Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I'm underemployed (historically particularly as an editor in book and magazine publishing), recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring severe clinical depression. See here for a major crisis. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. This is a previous update on my situation & this -- and this from December 19th, 2005 update.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it; that though indeed these are criminals who do not withstand such
temptation, yet neither are those innocent who lay the bait in their way; that the
opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction;
that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their
ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty,
because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of
judgment, and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square
with or differ from his own; that it is time enough for the rightful purposes of civil
government for its officers to interfere when principles break out into overt acts
against peace and good order; and finally, that truth is great and will prevail if
left to herself; that she is the proper and sufficient antagonist to error, and has
nothing to fear from the conflict unless by human interposition disarmed of her
natural weapons, free argument and debate; errors ceasing to be dangerous when it is
permitted freely to contradict them.
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their "tendency" is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
"Being evil is not a full-time job."
-- James Lileks
Gary Farber is now a licensed Double Super-Secret Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
Did he mention he was presently single?
The lutefisk is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left
or I'll shoot this gefilte fish.
No, really, I seriously need the help at present. And I hate asking.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 606
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
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And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
Farber's First Fundamental of Blogging:
If your idea of making an insightful point is to make fun of people's
names, or refer to them by rilly clever labels such as "The Big Me" or "The Shrub,"
chances are high that I'm not reading your blog. The same applies if you refer
to a group of people by disparaging terms such as "the Donks" or "the pals." (Note: I have to say I don't give that much of a damn any more.)
Farber's Second Fundamental of Blogging:
The more interested you are in scoring a "point" for a political "team," a "side," than in exploring the validity or value of an idea, the less interested I am in what you're saying.
(Note: Partially suspended for the Duration. Later note: forget I ever said this.)
Farber's Third Fundamental of Blogging:
If you see a link on another blog, and use it, credit the blog.
Some places I go:
[weblogs, sites, and columns]
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, George Alec Effinger,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Jay Haldeman, Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start.
And She of whom I must write someday.
You Like Me, You Really Like Me
...Darn: I saw that Gary had commented on this thread, and thought: oh. my. god. Perfect storm. Unstoppable cannonball, immovable object.
-- Hilzoy
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
Where would the blogosphere be without the Guardian? Guardian fish-barreling is now a venerable tradition. Yet even within this tradition, I don't believe there has ever been a more extensive and thorough essay than this one, from Gary Farber's fine blog. Gary appears to have examined every single thing that Guardian/Observer columnist Mary Ridell has ever written. He ties it all together, reaches inevitable conclusion. An archive can be a weapon.
-- Dr. Frank
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
I look at it almost every day. I can't follow all the links, but I read most of your pieces. The blog format really seems to suit you. It also suits me; I am not a news junkie, so having smart people like you ferret out the interesting stuff and leave it where I can find it is wonderful.
-- Lydia Nickerson
Gary is certainly a non-idiotarian 'liberal'...
-- Perry deHaviland
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
Gary Farber is a principled liberal....
-- Bill Quick, The Daily Pundit
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber! Jeez, the guy is practically a blogging legend, and I'm always surprised at the breadth of what he writes about.
-- PZ Meyers, Pharyngula
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
TIMES, TIMES, TIMES, I'm particularly fond of the Bangles' version of the Simon & Garfunkel song. Here's another take on the paper.
Jews reward and smack it. Yeah, that's exactly typical. See, it swings both ways. If you live in NYC, you know that people quarrel about the paper every day -- jeez, what else does one do in the morning, along with a bagel and a schmear? -- and you know that the only "paper" is the Times, and you are, much of the time, Jewish. Out-of-towners: they do, and read, other stuff. Whatever.
ASPARAGIRL CAN'T PASS she says. Wanna know why I talk about this stuff so much?
Because I can pass.
And I hate myself every time it happens.
Last week, a fellow worker made sure to tell me that another guy was from New York, and "a Jewish mother, who has to win every argument." I should have hit him, I suppose, but I was nice, instead. And now I regret it. I've not run into much anti-semitism in Colorado, mostly, I think, because I've not met a lot of people. What I have found is a compulsion to -- absolutely innocently, in their minds, I'm sure -- introduce me as a Jew.
Because heaven forbid someone not know. Be sure to mention it in the introduction. After all, otherwise I might pass. Not that this is anti-semitism, of course. They're leftists.
Pop star Lee Ryan apologised for saying the US terror attacks have been "blown out of proportion".
The member of boy band Blue said the plight of whales and elephants was more important.
But he has now pledged to make a donation to charity to say sorry.
Lee had said during a webchat with The Sun: "Who gives a f*** about New York when elephants are being killed?
"Animals need saving and that's more important. This New York thing is being blown out of proportion ... I'm not afraid to say this, it has to be said and that's why I'm the outspoken one from the band."
Lee said: "I am deeply sorry for what I have said and apologise unreservedly to everyone affected by the tragedy of September 11.
"I was trying to express my concerns for other issues close to my heart but I realise now I did so in a very foolish and offensive way.
Oh, that's fine. Just set yourself on fire and drop yourself from a mile up, and everything will be even-steven. After all, how could Americans ever be as important as elephants? We're not nearly so cute. Our ears are tragically small.
Fred points to this. It's almost as if he was paying attention. But how big are his ears?
No matter who you are, no matter how successful, how powerful, how beloved you were, once you're dead, it's all out of your hands. You can be the father of Egyptian civilization, but that won't keep you from being played by a professional wrestler in a major motion picture.
ABAYAS: The crackdown on Saudi publications a week or so ago means that more deciphering is needed to get through the now higher official censorship. Here's a piece on the immorality of women's dress.
The official added that the ministry was coordinating with the Commission for Promoting Virtue and Preventing Vice to crack down on factories which produce non-regulation cloaks, which have increasingly been seen in recent months being worn by women in the Kingdom’s bigger cities.
[...]
A group of students told the press that the college’s hostel officials forbade them from wearing abayas that did not include a veil to cover their heads.
The girls deplored the action as "arbitrary" and a "direct interference" in their personal freedom.
Given the placement here in this paper, Saudi Arabian girls are raising hell. Good for them.
In a few years, people are going to look back on those who approved of this suppression, pro-cloak, stuff, as "multiculturalism" and those who didn't. It's going to look exactly like those who explained why Germany deserved sympathy after the Versaille Treaty. The Treaty was unfair, and, yet, the actions subsequently taken weren't justified. Freedom will, I daresay, ring out. It might even ring twice. At the least, it will knock.
365 DAYS IN MOST YEARS: I've just noticed that the final, successful, coup against Salvador Allende in Chile took place on September 11th, 1973.
I've read about this before, but not looked up responses in a long time.
As the others made their way out of the palace, Allende entered Independence Hall. There the President sat down, placed his assault rifle between his legs, and set its muzzle under his chin. Two shots ended the life of the Constitutional President of Chile.
I refuse to acknowledge the small problem that the DMN is sufficiently boring that it's considerably difficult to find anything remotely worth linking to in it. So: here is their version of the AP story on the virtual child porn issue.
Michael Heimbach, who works for the FBI's Crimes Against Children unit [said:]
To make it worse, he said, pornographers are using computer technology to change the faces of real children and then claiming they are virtual creations to make themselves immune.
"Despite the fact that there is no evidence to suggest that these images on the Internet do not involve real children, this ready-made defense has had a dramatic impact on the government's ability to prosecute child-pornography offenders," Mr. Heimbach said.
While he offered no numbers, he called the reduction in prosecution "significant."
That's interesting. I'd love to see some cites; I've seen no stories about this whatsoever, and pornography prosecutions tend to be Big News. I'm, shall we say, skeptical.
Carl Leubsdorf has been a political correspondent since I was a kid; I remember him writing during Nixon's '72 campaign. Here he says basically nothing, doing a hack job anyone can do, discussing White House burnout.
It was highly unusual that, when Bill Clinton left the White House, three senior aides had lasted the full eight years: domestic adviser Bruce Reed, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and economic adviser Gene Sperling.
Snore. Though it's worth pointing out that the Clinton WH had a lot less infighting than many prior White Houses, Leubsdorf basically gives some facts in his sleep.
Is that enough "deep linking" to get me sued? One more?
The city of Dallas is considering a law to protect against discrimination against gays in housing, employment, and in public places, as called for by Mayor Laura Miller. Excellent. Hokay, so much for Deep Linking. Man, and Linda "Lovelace" just died; consider the parallels. What, do I have to explain everything? Silly illegal acts that reach out and touch someone, but can gross others out, as different morality systems are used to judge.... Okay, it's a reach, and not a deep reach. But in both cases, uh, talent is involved. That's the ticket.
FRENCH ANTI-SEMITISM: Absolutely revelatory dissection and analysis of what's been going on in France, full of details I've not previously seen. Also gives considerable insight into contemporary French politics.
Liberte, Egalite, Judeophobie : Why Le Pen is the least of France's problems, by Christopher Caldwell
The "youth," all of them beurs, or Muslims of North African descent, were staging an orchestrated protest against Bayrou, who as education minister in the mid-1990s had opposed letting Muslim girls wear the hijab, the Muslim headscarf, to public schools. But Keller was a convenient stand-in. They shouted insults and obscenities at her, one of them threatening (according to an account I was too embarrassed to ask the mayor to confirm specifically when I interviewed her days later) to take a razor to her private parts. When Bayrou arrived, the two went inside for meetings, and the crowd began to pelt the new building with stones, and howl what was really on their minds. First, "Why did you ban the headscarf!" And second, "F-- off! We don't want to live anymore in a country that has Jews in it!"
Bayrou emerged from the building while the stones were still flying and told the mob, "Talk about Jews that way today, and you may find people talking about young Muslims the same way tomorrow." At some point during Bayrou's visit, an 11-year-old boy jostled up against him and tried to pick his pocket. Bayrou, heedless that the cameras were running, slapped the kid in the face.
Politicians of the left tried to make hay of the incident, using it to paint Bayrou as some kind of fogey, and themselves as hip to the country's new and "vibrant" youth culture. "Heck, I live in the suburbs, and no one's ever tried to pick my pockets," said Communist party presidential candidate Robert Hue. "Me neither," added Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin, also running for president. The French public didn't see it that way. The more the Bayrou slap played on national television, the higher Bayrou's poll numbers rose--as he was seen as willing to support an assertion of authority against the country's lawless youths. He emerged from deep in the pack of 16 presidential candidates to finish a respectable fourth place, just behind Lionel Jospin. To the extent that he mentioned crime at all (and he never did, preferring the euphemism insecurite), Jospin evinced a la-di-da attitude that dropped him to third place and ended his political career.
[...]
What is surprising and confusing in all of this is that the "new anti-Semitism" in France is a phenomenon of the left. It has practically nothing to do with Le Pen. In fact, its most dangerous practitioners are to be found among the very crowds thronging the streets to protest him.
[...]
The first attacks included firebombings of synagogues in Paris, Villepinte, Creil, Lyons, Ulis (badly damaged), and Trappes (burned to the ground), and other Jewish buildings (high schools, kosher restaurants) throughout France; desecrations of synagogues and cemeteries; widespread stonings of Jews leaving Sabbath worship, death threats, bomb threats, and Nazi and Islamist graffiti of every description: swastikas, "Hitler was right," "F-- Your Mother, Jews" (Nique ta mere les juifs--a slogan so commonplace that it now appears more usually as NTM les juifs), "Death to the Jews," and "In Paris as in Gaza--Intifada!"
[...]
There was also a spike after September 11; on the following Sabbath alone, worshippers were stoned at synagogues in Clichy, Garges-les-Gonesse, and Massy; gangs sought to storm a synagogue in Villepinte; and shots were fired outside a Jewish association in Paris. But if it has slowed at times, the cascade of such incidents has never stopped, even for a week, in the last 19 months. At the turn of this year, the League of French Jewish Students and the watchdog agency SOS Racism compiled a list of 406 such incidents.
[...]
After Israel's attack on terrorist camps in Jenin and elsewhere, the violence exploded to unheard-of proportions. Over Passover weekend last month, a bomb was found in a cemetery in Schiltigheim, outside Strasbourg, and three synagogues were burned. The authorities seemed to be waking up. While it took 12 days for any national official to even comment on the October 2000 attacks, this time the Ministry of the Interior issued a report showing 395 anti-Jewish incidents in the first half of April alone. Almost two-thirds of these involved graffiti, but the others were more serious, including 16 physical assaults and 14 more firebombings. The Wiesenthal Center circulated an advisory urging Jewish travelers to France to exercise "extreme caution."
What has been most shocking to the Jews of France is that the political class of their country, which has an anti-racism establishment to rival any in the world, has been largely silent about their plight.
Yet Jacques Chirac recently announced in front of Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres that "There is no anti-Semitism and no anti-Semites in France." Every French politician interviewed for this article said pretty much the same. Strasbourg mayor Fabienne Keller says: "There is no significant anti-Semitism." Her deputy mayor Robert Grossmann says: "There is no active anti-Semitism." How can they say this with a straight face?
[...]
One innocent explanation would be that French society has suited up to do battle with the anti-Semitism of 70 years ago, and simply doesn't recognize any other kind. [...] In other words, the new anti-Semitism is not coming from the right.
"Worry about the right has turned out to be a decoy--in the military sense--to distract us from the real danger. French anti-racists have been parsing the tiniest dictum of Le Pen, while Jewish blood has been spilled by the left in Athens, Istanbul, Rome, Vienna, and Paris." (Particularly by Palestinian terrorists.) There are indications that the government, too, is looking at the wrong target. By the turn of this year, 60 people had been questioned for the hundreds of acts of intimidation. "Only 5 were subject to legal proceedings, being far Right," according to a report prepared by Shimon Samuels of the Wiesenthal Center. "As if the others were not really anti-Semitic and their exactions not just as serious."
There's another way that French politicians can deny that what they are dealing with is an outbreak of anti-Semitism. That is, in the philosopher Pierre-Andre Taguieff's memorable phrase, to "dissolve the anti-Jewish acts in a rising tide of delinquency." French foreign minister Hubert Vedrine told the Wiesenthal Center last June that the anti-Jewish acts were a matter of "suburban hooliganism." (He continues to hold that view.)
[...] (Jospin's suggestions for stopping the actual anti-Semitism, meanwhile, went no further than a generalized crime initiative, the highlight of which was a proposal to reduce the number of shotguns a hunter could legally own from 12 to 6.)
One can see a certain disconnect here, yes.
In the course of the campaign, only 3 of the 16 candidates--Bayrou, the free-marketer Alain Madelin, and the centrist Corinne LePage--condemned the acts unconditionally.
Charming.
And this unwillingness to call a spade a spade trickled down. The three boys who burned the synagogue at Montpellier--identified as "Morad," "Jamel," and "Hakim"--denied being anti-Semites, and so did those around them. Everyone interviewed about them in the news was content to call them "classic delinquents." The prosecutor described them as "like a lot of petty delinquents, animated by a spirit of revenge, who try to ennoble their excesses by using a political discourse." This seems to apply to all synagogue-burners, if we're to believe the representative from the local office of the mutual-aid society Cimade, who said, "In Montpellier--as in [the synagogue-burning at] Nimes--more and more kids from the projects are identifying the victimization of the Palestinians with their own. It's a simplistic thing, it's not really an ideology."
This would seem to be immunity on grounds of animality--or at least on grounds of ignorance. Such an understanding appalls Goldnadel. "Delinquents?" he asks. "All anti-Semitic thugs are delinquents. Who do they think was burning down Jews' houses on the Russian steppes a hundred years ago? Disgruntled architects?" And with immunity comes impunity. In January, the young men who had vandalized a synagogue in Creteil, outside Paris, were convicted of "general violence" and given a sentence of three months--suspended.
The article goes on; I've not quoted more than a third. Go read the rest.
I do feel I've learned a fair amount from this. I don't have to watch out for anti-semites. I have to watch out for delinquents. Has anyone called Officer Krupke?
Oh, okay, here's something about the French intellectual side:
With London its only rival, Paris is the media and intellectual capital of the Arab world, much as Miami is capital of the Hispanic world. As a result, beyond terrorism, the weight of fundamentalist Islam--and the anti-Semitism that goes along with it--is making itself felt in ordinary French life. According to the literary scholar Eric Marty, one professor of literature at the University of Paris was unable to teach the works of Primo Levi (including the Auschwitz memoir If This Is a Man), because his Arab students booed him out of the classroom. "Kenza," a young beurette who was on the French reality-TV show Loft Story (a sort of NC-17-rated equivalent of Survivor), complains that she got kicked off the show last season because "television is controlled by the Jews." A friend of mine was working out at his gym near Strasbourg and got to talking with a friendly beur about British prime minister Tony Blair. "Don't believe anything Blair says," the man told my friend. "Don't you know his real name is actually Bloch?" (Bloch is a common Alsatian Jewish surname.)
I'm going to start a rumor that Prince Abdullah is actually a Jew. He's about the only one left to claim.
Read the rest to read about Pierre-Andre Taguieff's "The New Judeophobia" ("La Nouvelle judeophobie"). Giving a taste, I've always wondered about the exceptionalism of so much criticism of Israel -- one might agree with much of it, but so much seems oddly focused uniquely on Israel, whilst ignoring similar or identical injustices around the world; here's an explanation for a bit of it:
What he is talking about is "mythic anti-Zionism," which treats Zionism as absolute evil, against which only absolute warfare can be raised. In this understanding, Zionism constitutes not just racism but the ne plus ultra of racism.
This is a vision that the French--particularly given the French left's obsession with race, and their history of romantic attachments to Third World guerrillas--are in danger of embracing. The philosopher Alain Finkielkraut notes that, in France, "support for the Palestinian cause is not shaken but reinforced by the indiscriminate violence of Palestinians." In particular danger of embracing this Manichaean view of the Arab-Israel conflict are those who support Third-Worldism, neo-communism, and neo-leftism, whom Taguieff lumps together as the "anti-globalization movement." The Chomskyites, . . . the people who think Empireone obsesses them (why not Chechnya? why not Sudan? why not Nigeria?), they can give you an answer that stops just this side of anti-Semitism. Israel-Palestine is the one where the "capitalist" world of the West (and, by implication, the Jews who run it) meets the underprivileged victim peoples of the South. Jews thus get to pay the price for the West's depredations since the Middle Ages, most of which they were on the receiving end of.
Oh, well, that's only fair, then. Here's a quote from the sage Jose Bove:
It was thus alarming to see Bove, after a pro forma denunciation of anti-Jewish violence, informing viewers of the TV channel Canal Plus that the attacks on French synagogues were being either arranged or fabricated by Mossad. "Who profits from the crime?" Bove asked. "The Israeli government and its secret services have an interest in creating a certain psychosis, in making believe that there is a climate of anti-Semitism in France, in order to distract attention from what they are doing."
All part of the Master Plan. The bad news?
Elisabeth Schemla, a longtime editor at France's center-left opinion weekly Le Nouvel Observateur who now edits the online newsletter www.Proche-Orient.info, says, "The anti-Semitism of the left is more dangerous than that of the right. They have power in the media, the universities, the associations, the political class." Schemla worries that a third of the candidates in the first round of the presidential election were strongly motivated by the conflict in the Middle East. As such, it is not the strong showing of LePen that is the most alarming development in the first round of the election, but the record-high score of the three Trotskyite parties on the hard left.
BULLETIN!: In this report, straight from the front, we learn that, in fact, the Nazis apparently did not torch the Reichstag, but merely took opportunistic advantage of that.
Amygdala will be back with fresh information on the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 shortly. Our latest information: France still believed to have lost; Bismarck a suspicious character; German empire still believed to be a poor idea.
EDWARD TELLER is 94. Whatever you think of him, he's a giant of the politics of 20th century nuclear strategy, and beyond.
At a reception for Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev at the White House on December 8, 1987, President Reagan introduced Teller to Gorbachev, saying "This is Dr. Teller." When Teller reached out his hand, Gorbachev stood frozen and silent. Reagan then added: "This is the famous Dr. Teller." Still without shaking hands, Gorbachev said: "There are many Tellers." Indeed, there are.
LAZY GENERALIZATIONS: Although they've been in my permalinks for quite some time, I've not made occasion to link to the very fine Tres Producers blog before, despite many excuses to. There's more than enough spiffy writing and thinking laid out across the entire current page that I will simply declare that they're another political blog I highly recommend, and you should hie thee forth when you've finished sucking every last morsel of wisdom from the bones of my words and archives, and enjoy their words as well.
I have spoken.
No, wait, I wrote.
I declared, that's the ticket. I do declare. Lawdy.
MY BLINDNESS: Here, and particularly here is explained my inability to understand just how extremely left-wing/liberal and pro-Palestinian biased the New York Times, run by the al-Rosenthal family, in a town where Jewish readership is unimportant, is. I particularly liked the commenter who implicitly labeled me as "ultra-left and anti-Israel."
Here (scroll down quite a ways through about six long items) we find a quite lengthy expostulation of my inability, due to my fallen standards, to see the extreme right-wing, conservative, bias of the New York Times.
That these were posted on the same day is particularly excellent.
THAT WACKY SHEIK OF ARABY: Everyone blogged this days ago, but I was busy, and I'd like to get it into my record, anyway.
Al-Buraik, a Wahhabi cleric, is closely tied to Prince AbdulAziz Ben Fahd, the king's youngest son, and member of the Saudi delegation accompanying Crown Prince Abdullah on his current visit.
Al-Buraik was the host of the two-day long telethon raising funds for Palestinians, which raised $109 million. He is also the host of "Religion and Life," a program on government television Channel One and on MBC television owned by Prince AbdulAziz Ben Fahd. Al-Buraik said on the tape that the money raised would go to Palestinian fighters.
The following are excerpts of the tape: [...] On Jews and Christians he said: People should know that Jews are backed by the Christians, and the battle that we are going through is not with Jews only, but also with those who believe that Allah is a third in a Trinity, and those who said that Jesus is the son of Allah, and Allah is Jesus, the son of Mary.
About America he said: I am against America until this life ends, until the Day of Judgment;
I am against America even if the stone liquefies
My hatred of America, if part of it was contained in the universe, it would collapse.
She is the root of all evils, and wickedness on earth.
Who else implanted the tyrants in our land, who else nurtured oppression?
Oh Muslim Ummah don't take the Jews and Christians as allies.
Jewish women as slaves he says: Muslim Brothers in Palestine, do not have any mercy neither compassion on the Jews, their blood, their money, their flesh. Their women are yours to take, legitimately. God made them yours. Why don't you enslave their women? Why don't you wage jihad? Why don't you pillage them?
THE TYRANT: Mark Bowden, author of Blackhawk Down wrote a must-readpiece on
Saddam Hussein, the Anointed One, Glorious Leader, Direct Descendant of the Prophet, President of Iraq, Chairman of its Revolutionary Command Council, field marshal of its armies, doctor of its laws, and Great Uncle to all its peoples, rises at about three in the morning. He sleeps only four or five hours a night. When he rises, he swims. All his palaces and homes have pools. Water is a symbol of wealth and power in a desert country like Iraq, and Saddam splashes it everywhere—fountains and pools, indoor streams and waterfalls. It is a theme in all his buildings. His pools are tended scrupulously and tested hourly, more to keep the temperature and the chlorine and pH levels comfortable than to detect some poison that might attack him through his pores, eyes, mouth, nose, ears, penis, or anus—although that worry is always there too.
J-3 OUT: That's not an insecticide ingredient, or spot remover.
No, wait, maybe it is. "J-3" is the Operations position in an Army TO (Table of Organization), and "the" J-3 is the Director of Operations for the Joint Staff, that is, the the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Since the Chiefs are not in the chain of command, but merely advisors to the President and Secretary of Defense (not the other way around, as some numbnutz would have it), the J-3 of the Joint Staff is often the guy actually in charge of ordering actual military operations, along, of course, with the Commanders-in-Chief (Cincs) of the various regional Commands.
So Lt. General Newbold is quitting. This is extremely rare, and therefore makes one wonder. I dunno if it's that the guy is an actual warrior who doesn't like the Pentagon, or this is covering, something, or what, but it sure isn't the act of your usual ambitious general-type.
This is an interesting view into current Pentagon culture:
Some in the Pentagon speculated that Newbold was fatigued by Rumsfeld's management style, which has been variously described by Pentagon officials as "hands-on," "brutally honest" and even "abusive."
"It is a completely different atmosphere from the previous administration, where our opinions weren't challenged," said one officer, who added that he considers the new skepticism to be healthy for the military.
Newbold denied this was a factor. As a tangent, one can only imagine how "healthy" such "skepticism" might have been considered if it came from the previous administration. I'm sure, of course, that the opinion that it is "healthy" is now universal throughout the building. Of course. Without doubt. Who doesn't welcome outside criticism?
5/02/2002 01:14:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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THE PRESIDENT: Good morning. Thank you for joining me here in Crawford. As you know, I spent a good portion of yesterday in the company of Saudi Arabiac Crown Prince Abdullah. And while he departed hastily to return to his beloved sand people, I am pleased to claim that our meetings were very productive and friendly. I gave him the nickname of Prince Picnic Basket, on account of how that tablecloth he wears on his head looks like the one my mother used to spread out for fried chicken picnics under the oil wells back in Midland - and he called me Captain Zionist Pigboy. It was all very positive.
Laura and I were honored that the Prince came to our humble Texas home. Over the years, the Saudi royal family has played gracious host to the Bush family on dozens and dozens of occasions while we negotiated private and fabulously lucrative oil deals, so it really was a pleasure to finally return the hospitality. Of course, I was sad to be unable to entertain the Prince with the wonderful after-dinner beheadings I know he and King Fahd enjoy so much, but I did assure him that on his next visit, we would go down to the prison and electrocute a mongoloid or two. He seemed to like that.
Last time I quoted from this source, a Concerned Reader worriedly wrote to ask if I knew that this wasn't the real White House and that it was a satire? I resisted the urge to do my usual deadpan, but I might as well have, as he then wrote back to instruct me that I endangered my credibility by posting this sort of item, and, I think, making light of The President.
I am prepared, with a heavy heart, to live with this risk. I do it for you, readers, and for my dedication to freedom of the press. And for the children.
Of course, you'll see quite a change here if we get some of that Quorvis petrodollar flowing this way. Watch me denounce the treacherous Zionists then!
BIRDS OF A FEATHER SIEG HEIL TOGETHER: There's some debate over whether "Islamofascism" is a fair term. I think this contributes towards the answer:
Unlikely Allies Bound by a Common Hatred: Neo-Nazis Find They Share Views of Militant Muslim Groups on U.S., Israel
BERN, Switzerland -- A portrait of Adolf Hitler has long adorned the study of Ahmed Huber, a 74-year-old Swiss convert to Islam who lives outside this small capital city. After Sept. 11, he twinned the picture with one of Osama bin Laden.
"A provocation," said Huber, the voluble proponent of a strange alliance, one apparently strengthened in the aftermath of Sept. 11: Muslim fundamentalists and neo-Nazis, who share a hatred of the United States, Israel and Jews.
For years, Huber has been barnstorming the far-right circuit, speaking to a European congress of neo-Nazi youth organizations and Germany's far-right National Democratic Party. He has taken the same message to Aryan youth meetings in the United States.
And then there's his other identity. Huber works frequently with militant Islamic groups. He is a director of Nada Management, a Swiss company described by the U.S. Treasury Department as a financial adviser to bin Laden's terrorist network. He acknowledges having met al Qaeda operatives, but denies any financial role in the organization.
In an interview here, Huber said his role is to build a bridge between radical Muslims and what he calls the New Right in Europe and the United States.
"The alliance has come," Huber said. "The 11th of September has brought together [the two sides] because the New Right has reacted positively in a big majority. They say, and I agree with them 100 percent, what happened on the 11th of September, if it is the Muslims who did it, it is not an act of terrorism but an act of counterterrorism." [...] "There is a sense of sympathy, [a sense] that there is common ground," Horst Mahler, a member of the National Democratic Party, said in an interview at his home outside Berlin. "There are contacts with political groups, in particular in the Arab world, also with Palestinians. That's a fact that is not being concealed."
There's more in this story, which you may want to read. Did you know that William L. Pierce, author of The Turner Diaries "also has been interviewed regularly on Radio Iran by telephone from his compound in West Virginia"?
"We have a common cause: getting the U.S. government off the back of the rest of the world and getting the Jews off the back of the U.S. government," Pierce said in a telephone interview.
Gee, the peoples I've kept an eye on all my life are all getting together; how convenient for us all.
[...] By his account, a group of aging SS officers and members of Hitler's personal guard who meet every few weeks in the German state of Bavaria for beer and conversation recently bestowed the title "honorary Prussian" on bin Laden. They praised his "valiant fight" against the United States, Huber said.
One of the members called Huber after the meeting to tell him that henceforth they had decided to call the al Qaeda leader "Herr von Laden," Huber said.
MY GOODNESS. A shame I don't have any, though. Goodness, that is. I'm amoral. I read it right here:
People who do not think our government should vindicate Judeo-Christian morality should not vote for believing Jews or Christians. On the other hand, people who believe in morality should probably not vote for nonbelievers, who are practically by definition amoral. (One hardly needs to point out the absurdity of trusting the presidential oath of someone who, not believing in God, can not feel themself bound by the oath. )
Mr. Judd appears unfamiliar with the fact that presumptive Presidents, Vice-Presidents, and assumers of lesser offices are offered a choice as to whether to "swear" their oath before God, or to "affirm" their oath, without reference to God, just as people are offered the same choice in courts in the US before testifying.
He also seems unaware that people can, and do, logically construct and adhere to moral systems without a belief either in his particular God or in any God.
As a secondary note, I believe he'd find on examination that this:
And Federalism is not an end goal of conservatism, it is merely a means of achieving conservative ends.
is also a false statement, or at best, an incomplete one. Conservatives', as they say, mileage varies; many do indeed hold that limited power to the federal government, and upholding of power to as local a level as possible, is indeed a principle, an end in itself, insofar as most principles are, though they are usually, of course, in service to yet more primary principles.
Of course, I can't truly understand this stuff, as I'm amoral. While we're at it, would you non-Christians stop cluttering up the country? You don't understand it, really. (And one might as well quit this "Judeo-Christian" usage; if everyone else is a foul amoral non-believer, it's silly to pretend that the under 5% of the population that is Jewish, the overwhelming majority of whom are non-religious, have much in common with the Truly Moral People, and that this won't be noticed once a proper cleanup is under way.)
Two posts below, incidentally, well, it's been quite some time since I've seen the term "egghead" used derisively; gives me a warm glow of nostalgia, it does. I also learn that abortion is a, of course, "holocaust." This in a post that refers to "cheapen[ing] and the culture further degraded."
DEPUTY DIR FOR OPS GETS CHATTY: James Pavitt reportedly said:
A top Central Intelligence Agency official has warned Americans that a new terrorist attack is unavoidable, despite all efforts to prevent it and the fact that the CIA is now "stealing more secrets" than ever.
"Now for the hard truth. Despite the best efforts of so much of the world, the next terrorist attack -- it's not a question of if, it's a question of when," CIA Deputy Director for Operation James Pavitt told an academic conference earlier this month.
"With so many possible targets and an enemy more than willing to die, the perfect defense isn't possible."
Pavitt said mounting foolproof countermeasures against terrorism would require sacrificing many civil liberties, which make American society great, and, as a result, would produce a system that, in his view, "is not worth defending."
Of course, many say this has already happened, or inevitably will happen. It doesn't look that way to me.
The warning was contained in an address delivered by Pavitt, who is in charge of all clandestine operations conducted by the agency, at an April 11 conference at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. The CIA released its transcript over this weekend.
Interestingly:
"Today, the year 2002, I have more spies stealing more secrets than at any time in the history of the CIA," he said, adding that the agency was now training more than 10 times as many operatives than just five or six years ago.
In other CIA related news, L. Britt Snider has quit as head of the Congressional investigation into 9/11. Y'know, that's the investigation that Doesn't Exist so far as some blogs have noticed, since the only reliable source of information is Congressional Rep. Cynthia McKinney; the fact that I've mentioned this investigation and Snider a number of times over months, well, Never Mind.
I read this AP story about interrogation techniques and head games at Gitmo a couple of days ago, but I do love the lede:
As interrogation techniques go, the recommended opener from a 1963 CIA manual - "My little man, you are not of much concern to us" - has gone the way of trench coats and truncheons.
Great conversation opener for endless conversations, really.
I'LL HAVE WHAT WYDEN'S HAVING: Your Senate at work:
Lunch orders for a meeting of the Democratic Policy Committee
SEN JEFF BINGAMAN - dry tuna on a bed of lettuce with lemon wedges SEN BYRON DORGAN - dry tuna on a bed of lettuce with lemon wedges SEN RON WYDEN - Crab Louis SEN HILLARY CLINTON - chef salad with no cheese on the salad, cottage cheese on the side SEN. PATTY MURRAY - fruit salad and a chocolate chip cookie, Diet Coke SEN. FRITZ HOLLINGS fruit plate SEN MARIA CANTWELL - veggie burger SEN PAUL WELLSTONE - veggie burger SEN TOM DASCHLE - Nothing SEN DANIEL AKAKA - Nothing SEN MARY LANDRIEU - Nothing SEN TED KENNEDY - ham and cheese on rye with lettuce, tomato, mustard on side, Diet Coke. SEN KENT CONRAD - Tuna salad on toasted wheat, with lettuce, Swiss cheese, soup, salad, apple pie, Coke
How do Daschle, Akaka, and Landrieu expect to keep the lunch industry of America going? Are they communists?
And what's with Murray's cookie and Diet Coke? Typical muddle-headed liberal, obviously, unable to make up her mind. Now, Kent Conrad, there's a hungry man; must be all that flying back and forth to the Dakotas, and that lousy airline food. But: tuna with Swiss cheese?
Summary question: does Pepsi have the Republican franchise?
TRY THE EYE OF TADPOLE instead. BBC monitored this:
Harry Potter fans in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk are believed to have been poisoned after drinking a "magic potion" inspired by the series of books about a boy wizard.
Local police suspect that older children stole copper sulphate from a school laboratory and fed it to younger children in a Potteresque initiation ceremony.
"What does the Communist Party stand for now?" he asked matter-of-factly. "Nothing. Stability maybe. But really no ideals at all."
It does stand for one very communist thing: staying in power, and keeping the Party in charge. In keeping with that goal:
Current reformist impulses have their roots in speeches by President Jiang Zemin last year in which he warned that the party had to "stay in step with the times," and also his campaign for what he called the "Three Represents."
The basic message of that campaign, now trumpeted in slogans throughout the country, was that the Communist Party should no longer just represent workers but should represent "advanced productive forces, advanced Chinese culture and the fundamental interests of the majority." That is, the party can be all things to all people, promoting the interests not just of workers and farmers but of wealthy entrepreneurs as well.
Here's an interesting thought to see voiced in China:
China's courts and banks are still primarily beholden to the party, for example, making it hard for them to respond to market needs.
"Unless the government effectively reforms itself, things like the reform of state-owned enterprises and attempts to end corruption are bound to fail," said Mr. Chi of the research institute, who favors greater judicial independence and more democratic methods for selecting officials.
There are various other interesting details in this story. It would be wonderful to have a reliable crystal ball to know if China will some day make a successful non-violent transition to a true democracy, but there are still plenty of ways for that to go wrong. Especially the "non-violent" part.
5/01/2002 07:18:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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THE PLOT: Ramzi Muhammad Abdullah bin al-Shibh is believed to know a lot about September 11th.
More than seven months after the attacks, the mysterious life and confounding disappearance of a man at the center of the plot provide a case study in the ability of Al Qaeda to plan operations unobtrusively, communicate secretly and behave with discipline, attributes all the more dangerous after indications from the Tunisian synagogue bombing that the network may be reactivating.
DEPT. OF EVILTHINK: Vowing that the most important children to protect were imaginary children, and
Attacking a recent Supreme Court decision as "a dangerous window of opportunity for child abusers," Attorney General John Ashcroft pushed today for new legislation that would ban computer-simulated pornography and withstand judicial scrutiny.
"Tragically, this decision of the court to reverse Congress's prohibition of virtual child pornography has left law enforcement at an extreme disadvantage in the campaign against all child pornography," Mr. Ashcroft said.
How does that work?
"In a world in which virtual images are increasingly indistinguishable from reality, prosecutors are now forced to prove that sexually explicit images involving children were, in fact, produced through the abuse of children, an extremely difficult task in today's worldwide Internet child pornography market," Mr. Ashcroft complained today.
It's shocking. Damn these courts! They want you to prove that someone was harmed, in order to prove that something is a crime. This is outrageous! Really, isn't it enough for prosecutors to be able to point a finger and declare guilt? Shouldn't thinking things we find disgusting be a crime? It's for the children.
Representative Mark Foley, a Florida Republican, appeared with Mr. Ashcroft and said he hoped the new legislation would pass Supreme Court muster. "Pedophiles do not have a First Amendment right to gawk over exploited children, real or virtual," Mr. Foley said.
Let's try that again, more slowly. People do not have a right to look at drawings, computer-generated, or otherwise, of non-existent children. Because they are disgusting people, with sick sexual impulses. Therefore drawings of imaginary characters must be made illegal.
There's no doubt that if a telepathy machine were invented, people such as Mark Foley and John Ashcroft -- and there are a ton of people who would agree with them, maybe even you -- would instantly seek to see it used to ferret out Sick Thinking, and make it illegal. After all, it would enable us to catch, far more easily, these evil-thinking people. And that's all that matters.
The lawmakers who embraced Mr. Ashcroft's position seemed impatient with legal nuances. "The court's ruling was a huge disappointment to everyone working to protect children," Representative Tom DeLay, Republican of Texas, said today. "The child advocates all over the country know that the consequences of this activity caused irreparable damage to children. Congress's clear intent was to ban any depiction or image of children in sexual situations."
No, not children. It's still illegal to even possess such pictures, let alone produce them, let alone abuse a child. The only topic here is protecting imaginary children. I suppose it's entirely fitting that this seems Alice In Wonderland, eh?
(One reader mentioned protecting one's children from their pictures being so altered as to be put in a sexual context; fair enough, that, and that's appropriately dealt with by giving the right to sue for a civil offense of unauthorized use of one's children's images; I have no problem with that at all; it hardly need be widened into a general criminalizing of drawing and using computer images of wholly imaginary people. )
I last addressed this topic, by the way, here and here.
Addendum: I was reminded in e-mail by zem that "the Supreme Court ruling only struck down two of the three prohibitions in the 'virtual child porn' act; the remaining restriction bans pictures which have been altered to place an 'identifiable minor' in a sexual context - which makes the civil litigation you propose unnecessary." Excellent point.
MENTALLY ILL POLICIES: I commented Sunday on the NY Timesstory on the horrors of New York State psychiatric group homes, an absolute must-read if you have a cell of compassion in your body for anyone ever consigned to such hell.
Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn and Manhattan said yesterday that their offices were investigating adult homes for the mentally ill in New York City to determine whether poor conditions in the homes resulted from criminal conduct by their operators and health care providers.
F.B.I. agents have begun interviewing current and former workers at the homes, and prosecutors said they would focus on whether the operators or health care providers had defrauded federal aid programs, siphoning off money that should have been spent on care for the residents.
Meanwhile:
...Gov. George E. Pataki and his aides staunchly defended their supervision of the system.... [...] The homes shelter 15,000 mentally ill people, most of them in New York City and its suburbs. An estimated $600 million, mostly federal money, is spent annually on the residents. [...] [The Times] found that they had become little more than psychiatric flophouses where untrained workers looked after severely ill people, and medical fraud was common.
The Times found that at those homes, 946 residents had died from 1995 through 2001, including 326 people who were younger than 60.
Asked for records of any investigations into deaths at the homes, the State Department of Health was able to produce files on only 3 of the nearly 1,000 deaths. Under Mr. Pataki, the size of the New York City inspection office was drastically reduced until the administration learned of The Times's investigation. It then hired a consultant to try to improve enforcement.
[...]
[Advocates] asked that the state increase the $4 daily allowance that it gives the homes for residents' personal items, like clothing. [...] The Times, in an article on Monday, described Seaport as one of the city's worst adult homes, and detailed how workers said they had engaged in the widespread fabrication of records. Roughly one resident of the home died every month from 1995 through 2001, with 58 the average age of death, The Times's investigation found.
In testimony during a previously scheduled appearance before the Assembly Health Committee, Dr. Novello said she was unhappy the homes received only $28 a day from the state for each resident, and that untrained workers, not nurses, distributed medication.
There's not much use in giving the operators of these homes more money without some way to increase the likelihood the money will actually be spent on patients, not simply used to increase the profit margin. How to best fix? I'm not sure.
Create an adversarial ombudsman system that gets a tiny proportion of that money when it makes sure the money is spent on patients? It's difficult to find objective markers to tie incentives to, and one doesn't want to simply increase the familiar kind of audit-culture that Chris Bertram has been writing about so well of late. (My mom spent her life working for the NYC Board of Education, the last part as head of the Reading program at Erasmus High School; I know about the audit-culture of non-profit organizations.)
What's needed is a piece of the system to solely look out for the interests of patients, that is as large as necessary to do the job, as small as possible so as to minimize the bureaucracy it inherently is, and that is, of course, incorruptible. Sounds like we need Grey Lensmen. Failing that option?
THAT WACKY MIDEAST THING: Jim Henley comments on Tony Judt's NYRBpiece. Though Jim doesn't, I have to disagree with this line of Judt's:
There will be no Arab right of return; and it is time to abandon the anachronistic Jewish one.
I don't see Israel ever abandoning the acceptance and solicitation of Jews everywhere to make aliyah and immigrate to Israel. It would remove Israel's raison d'etre and core identity. It isn't going to happen unless Israel changes so drastically it might as well cease calling itself "Israel." To not understand this is to lack all understanding of Israel.
Nor, for that matter, would I support such a change. In this month of world-wide anti-semitic attacks, to call for the end of Israel as the homeland of the Jews, the place to go to live with fellow Jews in the only Jewish State, and the only place that will always take in Jews, would be madness; one might as well simply abandon the place now, and advise all Jews to scatter, as to call for it to cease being the accepting Jewish homeland.
To say that the right of return is "anachronistic" is to speak nonsense so long as there is serious anti-semitism in the world. When we've seen the last of that, let me know, eh?
I have no problem seeing the Palestinian mirror image of this, either, despite the differences in various non-parallel ways. I don't expect Arab people who regard their "true" home as Haifa or wherever in Israel proper, to let go of such feelings within their lifetime or for any fixed number of generations. No, Israel can't admit all their descendents as citizens, and remain Israel. Yeah, that's part of why we got a problem.
But forget them; I say it's easy to spot remote-controlled bloggers, who have Pavlovian responses to various known stimuli. ("The-Big-Me-was-the-worst-president-ever." "It's-all-about-the-oil-pipeline." "Soon-Jordan-will-rule-the-West-Bank-again." "Colin-Powell-is-Neville-Chamberlain-I-tell-you." "Gore-is-a-robot-not-like-me." "This-proves-bombing-Afghanistan-was-evil.") Throw them certain news items, and the Auto-Response is cued.
With the Senate split over whether to ban human cloning for medical research, an influential Republican, Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, broke with President Bush today to join Democrats in supporting the science.
[...]
"I come to this issue with a strong pro-life, pro-family record," he said. "But I do believe that a critical part of being pro-life is to support measures that help the living."
The Senate is expected to vote on human cloning by the end of May. Lawmakers on both sides of the debate say that the outcome — with roughly 40 senators supporting the research, 40 opposing it and 20 undecided — is too close to call.
Harry and Louise, the fictional couple who helped doom President Bill Clinton's health care plan, are back at their kitchen table.
But this time they are arguing for cloning for research, and they are already competing for airtime with new opponents: Harriet and Louis, who oppose cloning for any purpose.
The same actors who portrayed Harry and Louise in the original advertisements are in the latest ones, both created by Goddard Claussen Porter Novelli.
"What's with this stem cell research debate?" Harry asks Louise. She says that a bill in Congress would put scientists in jail for working to cure the niece's diabetes.
"Is it cloning?" Harry asks. She responds, "Nooo . . . uses an unfertilized egg and a skin cell."
The counteradvertisement, a 60-second radio spot created by Stop Human Cloning, rebuts that.
Louis says, "But their ad says they're only using a human egg and a skin cell," to which Harriet replies, "Well, that's how you make a clone."
William Kristol, chairman of Stop Human Cloning, said: "It's important to have a real debate about human embryonic cloning, not to hide behind euphemisms and deception. That's why we're releasing this response ad to set the record straight."
Of course, debates by fictional couples in under fifty words is always a helpful way to consider any topic. Unfortunately, one thing proven in modern politics is that pithy sound-bites work. Harry and Louise's first appearance was an archetypical example.
A team of scientists from Norway and the United States say they are developing a technique that transforms one type of cell from the body into another type without using cloning or embryonic stem cells.
The scientists say they have made human skin cells in a test tube behave as if they were immune system cells, by bathing the skin cells in extracts of the immune cells. In more preliminary work, they have been able to get skin cells to behave as if they were nerve cells.
"We can take a skin cell from your body and turn it directly into a cell type that you need to treat a particular disease," said Dr. Philippe Collas, the leader of the team, whose work is being published today in the journal Nature Biotechnology.
HOT SPRINGS, Ark. (AP) -- When a suspected drug dealer on the lam tried to hide out in a small wooden house, the occupant squealed on him.
[...] Agent Todd Sanders saw Barajas jump from a second-floor balcony to the yard below and then jump over a chain-link fence.
Sanders and agent Cory DeArmon pursued the suspect through several back yards before losing him. That's when DeArmon noticed a pig causing a commotion -- Barajas was hiding in his house.
"The pig was not happy at all,'' Sanders said.
If the ununiformed pig had only been armed, he probably could have made the arrest himself.
Just kidding, by the way, about nomenclature in this story; I have the highest respect for our fine, upstanding, law-enforcing, pigs. Aagh, no, stop hitting me! Ow! Can't we all just get along?
NOSTALGIA STRIKES: I just received my first spam from the National Fantasy Fan Federation, better known as the N3F, founded by damon knight and Art Widner centuries ago, in the 1940's.
Announcing The National Fantasy Fan Federation Short Story Contest.
Needless to say, I've never asked to be on any N3F mailing lists or, in fact, had a single online contact with anyone regarding the organization. Next, will I get mail from their Birthday Bureau?
Here's a page for this generally quite useless organization made up of people who don't know how to find the rest of disorganized sf fandom. Recommended only for staying clueless about sf fandom.
I now have, by the way, 46 different Nigeria spam letters, and presumably more will come today. It's wonderful to be so trusted.
AUDIENCES SCALE, COMMUNITIES DON'Tsays Clay Shirky, whom I know primarily from days of community past on panix.chat. This is a tight essay you've probably read, or at least heard about.
Though both are held together in some way by communication, an audience is typified by a one-way relationship between sender and receiver, and by the disconnection of its members from one another -- a one-to-many pattern. In a community, by contrast, people typically send and receive messages, and the members of a community are connected to one another, not just to some central outlet -- a many-to-many pattern.
[...]
As a result of these differences, communities have strong upper limits on size, while audiences can grow arbitrarily large. Put another way, the larger a group held together by communication grows, the more it must become like an audience -- largely disconnected and held together by communication traveling from center to edge -- because increasing the number of people in a group weakens communal connection.
This speaks to weblogs:
The inability of a single engaged community to grow past a certain size, irrespective of the technology, will mean that over time, barriers to community scale will cause a separation between media outlets that embrace the community model and stay small, and those that adopt the publishing model in order to accommodate growth.
A Washington State agriculture official who was touring China a few years ago handed out bright green baseball caps at every stop without noticing that none of the men would put them on or that all the women were giggling.
Finally, a Chinese-American in the delegation took the man aside and informed him that "to wear a green hat" is the Chinese symbol of a cuckold.
[...]
Even stabbing chopsticks into a bowl of rice and leaving them there (an act of hostility among Chinese because it signifies death) would be laughed off (nervously) by locals unless it was done with obvious intent.
[...]
He recalled that during his days at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong the firm ordered expensive clocks to give as gifts commemorating the closing of a deal. The firm's local staff caught the mistake: to "give a clock" in Chinese sounds the same as "seeing someone off to his end."
[...]
Besides clocks, giving umbrellas is taboo because doing so is homonymous with a phrase that means the person's family will be dispersed. Books, too, are unlucky presents because "giving a book" sounds the same as "delivering defeat."
China's many dialects multiply the risks. Shanghai natives chuckle at Va Bene, an expensive Italian restaurant that recently opened in town, because the Italian name meaning "it goes well" sounds like Shanghainese for "not cheap."
Color is another cue that can send an unintended message. One multinational company giving gifts from Tiffany replaced the white ribbons on the famous jeweler's robin's-egg- blue boxes with red ribbons after the company's Shanghai employees pointed out that white in China signifies death, while red is lucky and is used for celebrations.
Picking numbers for everything from product prices to telephones is also tricky. Avoid four, a homonym for death in Chinese, and load up on eights, a number that is pronounced the same as "making money" in the southern Cantonese dialect.
But even an experienced Sinologist like Mr. Clark was mystified when his Beijing workers objected to pricing a product at 250 yuan. It turned out that in northern China, calling someone "250" is to say the person is nuts. [...] In the south, people tap two fingers on the table to say thanks, but people in the north might think the gesture is just a nervous tic.
One wonders if advice on dealing with Americans is given to Chinese business people: "Avoid picking your nose in front of them; they find it disgusting. Do not spit on them; they do not like it. Do not ask if you may have intercourse with their mothers; they will not take it as a compliment." And so on.
4/30/2002 03:44:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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TOPIC A-S: Useful article on Islamic anti-semitism, its history and how it relates to Islam itself.
Stay in a five-star hotel anywhere from Jordan to Iran, and you can buy the infamous forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Pick up a newspaper in any part of the Arab world and you regularly see a swastika superimposed on the Israeli flag.
Such anti-Semitic imagery is now embedded in the mainstream discourse concerning Jews in much of the Islamic world, in the popular press and in academic journals.
The depictions are not limited to countries that are at war with Israel but can be found in general-interest publications in Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that have signed peace agreements with Israel, as well as in independent religious schools in Pakistan and Southeast Asia.
Arab leaders, for their part, have long rejected the accusation that their state-controlled press, universities and television stations promulgate anti-Semitic views.
ON DESPISING GENRES is a fine piece by Ursula K. Le Guin (pay attention to the spelling and spacing of her name, boys and girls, since apparently only 5% of people manage this complex piece of iteration). Were I more awake, I'd give some counter arguments as to virtues of genrification, since it's not a one-side argument. But I'm not, so read this spiffy piece, which Bill Humphries points us to.
And Sherri Tepper and Margo Adler. Um, anecdotes, murfle, suppress.
There will be plenty more within the field, of course, particularly in both of the main news magazines of the sf field, Locus and Science Fiction Chronicle.
STRING 'EM UP, BOYS: In discussing yesterday's murdering of Palestinians by Palestinians, Haaretz casually mentions:
Most of the Palestinians who have been murdered during the intifada due to accusations of collaborating with Israel did not recently work as Shin Bet informers, an Israeli source said yesterday. In most cases, these victims had no connection with Israel's security establishment or with former Israeli collaborators.
Recently, an atmosphere of despair and rage in the territories has encouraged some frustrated organization operatives to search for scapegoats, the source said. The murder of these suspected collaborators, including former collaborators who returned to the territories, are sometimes accompanied by sexual abuse, the source said. Investigations during the first intifada established that just 3 percent of the hundreds of Palestinians murdered as suspected collaborators actually worked for the Shin Bet.
Yesterday:
The three Palestinians were brought by about 20 Fatah operatives to Hebron's a-Salam street, where Zaloum had been killed. They were executed in cold blood in front of an angry group of local residents who later desecrated the corpses.
"The gunmen sprayed the collaborators with machinegun fire. Bullets penetrated various parts of their bodies," a witness calling himself Mohammed told Reuters.
"This is what these collaborators deserve. They betrayed the nation and have been eliminated," said one of the gunmen.
WHARTON, Tex., April 28 — For more than a century, Jewish families have gathered in this unlikely spot along the bottomlands of the Colorado River to study Hebrew, master the Torah and celebrate their history as one of the oldest Jewish communities in Texas.
But on Saturday, members of the Shearith Israel Synagogue met for the last time. Their congregation is disbanding, their distinctive star-shaped synagogue is to be sold, and their religious objects will be scattered among Jewish organizations across the state.
[...]
"A rich man in New York named Jacob Schiff encouraged us to come to Texas," recalled Mary Meyers Rosenfield, 91, who moved with five other families to Wharton from Minsk, Russia, around 1915. "He said New York was too crowded with Italians and Irish and other Jews, but that there was plenty of room in Texas.
Reportedly some of my relatives came from near Minsk. I do wonder how I would have turned out as a native Texan.
Instead of contemplating anti-semitism, it's comforting to consider this:
"If the Christian community had not nourished the Jewish community here, it could not have survived," he said. "The Jewish community didn't pick Wharton because there was anything special about it; other communities just weren't looking forward to having Jews in their midst, and consequently we didn't flourish there."
Although Wharton is richly endowed with Methodist, Baptist and Lutheran churches, the residents always seemed to welcome the Jewish community, Mr. Wadler said.
"On the Jewish High Holy Days," he said, "most of the shops on Main Street would be closed, and I've heard more than one story of people waiting until the following day to shop out of respect for our religion."
It's a nice change to read this sort of story, and I'm trying to remember to do that.
Incidentally, Wharton is "known primarily as the birthplace of Dan Rather and the playwright Horton Foote."
THE BIG ONE: Britain has revealed some of its formerly top secret plans and estimates for dealing with a nuclear strike during the Fifties and Sixties.
It estimated that a successful Soviet night attack on main population centres using 10 hydrogen bombs, each of 10 megatons, would kill 12 million people and seriously injure or disable 4 million others. "This would mean the loss of nearly one-third of the population."
[...]
But the Strath report did conclude that if what was left of the population could get through this initial critical period then it would be possible for Britain to make a slow recovery despite the destruction of half its industrial capacity.
"The standard of living of the reduced population, although substantially lower than at present, would still be well above that of the greater part of the world. The country would be left with sufficient resources for a slow recovery."
The bake-off for the editorship of Slate, an online magazine owned by Microsoft, has concluded, and Jacob Weisberg, the Web site's chief political correspondent, will take the cake.
WHERE ARE YOUR PRIORITIES, MAN?: Public congrats to Dr. Frank, but this "wedding" thing seems like a pretty flimsy excuse for not blogging. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one!
And you expect us to still be waiting around to read you when you get back, after you've gone off on such a trivial excuse?! Humph! Well, I, for one, just can't be sure. Not posting because of some -- what is the term? -- woman. As if she can please you as much as getting a bunch of links. What's the blogosphere coming to?
I'M A GENERAL, MYSELF. Generalist, anyway. Moral of this story? Work hard, do your job well, be knowledgeable, talk good bullshit, and for quite a while you can get almost anywhere.
Stories of Great Impersonators always interest me. Don't most people feel some degree of Impersonator Syndrome, after all? But these people get to tell inspiring stories of overcoming that.
GOODBYE, PIGLET: George Alec Effinger has died, I'm very sorry to say. He was a helluva writer, and in our few fleeting exchanges, I always found him terribly nice.
When I was a young fan, at one of my first sf conventions, the 1973 Lunacon, there was a Young Turks panel, to highlight three little-known, just starting, up-and-coming young writers. The moderator was the Guest of Honor of the convention, Harlan Ellison.
The panelists were George Alec Effinger, Gardner Dozois, and Jack Dann. I don't recall if I'd been reading Effinger before that, or not. I think so, but at this point, I couldn't swear it. But for me, he was there more or less at the same time I was finding my way into the sf community, and now another contributor is gone.
IDIOTS: These sort of fools give people with a proper understanding of the Constitution, the First Amendment, and civil rights, a bad name.
Of course kids in school have a right to private prayer, vocal or not, so long as they don't disrupt class or other school activities. Of course a kid can say grace vocally, so long as she's not, like, screaming or acting disruptive, over her food. The widespread lack of understanding of our civil liberties guaranteed by our Constitution in the US is simply shocking. It's particularly shocking when a school board doesn't understand the First Amendment. The ACLU would be happy to explain it to them: you, as agents of the state, can't act to interfere with religious expression, either in one direction, or another.
THE TIMES IS SO BIASED!: This is the sort of article that those convinced the NY Times is left biased will point to, while other articles by Ginger Thompson from Venuzuela will cause those on the left to swear that the Times is the dupe of corporations, the US Embassy, and the right.
It was not just political differences that stirred Ramón Rodríguez to reject the coalition led by business leaders that forced President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela out of power briefly last week. It was the sight of them in the newspaper on Saturday.
"All of them oligarchs," said Mr. Rodríguez, a street vendor, using the term by which the country's poor masses describe the wealthy white minority. "Couldn't they have appointed one person like us?"
Outraged, he went out to join the protesters who poured from the slums and tore through the streets to seize the national palace and put President Chávez back. Within 24 hours, Mr. Chávez resumed his presidency.
"If they rise up again," Mr. Rodríguez said, referring to the elite, "then we will rise again too."
[...]
Although this is a country rich in oil and natural resources, some 80 percent of the people live poor.
Yet Mr. Chávez's opposition, while led by business executives, draws on an increasingly mobilized middle class of office workers, unionized laborers, even some military officers. They, too, have grown into a combative force.
Mr. Chávez, with his tan skin and curly dark hair, embodies the racial mixture of Venezuela. Some 67 percent of the people here are mestizos, a mixed race of the whites, blacks and Indians who are the nation's minorities. Economic and political power, however, remains concentrated in the hands of whites.
My most recent idea: the Times should rename itself. The New York Rorschach Blot. In context, I think Thompson's reporting has been on the balanced side. As usual, I see screams from both sides as to how "obviously" terrible her reporting is. This is today's story about trying to find out the truth about the killings, by the way.
4/28/2002 10:56:00 PM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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VOULEZ-VOUS, ER, UNION AVEC MOI?: Quebec Plans to Legalize Same-Sex Unions. I had the vague idea that the conservative Catholic culture there would have caused them to hold off on this, but it's nice to see I underestimate the Quebecois. I'm surprised that British Columbia and Ontario are behind the curve on this.
The province of Quebec is planning to give legal status to unions of same-sex couples, Attorney General Paul Bégin said today, but they will not be called marriages.
Quebec will become the second Canadian province to legalize civil unions of same-sex couples. Nova Scotia was the first.
So, two things to remember: in neither case is it marriage, and Nova Scotia smoked salmon isn't lox. Okay, then.
So, like, "marriages" are "uncivil unions," then, right?
CAN YOU MENTION MY NEW BLOG, PLEASE?: My rule of thumb is to ignore these mails. They come too often, and, jeez, who wants to encourage more plaintive requests? Besides, who needs more blogs? We're full, go away.
Okay, just kidding. Let's try a new tack. Howard Owens' new blog is promising, and now I've mentioned it. So, Howard, I'm sure you want to hit my Paypal Button now, right? :-)
Have you ever wanted to come up with a great evil plan, but just never had the time or intelligence? Well your prayers have been answered, because now with the Evil Plan Generator, you can come up with any number of plans in no time at all to wreak havoc upon the world!
PLEASE BE ORDERLY IN THE QUEUE: The line forms here to be the next space tourist to the International Space Station. Shuttlesworth, who is up now, paid about $20 million, reports say. So I only need 3,999,996 more Paypal donations! (Or more, as you can pay whatever lesser amount you like; thanks to Kevin for being the Fourth Contributor Ever this morning.)
Ms. Garver, a former NASA associate administrator for policy and long a space enthusiast, is hoping to get businesses, foundations, educational organizations and others to pay for her ticket.
THE DARK SIDE OF THE FORCE: COPYRIGHT. Updated story on how LucasFilm is dealing with fanfiction in film form. Unsurprisingly, while Lucas Hisself judged a fan film contest, only Star Wars parodies and documentaries allowed; no straight stories set in his universe. Rating five Claudes, fans not altogether with this aspect of Jedi training.
My reaction: yup, I'd like to see looser chosen enforcement of copyright -- but the law makes that problematic -- and I'd like to see the legal restrictions lessened in time-span. On the other hand, encouraging people to make up their own universes has its own positives. Use the Creativity Force, Luke.
HOME SWEET HOME. TO DIE IN. Psychiatric "group homes," in New York, that is. Stomach-turning, outrageous story of the horrific conditions of these places, many of which are larger than most state mental hospitals in other states. Endless paragraph after paragraph of people left to die, and their deaths not even investigated.
Oh, yeah, all the homes are privatised, and the owners are raking in huge profits, while the patients are left to die of heat stroke with no air conditioning, murder each other, and die in countless other uninvestigated ways. This is Willowbrook all over again, on a far larger scale. If someone can explain to me a solution for this that doesn't involve state regulation and enforcement, I'd be interested.
