela's imprisonment and the apartheid system of racial segregation and discrimination?

Perhaps it was considered a terrorist organization because "The African National Congress (ANC), as documented by the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, carried out a number of crimes in its fight against apartheid that would accurately be described as terrorist. For example, while the currently ruling ANC targeted government installations, its MK guerrillas also planted bombs in bars, restaurants, and other public places to intimidate or punish supporters of the white government." (Read the rest here. And more here.)

10.) Mandela has said that, to his view, you are "the real president of the United States." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said of the first years of the Bush presidency that, "Cheney and a handful of others had become 'a Praetorian guard' that encircled the President." O'Neill has also argued that the White House operates the way it does "because this is the way that Dick likes it." Why do you think that so many people, including veterans of this administration, seem to think that it is you, rather than George W. Bush, who is running the country?

Now the wheels are off the cart. Completely. Mandela (reminder), O'Neill (signature achievement), and Nichols (axe to grind) rise to the standard of "so many people?" It's not the most subtle analysis of the situation, but it's certain that Cheney, rightly, is influential in the White House. But no matter who or how many agree with Nichols et al., it doesn't ultimately matter whether Cheney runs the White House from the passenger's seat. Only whether the American people want him in that seat for the next four years.

-D. Brown

2004-10-04T13:04:00.000-07:00

Other Halves

David, Disintegration is the best album ever!

-D. Brown

2004-09-29T11:48:00.000-07:00

HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES

I'm sure Doug will be intereted in Barbra Streisand's timely and informative take on how the current administration works, as well as her poignant thoughts on the CBS document debacle. An excerpt:

Never mind that CBS's story included substantive and uncontested evidence that Bush didn't show up for duty when he was supposed to, that he skipped a required physical that grounded him from flying, and that he mysteriously received an honorable discharge. Yes...the documents CBS presented could not be confirmed for their authenticity, but these details of Bush's military record have been out for public consumption for years. Why is the media not discussing the facts behind the story instead of just focusing on CBS?

Why indeed, Barbra? Why?

Meanwhile, I urge you to check out the Mecha-Streisand Home Page

DOC

2004-09-24T09:07:00.000-07:00

More on Mary Mapes

An interesting bit of information from Cut On The Bias (link via JunkYardBlog) about Ms. Mapes and some of her activities in relation to certain federal prison inmates. While the communication itself may or may not have been dangerous in and of itself, the act of circumventing the prison procedure tends to show a contempt for things like following the rules, be they of journalism or law. Of course, the phrase "journalistic rules" doesn't exactly flow off the tounge.

What's that you say, Lord Acton? Power what?

Meanwhile John Ellis has some recent advice for Mapes; to paraphrase: "CYA, Mary, you're being thrown to the wolves!"

Posted by DOC

2004-09-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

Book Blogging

Since Vin Pays D'OC started with the recently-read books blogging, I'd like to mention the affecting Gulag by the redoubtable Anne Applebaum. Sure, I'm the last guy to arrive at this particular party (she's already been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, etc), but it's recently (April) out in paperback, and it's an important one. Her website archives some highlights of her other writing. But put down whatever bit of trivia you're reading and pick up Gulag, if you haven't already.

-D. Brown

2004-09-22T17:40:00.000-07:00

Our Fearless Leader

As part of my "No Joke Left Behind" policy, let me be the first to say: "Welcome back, O'Connor."

-D. Brown

2004-09-22T16:34:00.000-07:00

Cat Stevens Deported . . . But For All The Wrong Reasons

Regrettably there's no part of the Patriot Act covering such maudlin '70s twaddle as "Peace Train."

DOC

2004-09-22T14:45:00.000-07:00

Why we need to kill terrorists (not for the faint of heart).

DOC

2004-09-21T13:10:00.000-07:00

More Wineblogging

Speaking of wine, here's a plug for Pretty Smith, a Paso Robles winery. They have what I consider to be some outre offerings, including a Cabernet Franc (usually used in blending) and a Zinfandel-based port.

DOC

2004-09-21T13:03:00.000-07:00

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa

I recently finished reading this book by E.B. Sledge, a marine who fought at the above battles and lived to tell about it in this somber but excellent book. Although the way America fights wars has certainly changed completely since the massed-infantry battles of WWII, this book is, I believe, a must-read in a time when we're sending troops abroad to fight.

DOC

2004-09-21T11:59:00.000-07:00

Finding Wine

Wine Searcher's your tool! Not that I ever find myself searching for that hard-to-find vintage -- I tend to buy wine from Trader Joe's -- but if you do, this is a neat tool.

DOC

2004-09-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

Once Again the World Bends to My Will

Regular readers (a fictive category) will recall that back in March I had a suggestion (scroll down to March 24):

Here's a cute idea (again via IHT) from a Japanese journo: let the whole world vote for who they think should be elected POTUS. That way, we can have a better idea of who will probably look out not for American interests, but for the interests of the world as a whole.

Well, apparently I have a lot of influence. In what must have been the most foregone conclusion since Rocky 3, Kerry beat Bush in a landslide in an international poll (IHT). So the choice is now clear: a majority of the people who think the US was behind the 9/11 attacks prefer John Kerry for President. Vote accordingly.

-D. Brown

2004-09-08T21:09:00.000-07:00

How stupid do you have to be to . . .

In making the case for something in which one believes deeply, it's possible to
overstate that case, to exaggerate, to be (ahem) inventive. It's also possible to lie. The more public one's case is, the less this is expected to happen. That is, when telling my boss why I'm late to work (power surge killed the alarm clock, again) I'm violating a public trust less than I am when I tell a court of law that there is no relationship with Monica Lewinsky. It is expected that the organizations which present these cases to the public will be scrupulous to ensure that they are not broadcasting fabrication or falsehood. Fact-checking.

So explain this from Reuters in an article on the soon-to-expire assault weapons ban:

She said 90 percent of spinal cord injuries in the United States are caused by gunshot wounds and noted that $1.8 billion a year is spent on spinal cord injuries.

This from Amy Sisley, a doctor and spokesman for Physicians for Social Responsibility. Forgive my skepticism. If those words had left my mouth, I'd immediately have made a screwy face and said aloud, "Really? More than car accidents?"

Of course there's always this from the Centers for Disease Control indicating that 1) "approximately 11,000 Americans sustain an SCI [spinal cord injury] each year," and that of these 2) "The leading cause of SCI varies by age. Motor vehicle crashes are the leading
cause among persons under age 65. Among persons age 65 and older, falls cause most SCIs," and that furthermore, 3) "SCIs cost the nation an estimated $9.7 billion each year."

Helpnetwork.Org has a related fact sheet (here, pdf only), according to which:

Avalable data indicate a dramatic increase in the proportion of SCI caused by acts of violence; from 14% of traumatic SCIs in the mid-1970s, to 20% in the early 1990s, to 30% of SCIs in 2001. Acts of violence have nearly doubles as a percentage of all causes of SCI and have overtaken falls as the second most common source of spinal cord injury, trailing only motor vehicle crashes. . . . Data entered into the National SCI Database since 1973 show that 17% of nonfatal injuries are gun-related, and about 90% of violence-related SCI are from gun injuries.

Apparently, Dr. Sisley got her figures confused. Doing some quick math, 90% of 30% is 27% of total spinal cord injuries. That's about 2,970 people a year injured by all types of firearms. One wonders what unimpressively small number would be the result of a gunshot wound from an assault weapon. I'd guess maybe 10% of the total: 297. Given a US population of nearly 300 millions, we're talking about protecting 0.0001% of the population from spinal cord injury. Relevance?

Points of policy aside, it's clear that the civic-minded Dr. Sisley is wrong coming (90% vs. 27%) and going ($1.8 b vs. $9.7 b). Of course, if someone at Reuters had spent ten minutes on Google, I wouldn't have been irritated enough to do this. Seems like that's becoming the refrain of the blog-o-sphere.

- D. Brown

2004-07-29T08:19:00.000-07:00

The Kiss Behind the Celebrity Press

There are several jokes going around about the press. One of them is: What distinguishes a political journalist from a celebrity journalist?

Answer: The actor's schedule.

As the media succumb increasingly to their celebrity myopia, a simple appeal should be made: Stop kissing up to celebrities who wish to comment on politics, who wish to participate in political coverage and who wish to be elected into political office.

This goes for reporters, producers, cameramen, photographers, editors and publishers. This goes for television and print, network and cable, newspaper, magazines and the Internet.

What's happened most recently? Actor Ben Affleck charmed the media buncombes at last month's Democratic Convention which led one Fox News' commentator to ask him, "Besides the tax issue, what's the biggest issue on your mind?"

In July, the name of Mike Ditka, former coach of the Chicago Bears, captured national news. For what? One would have thought Ditka had announced his candidacy. Instead he had only been approached about a run for the US Senate from Illinois which he later declined.

The same pattern appeared last week when CNN.com ran the same story for five days--unusual for any story--with the title "Joe Piscopo, New Jersey Governor?" Piscopo, a cast member of Saturday Night Live in the 1980s, has not even announced his gubernatorial candidacy for New Jersey. Neil Cavuto of Fox News picked up the story and said in his commentary, "Why do we always select our elected officials from the same petri dish? Like only senators or governors can run for president. I say, why not CEOs, or teachers and yes, comedians?"

The problem isn't that comedians or celebrities are running for office. The problem is how we in the media disproportionately cater to them over the CEO and the teacher.

Neither Mr. Cavuto nor Fox News nor CNN has yet to spotlight any CEO or any Grade School Teacher with Internet or Prime Time media attention.

Sadly, the news media has tried to justify their celebrity addiction with the excuse that people tend to listen to celebrities more. This excuse will not be found in any journalism 101 textbook. No news reporter or newsroom will ever favor the replacement of "Fit to Print" or "Fair and Balanced" with "Solely because the people want to see it."

No longer do the media hunt for the most qualified news sources with experience in political office or academic posts, in the military or business. Instead, after carefully siphoning the film aristocracy from the television bourgeois, they dress up for commentary those celebrities who have established a rich pedigree of political opinions or appearances.

This virus has spread so widely that even professional media critics have caught it. The former Brill's Content in the summer of 1998 ran a guest editorial critical of journalism. Who was the author? Actor George Clooney whose qualifications foundered around the fairly irrelevant fact that his father had once been a news anchor on a local news station.

Though the silver, paid in ratings, may help feed and keep the best and brightest journalists, the media unwittingly prop up, as by-product, the Hollywood thespocrats with political legitimacy. The music-rap artist Sean 'Puffy' Combs is gaining national coverage by publicly encouraging young people to vote. This coverage by itself is becoming the electorate's litmus test for political office--should Mr. Combs, like Arnold Schwarzenegger, choose to seek it.

Is this surprising? Having overcome the traditional firewall of the press, why shouldn't the public follow and accept celebrities as political touchstones too? In their defense, celebrities claim they too should be able to talk about politics like anyone else. They are right.

George Washington was described as a "celebrity" by the statesman Gouverneur Morris in 1785. The 18th century Shakespearean actor David Garrick was a distinguished member of Samuel Johnson's literary circle. And it's possible that somewhere at sometime in 1960, comedian Joey Bishop had some interesting observations about the islands Quemoy and Matsu.

But I don't recall Walter Cronkite chasing down Bishop on the 1960 Democratic convention floor to get his take on US policy towards China shouting, "Mr. Bishop, America wants to know."

It's not celebrities, but the press that is wrong for giving celebrities a platform. This is a trend that has not tapered. There is no good reason, there is no real excuse. For the media to prop themselves with excuses or dismiss the subject with the cynicism of a prom-queen giggle would undermine the same honesty and self-critique it demands from everyone else.

Should the hypnotic glitter fade away, the danger will be that journalists, again betraying standards of impartiality, will swing as wildly in penance. They will quietly and suddenly turn to set their teeth into the same celebrity absurdity they helped create.

After this celebrity farce has reached its Guernica-like nadir and journalists have washed their hands of the sin, they will then coyly ask the rest of us, "Did you do this?" to which we should reply,

"No. You did."

S. Schudy

2004-07-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

Contempt for Democracy II

What really irked me about the LA Times piece from two days ago was one sentence:

Vice President Dick Cheney gives speeches that are so barren of any effort to charm or persuade that the delivery alone seems to reflect contempt for democracy.

This in comparison to Edwards, who could, we are told, "win a talking contest against his GOP rival with one tongue tied behind his back." (Would this make Edwards double-tongued? And are the editors sure this is a good thing?) Leaving aside that this is trading on a crass stereotype of the yarn-spinning southerner and the tight-mouthed westerner (whether you think Cheney hails from Texas or Wyoming), this proposition offends me deeply.

Edwards's charm will be an asset to the Democratic ticket, no question. And Cheney's delivery is that of the lecturer rather than the huckster. But contempt for democracy? There is, the Times editors assume, an appropriate style for addressing the demos, and that tone is histrionic.

Granted, there is a long tradition of dramatic speechmaking in the executive, a tradition that gained effectiveness with the advent of sound recording. Granted, Cheney is not a part of this tradition. But it seems to me that Cheney's speaking values substance over style, and thus the intellect of the demos over the emotion. How much more respectful of democracy can you be?

-Doug Brown

2004-07-07T09:24:00.000-07:00

Contempt for Democracy

So John Edwards is Kerry's pick for Vice President, improving if nothing else the decibel level of the ticket. Comments about Edwards being the obvious choice are now bouncing around. Like this one from the LA Times (registration required) titled "The Obvious Choice."

The first thing that surprised me about this was the lack of surprise, real or feigned, in many quarters. It's as though Edwards hadn't been the third or fourth guy on most everybody's list - Kerry's included - since the "Veepstakes" (detestable word) heated up. But set that aside. Now that he's been chosen he is, and was, the obvious choice.

What does the editorial board of the Los Angeles Times think made Edwards the obvious choice? Four things:

1. He's an excellent speaker.
2. His positions are undefined.
3. He's ambitious/inexperienced.
4. He's a hottie.

I'm not kidding. It would seem that the majority of the LA Times editorial board are, as they used to say, simple.

Or not. Each of the four I-won't-put-it-in-quotes qualifications serves as a pretext for a swipe at Dick Cheney. Quotes from the editorial illustrate each major point. Check it out:

1. He's an excellent speaker.

Edwards could win a talking contest against his GOP rival with one tongue tied behind his back. Vice President Dick Cheney gives speeches that are so barren of any effort to charm or persuade that the delivery alone seems to reflect contempt for democracy.

2. His positions are undefined.

lack of deeply held beliefs can be useful in a political campaign, even for a sitting vice president, whose job traditionally is to support the president's policies and not to reason why. (In the current administration, of course, it works the other way.)

3. He's ambitious/inexperienced.

The right question to ask about experience is not, "How much?" It's, "What kind?" Republicans will be right to note that neither Kerry nor Edwards has ever run anything bigger than a small law firm or a Senate office staff. In recent elections, voters have shown a clear and probably wise preference for governors over members of Congress.

Republicans can brag that their ticket not only has a former governor and current president on the top but has as No. 2 the former chief executive of a company (Halliburton) that could actually teach the government a thing or two about creative accounting.

4. He's a looker.

One more thing. Edwards is handsome. The consensus on Kerry is that he is Lincoln-esque. The traditional grinning-candidates-at-the-podium shot from the Democratic convention will be a thing of beauty, compared with the Republican version, featuring a lumpish Cheney and President Bush trying hard to suppress his patented smirk. That shouldn't matter. But you know it does.

So the Cheney slurs that match Edwards's I-can't-help-but-put-it-in-quotes "qualifications" are:

1. He's an excellent speaker; Cheney is bo-ring.
2. His positions are undefined; Cheney's the head of the evil neocon conspiracy that runs the White House.
3. He's ambitious/inexperienced; Halliburton!
4. He's a hottie; Cheney's not a hottie.

Interesting to find on finishing this little side-by-side look that at least one thing is obvious: that the criteria employed by the Times editors might resemble those of their teenage daughters. If their teenage daughters are, as they used to say, simple.

-Doug Brown

2004-06-30T07:50:00.000-07:00

A Question for Michael Moore
Mr. Moore is known for his criticism of Corporate America, political parties and, most recently, the war in Iraq. I do not take issue with his television work or films, such as Fahrenheit 911 as Mr. Hitchens does, because I have not seen his work. However, I have seen Mr. Moore’s television interviews where his criticisms have seemed dogmatic, polemic and lop-sided. In the interest of balanced criticism, I think it would be appropriate for a journalist to put the following question to Mr. Moore:

“Mr. Moore, why did you not criticize, in your 2003 acceptance speech , the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences after the Academy nominated for its top honors a convicted, pedophile rapist who has refused to return to the United States to serve out his prison term for his guilty plea? Why haven’t you criticized the Academy in the year since and, more importantly, why haven’t you returned your Academy Award in protest?”

-S. Schudy

2004-06-23T11:17:00.000-07:00

Battle of the Professionally Cranky

via The Corner

Hitch rips Moore a new one in this piece at Slate. The moral of the story: those who live in glass houses shouldn't be lackwits.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Two Views

Two articles on the Iraq/al Qaeda connection. With the recent staff statement of the 9-11 Commission, commentators on either side of the issue are weighing in.

Here's the New York Times:

It's hard to imagine how the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks could have put it more clearly yesterday: there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11.

Here's The Nation:

The connection"--neoconservative shorthand for the purported link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda--is crumbling. Two days after Vice President Cheney asserted that Saddam "had long-established ties with Al Qaeda" and one day after George W. Bush echoed his second-in-command, the independent bipartisan 9/11 commission said that no such bond existed.

And here's the National Review:

The 9/11 Commission's staff has come down decidedly on the side of the naysayers about operational ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network. This development is already being met with unbridled joy by opponents of the Iraq war, who have been carping for days about recent statements by President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that reaffirmed the deposed Iraqi regime's promotion of terror.
The celebration is premature.

I tended toward the views expressed in the Times until fairly recently. Earlier NR pieces (see here) have made me think the case isn't closed. Nothing that's come out today has changed that.

posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-17T12:28:00.000-07:00

Partial Retraction

I'd like to spend some more time on something I wrote in haste the other day. On the subject of political speech in churches, I wrote:

While most of the political speech I've heard coming from the pulpit has been, to be generous, mediocre, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of silencing political speech in any forum.

This is hyperbolic, in the vein of "I may disagree with what you say, but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." Which, of course, really means, "I'm ignoring you."

There are times and places that are appropriate for political speech and others that are not. A standing question which has been answered in different ways over the course of American history is which kind of place a church is. As this book shows, political speech has not always been a stranger to American churches. Both the state and the church are, to some degree, ordered to the communal consideration of how we ought to live. This shared body of concern may obligate a church leader to speak out against political wrong.

That's what I was getting at.

posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-17T11:32:00.000-07:00

Seems Reasonable

A NY Times editorial (via IHT) that makes a modest proposal:

The World Bank, which provided $18.5 billion in aid in 2003, should withhold money from governments that are antidemocratic or that violate their people's human rights.

Why not?

In fact, that the World Bank would be indifferent in its lending requirements to the type of regime it lends to serves as further proof, if you needed any, of international institutions' flight from reason. Ain't moral equivalency a bitch?

posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-16T18:34:00.000-07:00

Acts of Self-Parody, UN edition

The sale of bulldozers by Caterpillar Inc. to the Israeli military could violate Palestinians' human rights, a U.N. human rights investigator has warned the U.S. heavy equipment maker.

Jean Ziegler, an expert on the right to food in the Geneva offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, wrote Caterpillar that Israel used the bulldozers to raze homes and destroy crops, preventing the Palestinians from obtaining adequate food supplies and aggravating their "already precarious living conditions."

[Pauses, collects self, clears throat, succumbs to fit of the giggles]

The fact that within the offices of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights (whose Job Title is Far Too Capitalized for Belief) there is work to be done by an expert on the right to food boggles, utterly boggles.

Read the whole thing, if you must.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

Responding to Responsive Chords

A catchy little post by Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel this week in her "Editor's Cut" blog proposes a method to sway "those four-in-ten Republicans who now say they would reconsider their support for Bush in November." That method? Pluck at their "responsive chords," of course.

Read the whole thing, if you want. It begs for fisking, but I lack the give-a-damn. Here's how this Nader-last-year-now-leaning-Bush voter responds to a few of her items:

Would you rather have a President:

Who can change his mind when his vision of reality turns out to be mistaken? Or one who dares not change for fear of appearing weak?

I dare anybody to use this line in a pro-Kerry commercial. Just go ahead and remind everybody that the "F" in "John F. Kerry" stands for "changes his mind every Few minutes."

Who asks a variety of wise men and women to advise him as well as God? Or one who thinks that it is enough that he hears and recognizes God's voice

About the only people who'd buy this claptrap are planning a write-in campaign for Michael Moore. But, by all means, alienate people (Demorats and Republicans alike) with your disdain for religious belief.

Who, when considering healthcare policy, gives first priority to the health of children and parents? Or one who gives first priority to the interests of the drug and insurance corporations?

This is the first one that might actually get some traction, and it's something Kerry certainly would have brought up, on account of the fact that every Democratic candidates since Thomas Jefferson has complained about the Republicans' callous disregard for [ahem] the children. Anybody who was going to respond to this chord already has.

Who can remember his mistakes, hence moves to remedy them? Or one who says he cannot remember any, hence cannot do any remedying?

Apparently, vanden Heuvel (lit. "of the chin") thinks that this obscure reference to an awkward press conference moment will really resonate with Bush supporters who are having second thoughts. And, just so we're clear, trying to have it both ways is not admitting your mistakes, it's being duplicitious.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-15T09:56:00.000-07:00

[Insert Pun Here]

The International Herald Tribune plays host today to a pair of interesting editorials. I value the website primarily for its usefulness as an opinion clearinghouse rather than as a news source. The essays on view today illustrate why.

Beginning with the seemingly ridiculous, witness this interesting editorial on "The Ethics of Face Transplants." Surprisingly, it's thoughtfully considered, except for a couple of silly paragraphs that indulge in the bioethicist's cliché of choice: concern over "designer bodies." But skip the penultimate paragraph and you'll have an excellent example of the genre.

Passing to the seemingly sublime, IHT hosts a New York Times editorial with the title "Mocking Honest Clergy." Of three paragraphs, two are devoted to the state of affairs in the legislative branch. It is not until the final graph that we learn what mocks the honest clergy (other than the New York Times, every chance it gets): a rider on a bit of legislation that would enact a three-strikes rule for "churches that venture too zealously into politics." I suspect that by "zealously" is meant "conservatively."

While most of the political speech I've heard coming from the pulpit has been, to be generous, mediocre, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of silencing political speech in any forum. There are moments when one's religious beliefs are relevant to political issues. Clergy should be free to express these views, even as part of a religious service. Their congregations will guide them as to how much of it they will tolerate.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-11T11:19:00.000-07:00

Killing it at The Nation

Have you seen the South Park episode "Scott Tenorman Must Die"? Drinking the tears of his outwitted enemy, Cartman says, "Oh, the tears of unfathomable sadness. Mmm, yummy!" I felt the same way when I found this little bit of silliness. In case you don't give The Nation hits on principle, here's the executive summary: it's a contest to decide which slogan will go on the button that they'll distribute at "this summer's political conventions." And while sloganeering is neither art nor science, but an excercise in self-ridicule, the slogans (submitted by readers) in this contest are unbelieveably bad. Again, in case you don't want to hit the website, here they are:

Exit Strategy: Vote!
Know Bush, No Peace--No Bush, Know Peace
Beat Him by More in 2004
Import Democracy
Kerry Us Back to Democracy
Security Begins with Peace

These, mind you, are the finalists.

UPDATE:
They're using Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), which has gotten some press in the last couple of years. Basically, you rank your preferences, and if your first choice is the least popular, it's eliminated from contention and your second choice becomes your vote. The process ends when a majority of votes is cast for a single selection. This I find appropriate for Kerry (semi-)supporters, as Kerry also switches his vote when what he votes for intially turns out to be unpopular.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-06-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

Kerry the Candidate

Eric Alterman, writing in The Nation, expresses his confidence that John Kerry could realize strong gains on George Bush:

. . . if Kerry could only admit to the entire country what he told me and a bunch of other reporters back in December in Al Franken's living room: Like so much of the country--and its elite media--he made a terrible mistake in trusting George W. Bush. He underestimated both the fanaticism and incompetence of the President and his advisers and their willingness to mislead the country into war. He thought George Tenet's CIA reports were on the level. He imagined Colin Powell was more than just window-dressing.

Two questions: 1) Considering his audience what else could he say? Something nuanced? 2) Does Alterman really this sort of talk would help Kerry? "Why did I vote in favor of the war in Iraq? Well, let me tell you what I told Eric Alterman while I was hanging out in Al Franken's living room . . ."

Yes, please. To paraphrase the National Review, please make this man your campaign manager.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-04-26T07:42:00.000-07:00

Brief History of "Blogging"

Geoff Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford University, has a fairly interesting commentary on the blog and its origins (in audio under "Commentaries"). This may be even more interesting to those of us who are fairly new at it.
-S. Schudy

2004-04-16T17:34:00.000-07:00

Abecedarian Poetry Assaults Ass, Beats Butt, Cracks cracks!

2004-04-15T10:06:00.000-07:00

Fox News: Bias Against Israel?

Putting aside the LA Times and "liberal bias" for the moment, let's take a look at Fox News and "conservative bias," or more importantly "What is conservative bias?"

On April 14, Foxnews.com posted a story "Bush Backs 'Historic' Gaza Pullout Plan" by Fox writer Peter Brownfield. About one-third of the way into the article, Mr. Brownfield writes the following about Israel's actions in the 1967 Six Day War and the Palestinian reaction to subsequent Jewish settlements: "Israel seized the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem in the 1967 war. Palestinians see settlements in these territories as an illegal encroachment on land they want for a future state, and refugees demand to return to the land they fled during the 1948-49 war." One might expect the "conservative bias" to be in support of Israel and its actions in 1967, in part because of so-called "conservative Christians" in the United States who provide a strong base for the "conservative movement" and support Israel.

Yet this article uses the hyperbolic verb "seized" to describe Israeli actions which one could argue demonizes Israel and lends support to the claims of the Palestinians in the following sentence that Jewish settlements following the 1967 War must therefore be "illegal." Nowhere in the article is the Israeli justification for the settlements or its invasion of Egypt, Syria and Jordan mentioned such as the false reports by the Soviet Union to Egypt that Israel was massing troops for another surprise invasion similar to that of 1956 or the artillery attacks by Jordan into Jerusalem prior to any Israeli action.

Does this article represent an unbalanced report by the reporter or does it represent a larger institutional bias against Israel by Fox News? At the very least, it may provide an example of the difficulty of determining "liberal" or "conservative" bias.

-S. Schudy

2004-04-14T12:20:00.000-07:00

LA Times, Bias, the Feature and the Column

Instead of concluding that news Features and Columns should be excluded from the debate on bias at the Los Angeles Times, should we ask if the Feature and the Column, not included on the Op-Ed page, can be used to examine whether the LA Times has an institutional bias on a particular issue when it claims to be impartial? If so, should the Times require balance in Features and Columns, or in the case of the examples below about homosexuality, have a Feature and a Column about a preacher, a lawyer, a rape victim opposed to homosexual civil rights that is sympathetic towards their points-of-view?

I pick this topic because it is the only one in the LA Times over the last couple weeks that I noticed was covered by several articles, a Feature and a Column, all of which can be referenced for the question about “liberal bias” or "conservative bias" at the LA Times.

By Feature, I mean a story that focuses on a person, persons or event and primarily focuses on their point- or points-of-view of a person or group. Opposing opinions can be included but are not required, and do not take the focus away from the main focus. By Column, I mean once again to reference those that are included in the news sections rather than the Op-Ed page which we earlier agreed to exclude from consideration.

An example of an article that I think falls under the definition of Feature can be found in Monday’s Los Angeles Times’ article “Gay Son's Cause Lives On in Fund at UC Riverside, A woman who had to 'grow up' after learning a secret helps other gay students,” by Staff Writer Sandra Murillo.

The article focuses on the noble efforts of a mother who lost her son to AIDS and now is helping financially another young man with AIDS to finish college. The article does not offer opposing viewpoints because in part it does not bring up contentious points associated with the debated over the homosexual civil rights movement. Nor are the three baseball players who are accused in the article of harassing the mother’s son in 1981 interviewed to get their side of the story. In short, the article centers around the viewpoint of a grieving and heroic mother. Does a simple Feature such as this which is sympathetic to or may create sympathy for one side of a political issue count as bias? If so, can bias on an institutional level be determined based on such Features?

Similarly, columnist Dana Parson in today’s column “Anti-Gay Quote Even Upsets Sheldon” focuses on comments made by Rev. Lou Sheldon who, as Parson’s describes him “has been upsetting gays since the early 1970s.”

If we are to focus on "Bias," let's consider the Feature and Column and begin with the questions: Can the Feature and Column be considered bias? Should certain topics be excluded from the Feature and Column? If not excluded, should there be a balance in the number of Features and Columns which represent two viewpoints on a particular topic whether gay rights, gun-control, abortion, the death penalty or the war in Iraq? Does this fall under the meaning of “bias”?

Three other news articles have appeared, the first on April 11 by Staff Writer Elizabeth Mehren “Acceptance of Gays Rises Among New Generation,” a headline that may appear to forecast bias towards the homosexual civil rights movement in the article by focusing on “acceptance” but which in fact balances the number of opinions on both sides of the debate on homosexuality.

Two other articles in an ongoing series by Staff Writer Kimi Yoshino focus on a battle in the Westminster School District outside of Los Angeles over the acceptance of a state mandate that allows school employees and students to define their own gender. The April 13 story is “School Gender Bias Fight Taken to the Brink” while the April 14 story is “Westminster Awaiting a High-Stakes Verdict.”

-S. Schudy

2004-04-09T11:08:00.000-07:00

Media Bias

First, Doug, thanks for The Middle East Media Research Institute link. At first glance, it looks to be an excellent link.

As for bias, we still don’t have a working definition of “liberal bias” nor can we accurately conclude if the LA Times is institutionally corrupted by it. For that matter, we still don’t know what “conservative bias” is or if a news organization like Fox News is corrupted by it.

However, in regards to the benefits of a news organization such as the Times rejecting its pretenses of impartiality in favor of its stated support for issues it defines as Liberal, it's probable that a reader or viewer might have an easier time seeing the bias of a news organization. The issue then wouldn't be whether a news organization failed to avoid bias, but whether they failed in producing stories that were unbiased because they reported reasonable, opposing opinions or analyses.

Working on the assumption that "unbiased" reporting is possible, even though we probably need a good example of it, one could still reasonably argue that the propensity of news organizations or media watch dog organizations that state their purpose as supporting a state, ethnicity, political party or political ideology is inevitably less likely to produce reporting that includes differing viewpoints as done by organizations like the Los Angeles Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Washington Post, or The Miami Herald.

To compare what may be bias or unbias, let's take an example from the first paragraphs in an article in today’s LA Times, “Pendleton’s Grief and Pride, The base's 17 Marines killed in Iraq since Sunday are saluted as heroes,” by Deborah Schoch, Jean-Paul Renaud and Monte Morin, Times Staff Writers, reads as follows--

"CAMP PENDLETON — Amid a valley of coastal green hills stands the austere cinderblock headquarters of one of this Marine base's most storied regiments, "The Magnificent Bastards."

"Normally on a Thursday evening, the sprawling barracks of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, or "2/4", would echo with the noise of Marines returning from the mess hall and lingering outside to chat or smoke or listen to music from the stereos by their bunks.

"On this Thursday, the loudest noises were the evening calls of birds and the distant sound of a helicopter over scrub-covered hills.

"As news spread of the 17 Camp Pendleton Marines killed since Sunday, the hardest hit were friends and relatives of 2nd Battalion Marines, to which a dozen of those men belonged. Since February, the battalion, which calls itself "Second to None," has been tasked with quelling one of the most restive towns in Iraq, a mission that has led to some of the heaviest combat since the war began."

If the stated purpose of the LA Times were “to support Liberal causes including the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq," the article might have reflected a more ominous and critical tone of those who died as in the opening paragraph from an article in The Nation this week--

"The first anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq has arrived. By now, we were told by the Bush Administration before the war, the flower-throwing celebrations of our troops' arrival would have long ended…. Instead, 549 American soldiers and uncounted thousands of Iraqis, military and civilian, have died; some $125 billion has been expended; no weapons of mass destruction have been found; the economy is a disaster; electricity and water are sometime things; America's former well-wishers, the Shiites, are impatient with the occupation; terrorist bombs are taking a heavy toll; and Iraq as a whole, far from being a model for anything, is a cautionary lesson in the folly of imperial rule in the twenty-first century. And yet all this is only part of the cost of the decision to invade and occupy Iraq."

Were the Times to strive for biased reporting in which the Iraqi war is criticized, one might conclude that the somber, respectful tone of the Times article above would be replaced in all its articles by the clear and unambiguous criticism found in The Nation, or in this case by noted writer Jonathan Schell.

While reasonable people may disagree as to the content of this Times article, the way in which the information was presented, the absence of additional information, few would state that the Times was unable to achieve a far more “unbiased” report than Mr. Schell in The Nation.

Here perhaps we must come to the difficult conclusion that few reporters are able to write a news article, especially if it’s a feature, which does not generate accusations of bias. A person who is against the war in Iraq would much rather have had the article begin—as so many do—with a description of a weeping, single mother who has lost her only son and is angry at President Bush for taking her only son away from her.

Perhaps we should make the distinction between “news articles” in which facts are reported such as how many soldiers fought, where they fought, what their goal was, with pieces that may attract bias, such as features, investigations and analysis pieces. Here is where we may be able to search for bias and see if the LA Times has a “liberal bias.”

But, as for the tone of the article about the Iraqi soldiers killed, could the Times article, especially when contrasted to The Nation article, be perceived as pro-war with a “conservative bias”?

-S. Schudy

2004-04-09T09:20:00.000-07:00

News in Brief

I'll try to contribute to this at greater length, which I cannot now do. I think, Scott, the answer to your question: "How honest is this media watch organization?" is: so honest that it actually tells you where it stands, that it actually takes a side.

I mean, I don't know about you, but the problem I've had with LA Times and other national news sources is not that they seem to be biased, but that they aren't open about their views - the thought culture at LA Times has become invisible to those who live in it.

Since we're having a link-fest, here are a couple of media organizations. Media Research Center is an openly conservative meta-media organization that occasionally has some useful comments and/or observations. The resource that is almost indispensible these days is The Middle East Media Research Institute, which offers translations of Arabic, Farsi, and Hebrew publications.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-04-08T18:23:00.000-07:00

HonestReporting.com

Thanks for the link to HonestReporting.com.

But just how honest is this media watch organization? It comes into question when the purpose of HonestReporting.com is listed at the website as the following--"If you understand how critical it is to keep the media honest, so that public opinion stays stronger for Israel, please make a generous tax-deductible gift now. We depend on the good will and generosity of concerned individuals like yourself, who help us to combat anti-Israel media bias worldwide. The battle for public opinion is key for Israel, and one in which HonestReporting, working hand-in-hand with informed, committed people like you, is making a difference!"

Here is a site where its stated purpose is to support Israel and correct what it considers misrepresentation of Israel. While such an organization may strive to be impartial, I would argue it is far less likely to be so because of this stated goal. I would also argue that this conclusion is supported by the content of the site's articles.

A similar problem is found, in my opinion, with the group CAMERA, Committe for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America, which states at its website--"In recent years misinformation about the Middle East has also surfaced in fashion magazines, architectural publications, encyclopedias, professional reference works, geography textbooks, travel guides, and even dictionaries. Frequently inaccurate and skewed characterizations of Israel and of events in the Middle East may fuel anti-Israel and anti-Jewish prejudice."

Similar overt statements can be found for Palestinian and Arab groups, such as Arab Media Watch which states--"Arab Media Watch is dedicated to improving the objectivity and comprehensiveness of the British Media's reporting on Arab issues."

Like the others, there seems to be what might be termed as "bias" in that each site overtly claims its purpose stems from its support of a particular state or ethnicity. This is more obvious than "bias" in the United States media in so far as the purpose of media groups like the Los Angeles Times is not defined specifically to support the United States, any other goverment, or particular ethnicity or religious group.

-S. Schudy

2004-04-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

The other site to check (which has links to additional media bias blogs) is:

HonestReporting.com

2004-04-08T13:43:00.000-07:00

What is "Liberal Bias"?

The blog “Oh, That Liberal Media” brings up some good questions but unfortunately doesn’t attempt to answer the most fundamental question “How is liberal bias to be defined?” nor does it provide us with examples of unbiased journalism, only corrections of bad journalism, nor does it give examples of pieces that might be viewed as “conservative bias.”

Based on the posts, or at least the ones available today, we can attempt to draw some conclusions about what the critics mean by “liberal bias” in the LA Times: criticism of, or lack of support for certain Supreme Court Justices, abortion, gun rights, Israel, the criminal justice system, esp. harsh sentences, and Republican President George W. Bush. These constitute “liberal.” As to what constitutes “bias,” we can focus on the use of verbs, adjectives, and the placement early or late in the article of favorable or unfavorable quotes.

But since “liberal bias” goes undefined, even this list may consist of contradictions, or at least inconsistencies. For example, one post criticizes the Times’ bias against the FBI and would therefore list such criticism under the heading of “liberal.” Yet criticism of the FBI has just as often come from so-called conservative groups and individuals such as Iowa Senator Charles Grassley, a Republican whose congressional website describes him as a “common sense conservative.”

A similar problem regards support for Israel. To classify unbalanced journalism that appears to go against Israel under “liberal” is to dismiss reported views that the “conservative” Bush administration during its pre-Septemeber 11 months was more critical of Israel than the preceding, “liberal” Clinton administration.

Also consider the posting about the Times’ story on Spain’s new socialist Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero. The article cited points to several quotations that, in the opinion of the bloggers, use positive adjectives, verbs and nouns for Zapatero, such as the sub-head “Next premier, a listener who cuts a humble figure, will replace the confrontational Aznar,” and negative ones for the aforementioned and outgoing Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. One might draw the conclusion that such language is never used for features on newly elected or even returning “conservative” politicians. This we will have to look at.

This is not to say that much of the criticism of particular articles is well-argued. I agree with much of it in regards to the language use and balance.

There are also some journalistic practices that are rightly criticized, namely the general use of “some” or “critics.” These may not be limited to stories viewed as either “liberal” or “conservative.” We will have to see in the weeks ahead.

But we are still left with more questions such as which reporter wrote the articles and whether the problem is more with an individual reporter than an institutional bias at the Times. Unfortunately, Stefan Sharansky or Patterico and a “Captain Ed,” with my apologies to any contributors I missed, don’t list the individual reporter or reporters. This may help us find out if the bias is with the individual reporter.

I don’t conclude here that the problem is with the reporters rather than the institution. But I think it should be discovered before conclusions about institutional bias are drawn.

Absent of any comprehensive or practical definitions of liberal or conservative, I think we need to review stories, ones considered good and bad, ones that might be considered liberal or conservative, and make observations and distinctions that may serve us with better observations than the ones we’ve come across in books, magazines or on the Internet.

In short, let’s present the evidence ourselves and draw our own conclusions.

-S. Schudy

2004-04-07T17:56:00.000-07:00

I'm slammed at work, but the bias in the L.A. Times has been nicely documented at...

Oh, That Liberal Media -- L.A. Times Archive

Hope to post more on this when the weeds thin out.
bb

2004-04-07T01:35:00.000-07:00

So Much to Say

Scott-

I'm no media evaluation expert. Do we take on only the hard news or the editorial pieces as well? I'm ready to (baldy, after the infinitive-splitting manner of the original Enterpriseers) assert that the LA Times veers to the left. But if the scenario you outline, viz:

To be more specific, if a reporter's article appears to be anti-death penalty one day, and another article appears to support anti-abortionists the next, followed by one that appears to favor pro-gay civil rights, with a Sunday feature highlighting the efforts of an Austiran-school economics professor, how then is this reporter, much less, the newspaper to be classified?

is possible (especially the part about an LA Times reporter knowing about a Hayek other than Salma), I'll hand in my badge right now. Just saying.

Posted by Doug Brown (who adores Salma; just saying)

2004-04-06T16:47:00.000-07:00

Defining Bias in the Los Angeles Times

Instead of falling under the democratic people's addiction--as diagnosed by Alexis de Tocqueville--of generic and abstract terms such as "liberal bias" and "conservative bias" in the media, we should take up the basic definition of these terms in relation to the media and then ask the question, "What makes a newspaper, magazine or news channel liberal or conservative?"

This is no easy question to answer especially since the general and protean uses of liberal or conservative in regards to the media may have less to do with traditional society and religion, as stated by Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, or the economics of laissez-faire or the welfare state of Walter Bagehot and John Kenneth Galbraith, than they do with a particular position of a party or competing group within a party.

This question becomes even more difficult as the media information is broken down. Editorials of a newspaper or media outlet have to be considered separately from the news reporting. Add to this a further, necessary distinction of separating and identifying particular writing styles, reporting habits and the potential complex political opinions of individual reporters, all of which over one month of broadcast or publication are to be found in hundreds of stories. Then the issue of style has to be broken down to see if bias can be determined by the amount of space one opinion receives in an article and whether that opinion is placed at the top of the story, in the middle or near the bottom. But the kind of story must itself be taken into consideration such as a feature of a person or subject which may contain controversial issues in which opposing opinions are not presented. Then move onto the next step as to whether certain issues require two opposing opinions and should therefore be excluded from appearing in a certain style such as a feature article.

Then there is the issue of domestic versus international affairs; national, state and local politics; legal, economic and social issues.

To be more specific, if a reporter's article appears to be anti-death penalty one day, and another article appears to support anti-abortionists the next, followed by one that appears to favor pro-gay civil rights, with a Sunday feature highlighting the efforts of an Austiran-school economics professor, how then is this reporter, much less, the newspaper to be classified?

Therefore, instead of assuming a newspaper is one side or the other, I propose we prefer labor to obscurity and take the next four weeks to review and break down stories in the Los Angeles Times to see for ourselves what conclusions can be drawn about a 'liberal bias" or "conservative bias."

-S. Schudy

2004-04-05T15:39:00.000-07:00

The Los Angeles Times won five Pulitzers today. Five of them. The New York Times received one.

The LA Times seems to have been highly awarded mostly because of the public dressing-down the NY Times (no relation) has received in recent months. As you can see for yourself here, the LA Times would do well not to get puffed-up about its awards, staying as it has one factual error or politically-timed story away from the next shaming kerfluffle.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-04-05T14:29:00.000-07:00

I Will Repay

Googlism.com doesn't have much to say about The Irrationalist, but what it does have to say is either indifferent, as in

irrationalist is the man or woman sitting next to you in the tube train

or gibberish, as in

irrationalist is daarnaast bijzonder onaantrekkelijk omdat het psychologisch onverdraag

or negative, as in

irrationalist is usually a waste of time

Of course, my employer would probably agree with this last.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-04-01T13:12:00.000-08:00

Now is the Time on Sprockets When We Open a Hotel!

posted by:
wordwarp

2004-04-01T11:33:00.000-08:00

Why Terrorism Works:
In line with Patrick’s previous link to the suicide bomber story:

This is a speech given by Alan Dershowitz at the First Parish Church in Cambridge, Mass in December 2002. It is titled “Why Terrorism Works,” based on the book of the same name. He makes the claim that Terrorism--which usually gets rewarded and is therefore successful—must, like piracy of the 17th and 18th centuries, be stopped by punishing it rather than rewarding it. Reasonable people can disagree on Dershowitz’s general theme or specific points. Nevertheless, it is well worth listening to.

But there is a question worth asking that emerges from Dershowitz’s presentation: If Terrorism could have been as successful for the Jews of Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s and 1940’s as it’s been for other groups in the 20th Century, that is, if Jews could have bombed residences in Munich and Bonn, or blown up Berlin buses and achieved their particular goals, should they have done it?

This question is not meant to equate the situation of Jews in Nazi Germany with Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza, the Kurds in Turkey or Iraq, or the Tibetans, all of which are mentioned by Dershowitz in his speech.

Note: Having not yet read his book "Why Terrorism Works," I do not know if he addresses this question in it or in any other of his lectures, articles or books.

-S. Schudy

2004-04-01T11:18:00.000-08:00

The Name Game

A couple of significant news stories prompt a couple of insignigficant remarks.

The first is here. The sentence in question reads:

"Nothing should be read into the timing of this announcement," said Lieutenant Commander Flex Plexico, a Pentagon spokesman, of the planned radar sale.

That's Flex Plexico from the 21st century to you!

The second is here. Again, the bit of interest:

A Turkish interior ministry official said 37 people were detained in Turkey and 16 more were held in swoops in Italy, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, targeted at Turkey's Revolutionary People's Liberation Party-Front (DHKP-C).

In a taped statement the People's Liberation Revolutionary Party-Front of Turkey said, "Splitters!"

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-04-01T10:36:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting article over at news24. Hypocrisy at it's finest.

It also seems that not all French people are insane (Washington Times).

And lastly, IP is really going off the deep end. This is even worse than the attempted patent for the letter 'e'... this one got passed.

-Patrick, counting the days until David officially becomes evil

2004-03-31T16:45:00.000-08:00

Afternoon Constitutional

By way of contrast, here's the Iraqi Interim Constitution, complements of The Agonist. Striking by its absence is the sort of UN-speke that was scattered throughout the Afghan Constitution.

On the other hand, more problematic than the occasional rainbows & unicorns of the Afghan document is this sentence:

Article 7 (B) Iraq is a country of many nationalities, and the Arab people in Iraq are an inseparable part of the Arab nation.

Wow. Pan-Arab nationalism, right there in the constitution? Who do we thank for that? Bremer? Chalabi? Al-Sistani?

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-03-31T10:25:00.000-08:00

Whistling in the Dark

John - I agree with your Tolkien comments, with a difference. However, I'm unable to articulate said difference because I already made my last comment on Tolkien below. So I'll just say that I'm persuaded, having never disagreed wholly with any of the points you raised, but it's the kind of agreement that says, "And yet . . ."

But if I were to break my word, this would become a Tolkien blog and the next thing you'd know we'd be hopping around in costumes. Not being one to give David such gratification, I will subside.

2004-03-30T15:59:00.000-08:00

Tolkien . . .
Further Notes On The Art Of Middle Earth

By John O'Connor

I have cited to the Christian symbolism in Tolkien, not because this is my interpretation or imagination, but because these are specific items which, in extensive reading and browsing, I have seen attributed to the author's intent, either by himself or by plausible others. If an author says, in writing, that he intended such-and-such a thing, I think it is safe to say he intended it.

Tolkien's collected letters and his authorized biography reveal and clarify his own intentions authoritatively, and in his own words. In his collected letters, for instance, he explains that the "lembas" is a communion reference. He was also on record as to the Christian-calendar aspect of the story, which has Frodo's trip take place in a single liturgical year. These are written records in which the artist explains his symbolic intent. They cannot be explained away.

Tolkien's own published literary theory makes plain that he does not approve of authors being overly-clear with their readers. One complaint he has about allegory, in particular, is that it tends to diminish the literary nature of any given work, reducing its literary stature and shrinking it to propaganda or agitprop. In the 20th century, this problem was probably most common in socially committed or leftist literature; but Tolkien's complaint was a timeless one, and intended as such. Allegorical writing and allegorical reading, in his view, directly threaten literature by diminishing the pleasure of reading as such and by reducing the story to a mere message, or a mere vehicle for a message. (The process by which a person becomes corrupted into a ring-wraith is not unlike the process by which literature becomes corrupted into propaganda.)

Tolkien's seminal essay on Beowulf makes plain that Tolkien's ideal writer of allegory would not spell everything out for his audience. Quite the contrary. What made the Beowulf essay revolutionary in its day was its insistence on the literary value of the Beowulf poem as a piece of literature, and not simply as a mine from which data or meanings were to be extracted. Because Tolkien's Beowulf essay was written and published just as Tolkien was producing The Hobbit, it has much relevance, not merely to Tolkien as a reader of literature, but also to Tolkien as an author thinking out loud about his own crafty craft. He is very emphatic that an author is to sublimate whatever allegorical intentions he may have, and that the message should be subordinate to the art. (Poetry should instruct by pleasing.)

With the Beowulf essay in mind, and a few clear clues as to what is coded into the text, a hunt for symbolism becomes not only plausible but unavoidable.

Tolkien's other significant piece of literary theory came in his essay on fairy tales. Here he advances his theory of the "eucatastrophe" in literature. More important, though, he puts forward his theory of the gospels. According to Tolkien, the gospels are fairy tales. That is their literary genre. He means this as a high and serious compliment. The corollary, however, is that some fairy tales are thus the gospel.

I take this to be a Catholic way of interpreting the Christian religion, radically different from a fundamentalist approach. Fundamentalists of all varieties tend towards an idolatry of the text -- just as, in Catholicism, Catholic fundamentalists tend towards an idolatry of the church. Because Tolkien has an essentially Roman Catholic relationship to the gospel texts -- one which does not view them as an end in themselves -- he reads them differently and imagines them differently, as well. Seeing the gospels as fairy tales, he writes fairy tales which are gospels. All this is based on what is plainly stated in writing in his own literary theory and is not a projection onto the text of his stories.

Leo Strauss popularized the idea of code writing -- the idea that sometimes the message of a text must be deciphered rather than read. The Jewish experience of reading and writing under difficult circumstances and amidst untold persecution led Strauss to emphasize this way of interpreting, and it is an accepted fact that certain Jewish texts contain coded messages not intended for the general public, but only for the initiate.

In my opinion, there is a Straussian element in Tolkien's work As a patriot and nationalist, Tolkien wanted to create a mythology for England -- yet he was also a rock-ribbed Catholic. The challenge was to combine those two commitments. For many centuries, the self-definition of Englishness has not included Catholicism -- somewhat the reverse, actually. Tolkien does not hide his debt to English literature or to German mythology, but he does hide his Catholicism. It is there, but you must search for it.

Tolkien's Catholicism has important literary consequences. As noted, there is a crucifixion-and-resurrection in the narrative. However, this is not how salvation occurs. It turns out that the most important thing in the trilogy is an act of compassion, not an act of crucifixion. Specifically, Bilbo's act of compassion in not killing Gollum turns out to be the single deed which saves the whole world. The narrative underlines and emphasizes this moral, so it is difficult to miss.

Less emphatically, and with more subtlety, Tolkien has shifted the emphasis from crucifixion to compassion. It is not quite a heresy, but it is not exactly what a conservative Christian (Mel Gibson, for instance) would recognize as the essence of Christian salvation. One act of forbearance saves the entire world -- this is a Christian message, but it is not the Christian message. The shift is away from human sacrifice and towards two other things instead -- compassion and luck. This last idea, that the world might be saved by luck, is surely anathema to any orthodox Christian, Catholic or not. And yet it is hinted at in the text by a vigorously orthodox writer.

Strauss, anyone?

An Eastern comparison to Tolkien's cosmology is helpful, I think. In Asian religion, the figure of Kwan Yin is suspiciously like that of the Virgin Mary. She functions, like Mary, as the female face of the divine. Also like Mary, she is the incarnation of compassion. The difference between the Virgin Mary and a boddhisattva strikes me as small to the point of debatable. Gandalf, in particular, who as discussed is a kind of Christ figure, is also very like a boddhisattva. In his youth, as Olorin, he studies under a female spirit (this is from The Silmarillion) and from her he learns pity and patience. Gandalf is a Christ figure -- but he is also a Mary figure.

I have explained before that Tolkien would probably accept the papal teaching that Mary is as important as Christ. This teaching is, as discussed, anathema to most Protestants, although Eastern Orthodox Christians would probably align more with Rome on this questions. (Mary wins two out of three, and has certainly won the popular vote. The electoral college is another matter.) If one interprets Mary as being the incarnation of compassion, then Tolkien's book is not merely written by a Catholic, it has a specifically Marian moral. An act of compassion by an ordinary creature is what saves Tolkien's world. This is a Marian lesson, taught by one of Mary's devotees, and it is beyond the purview of many conventional Christians, Catholic or Protestant.

This aspect of Tolkien's work is there for those who are meant to see it, but not for the general reader. If Mel Gibson were to make a movie out of Tolkien, he would focus on Gandalf at the bridge, or, with several hours of slo-mo, on Gollum biting off Frodo's finger. In that sense, Tolkien's book, like any great book, is a Rorschach test for the reader or potential film-maker. The recent movie trilogy left out Bombadil, for instance.

The whole book, of course, is a marriage novel. It could plausibly be titled, Sammy And Rosie Get Married. For those who prefer a military or church-militant view of the story, the marital dimensions of the epic might as well be written in a lost runic language.

joc

2004-03-30T14:34:00.000-08:00

The Beginnings of Democracy?

I finally took a moment today to read through Afghanistan's new constitution. It's a pretty standard republican constitution. The usual three branches of government, a President and Vice-President, a bicameral legislation, and a Supreme Court. Of course, it's got the expected parts about the role of Islam in the state, which is probably handled as well as it could be. A few of the articles stood out on my first reading.

Article 3 reads: "In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the sacred religion of Islam and the values of this Constitution." I wonder if, by placing the Constitution parallel to the teachings of Islam, this was intended to set a limit to the interpretations of Islam that may be legislated.

According to Article 84, the upper legislative house (the "Meshrano Jirga") is to be appointed by the provincial and district councils, one per province or district, and one-third of its members by the president. Apparently this could be a body of flexible size (as, actually, could the lower house ("Wolesi Jirga") which is to have from 220 to 250 members.

Article 130 and 131, which pertain to the Supreme Court provides, problematically, for two systems of jurisprudence: a default to hanafi jurisprudence, with an exception for "personal matters involving members of the Shia sect," whose cases will be subject to, you guessed it, Shia jurisprudence.

Interesting fact: each page of the English translation refers the reader to the Pashto version as authoritative. Curiously like the warning at the front of my copy of Q'uran that only the Arabic version is inspired.

Last comment but one on Tolkien:

There are things in the recent LOTR movies that are (in the sexual sense) totally gay. Best example of this: when the glam-rock-Ziggy-Stardust-period-Bowie elf of Lorien says, "The dwarf breathes so loudly we could shoot him in the dark."

Last comment on Tolkien:

The motifs you highlight are archetypes so common that you could hardly write anything on the mythic scale that Tolkien aspired to without including them. There are certainly things in Rings that facilitate a Christian symbolic interpretation some of the dating, as you point out), but a) they are most often used subversively (e.g. Lorien, the "immaculate land" is fading and dying), and b) most of them depend for their existence on the imagination of the reader, I think, and not on that old bugbear authorial intention.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-03-30T10:30:00.000-08:00

Tolkien . . . The Lighter Side

Much as I revere Tolkien's books, there are parts of Lord Of The Rings that are (in the non-sexual sense) totally gay.

Hobbits. Dwarves. Elves.

Can Dorothy and the wizard be far behind?

--john o'connor

2004-03-29T15:28:00.000-08:00

Tolkien, Part Two

The Christian symbolism is in my opinion easy to miss, especially if one gets caught up in the very engaging story.

Nevertheless, it is increasingly clear that Tolkien intended to put allegorical symbols in.

Gandalf's mishap in Moria is actually intended to be a death-and-resurrection number. This is easy to miss if you have read The Silmarillion, for that book makes clear that Gandalf and his kind can change shapes (ie, bodies) the way other people change clothes. (It is a mark of Sauron's slow decline that he eventually loses this power.) Knowing this, you might miss the resurrection symbolism of Gandalf's return -- the all-white clothes, the increased power, etc etc. Gandalf after Moria is a white rider on a white horse -- right out of Revelations, I would think. Tolkien wrote elsewhere (forget the exact cite) that, because he had imagined a world which was different from ours but subject to the same rules, that the death-and-resurrection aspect of Gandalf's fall was his world's version of Christ's d-and-r number in the Christian faith. In other words, once you find the author's intent from an extramural source, you can look back and see The Christian Symbol, which an innocent reader might miss. I missed this until I read Tolkien's commentary on this. Other readers I know picked up on it right away.

The symbolism is distinctive, original, and at times plain weird. For instance, the "lembas", the bread of the elves, is meant to be a symbol of (Catholic) communion. Tolkien was a Catholic rather than a Christian (one source of his differences with CS Lewis), and the symbolism runs to Catholic rather than to Protestant forms. For instance, there are many references to the Virgin Mary, both as an archetype and as a role model. The Elvish songs to Elbereth are more or less hymns to the Virgin Mary. Galadriel, who Tolkien actually viewed as a penitent, is not unrelated to the BVM archetype. Certainly the idea of Lorien, the immaculate land, relates to Catholic ideas of immaculateness. And yes, Galadriel is a penitent (this is explained in the Silmarillion) who, in declining Frodo's offer of the ring, earns the right to return to Valinor by boat at the end of the book.

This is easy to miss, unless you are clued in to the author's very intense Marian devotion. The ancestral Tolkiens had been given the choice, in Germany (if memory serves this was Frederick The Great), of becoming protestant or being exiled. They chose exile, and thus became English Catholics. Tolkien's own mother, who was of course English, was disinherited for marrying his father, who was Catholic. The motifs of exile and disinheritance are all over Tolkien's work once you know what to look for. Moreover, Tolkien appears to have been one of those Catholics who rate Mary very highly indeed. He had what is known as a special devotion to her. The papal pronouncement in the mid-20th-century, that Mary is co-mediatrix with Christ, would have seemed obviously true to Tolkien and like-minded others. To Protestants, of course, it is heresey or idolatry or both together.

Then there is the calendar aspect of the thing. Frodo's epic begins with one Christian date (I think it is Christmas, can't recall) and ends with another (the Old English date for Easter), so that everything happens in the same liturgical year. Unless you know what to watch for in the dates department, it is easy to miss this as well.

One plausible account I have read suggests that the kingdom which returns at the end of LOTR is a kind of icon or image of the Holy Roman Empire, reconstructed in some way in the future (or in an alternate world) so that Catholic unity becomes re-established. This may have been one way Tolkien, as a Catholic, viewed the Second Coming.

I would say that Tolkien divvies up the Christ-figure into three characters: Gandalf, Aragorn and Frodo. The three together constitute the Christ motif of the work. Gandalf is always presented in the iconic and visual terms which Germanic myth usually reserved for Odin -- who, perhaps not coincidentally, was also a crucified divinity. Aragorn is Christ in his aspect of returning king. Frodo is more the martyr aspect -- his departure at the end of the book is a symbolic death. So the Christ motif is there, but handled with much greater literary skill, subtlety and depth than CS Lewis could muster. I think this is one reason the LOTR story packs so much punch: the reader can feel the author's seriousness, without quite deciphering the allegory which has been coded into the work. This combination of skill and obscurity is, in literary terms, one of the best ways of achieving the effect of the sublime; the Ultimate Symbols are there, but not in plain sight.

I suspect that Tolkien's frustration with the way he was received and mis-read (as an allegory of WW2, as a proponent of psychedelic drugs, etc.) contributed to his refusal to make things plain. But there were good literary reasons to not make it any plainer. If you have ever read his essay on Beowulf, it is a masterpiece of deliberate obfuscation, designed in my opinion to hide his understanding of what Beowulf is about.

2004-03-29T10:23:00.000-08:00

The Long Defeat

John -

Fighting words, those. I mean, I still read Shakepeare despite the Renaissance Fayre types. The sad fact is that other people are allowed to like things that we like, and that most of those people will be, um, disappointing.

I think Rings is a highly "moral" book, by which I mean that in it to be a good guy one must act morally. But if it's meant to be allegory, it's a complete failure. The closest it comes to allegory, really, is in terms of the two world wars. But even that falters in the end. As for a Christian allegory, the idea of Frodo as Christ figure doesn't have much that I can see to recommend it.

Or, as a Christian, am I like the fish who doesn't see the water he's swimming in?

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-03-28T22:19:00.000-08:00

PRETTY FUNNY

One Hundred Albums You Should Remove from Your Collection Immediately. Any such list is incomplete without the Stone Roses' second album, Second Coming, The Most Pointless Album In Rock. But this one is a good start. Via Protein Wisdom. Posted by David O'Connor

2004-03-28T21:57:00.000-08:00

With Fans Like These . . . .

Fans like the ones linked below are part of the reason I am no longer a die-hard Tolkien fan. It was fun when it seemed like my own imaginary world. But when all these other people got into the act, it lost something and began to be an embarassment. Plus I am older, which makes a difference.

Additionally it is increasingly clear, notwithstanding the author's disingenous claims to the contrary, that Lord Of The Rings is in fact a Christian allegory filled with implict and explicit symbols of the Christian faith. This caused me to lose interest in CS Lewis, and now it has spoiled some (not all) of Tolkien for me.

Tolkien is nowhere near as saccharine as Lewis (faint praise -- how could he be?) but I can't resist the impression that the LOTR story is "for my own good". This impression is less true of The Hobbit and much less present in the Silmarillion. I remain fond of the LOTR books, and do not regret the time I spent reading them, but I find that I can no longer do so.

Moreover, it is also clear that Der Herre Der Ringe is constructed out of some of the same archaic-Germanic materials that gave us the Wagner ring cycle. One of my favorite wisecracks about Tolkien's work came from an English writer who said it was a case of Wagner meets Winnie The Pooh. Quite a perceptive jest. Tolkien was quite sensitive to the comparison, and at one point, pressed about the comparison, said "Both rings are round." It's true that Tolkien's Catholicism was different from Wagner's what-do-you-call-it. But this is German mythology nevertheless.

I would argue that The Hobbit remains his greatest work, and (paradoxically) the one most available to the adult reader. It represents the best balance of his different interests and is the most finished of the books artistically. Much as I enjoy the tale of the fall of Sauron, the fall of Smaug is in many ways the better story.

Or maybe I am just a more simple-minded reader . . . . . . all those years of carrying the precious took their toll.

joc

2004-03-28T14:12:00.000-08:00

Kissinger, the Cold War and al-Quaeda

This is taken from Henry Kissinger's 1957 book Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, Chapter 10 in which he begins with the question "What is a Revolutionary?"

Time and again states appear which boldly proclaim that their purpose is to destroy the existing structure and to recast it completely. And time and again, the powers that are the declared victims stand by indifferent or inactive, while the balance of power is overturned. Indeed, they tend to explain away the efforts of the revolutionary power to upset the equilibrium as the expression of limited aims or specific grievances until they discover--sometimes too late and always at excessive cost--that the revolutionary power was perfectly sincere all along, that its call for a new order expressed its real aspirations. So it was when the French Revolution burst on an unbelieving Europe and when Hitler challenged the system of Versailles. So it has been with the relations of the rest of the world toward the Soviet bloc.

How was it possible that from positions of extreme weakness these powers could emerge as the most powerful states of Europe and that the most recent of these challeges, the U.S.S.R., can bid for the domination of the world less than a generation after a group of die-hards were trying to hold Moscow against enemies converging from all sides?
from Ch. 10, "The Strategy of Ambiguity--Sino-Soviet Strategic Thought"

I reference this quote as a potential analog to actions by al-Quaeda to generate this question: Is it possible that al-Quaeda could itself join the list of the French Revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks, the Nazis, the Chinese Communists, the Iranian Revolutionaries as marginal revolutionary or terrorist groups who were able to take over state? Or is al-Quaeda unlikely to join these examples since, unlike the French, Soviets or Chinese, it began to attack foreign nations prior to its having established itself as a governing power in a state? (I use the term "state" instead of "nation-state" since al-Quaeda while primarily Arabic may further expand and attract other groups that despite the use of Arabic in the Qu'oran do not share traditional Arab language and culture.)
-S. Schudy

2004-03-28T12:44:00.000-08:00

WHEN LOTR FANDOM GOES BAD

Res ipsa loquitor.

DOC

2004-03-28T12:42:00.000-08:00

Kerry As Fangorn

It seems a bit unfair, Doug, to compare Kerry to a fictional piece of wood, when actual pieces as wood, such as Al Gore, are available.

DOC

2004-03-27T11:08:00.000-08:00

Not Some Farcical Aquatic Ceremony

It's funny how different people can interpret a single set of events differently. Three people looking up into the same night sky might see, respectively, concentrations of gases seething away in the cold emptiness of space, Jupiter ascendant in the house of Capricorn, and a mandate for the passage of a constitution for the European Union. This phenomenon can be observed here. Call it EuroBureaucratic Romanticism, that it should be able to see a call for supra-national law-making in a train bombing.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-03-26T16:27:00.000-08:00

A/B Comparisons: They're Good for You!

I was listening to NPR at lunch today, and was struck by something. John Kerry's speech is very formal, in a style that has been out of vogue since, I think, Nixon's resignation. I'm talking about the stage-tuned modulations that began to die out as soon as political questions were argued on television instead of in newspapers or on radio. The fact that since Carter, at least, the presidential tone has been one of plain-spoken folksiness rather than that of traditional oratory makes me wonder what the general reaction will be when the two candidates meet in debate. Will Kerry's formal cadences be off-putting to the increasingly informal American ear or will people think of FDR and the first JFK? Will Bush's halting twang sound honest or ignorant when contrasted with, not Gore's SID-chip speech-synthesis, but Kerry's turn of the century style?

Speaking of things that John Kerry reminds one of, there's this fellow.

Posted by Doug Brown

2004-03-26T11:54:00.000-08:00

Tax cuts for the wealthiest?

One has to wonder how this will play with the Dean/Edwards wing of the Democratic party. I hope, O I hope! that Kerry will try to spin this as somehow targeted to middle class corporations. That would be delicious.

Posted by Doug Brown