Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a "traitor" since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting in 1974, as well as a variety of other work experience, but have been, in recent years, recurringly housebound with insanely painful now-sporadic (when I have meds) gout, an enlarged heart, and other health problems, particularly including lifelong recurring major clinical depression and bipolar disorder. I'm also sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer or researcher. I'm available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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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
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"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.
Current Total # of Donations Since Blog Began: 618
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 30 sign-ups; 24 cancellations; Total= 6
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 7 sign-ups; 3 cancellation; Total= 4
Patron subscribers to date at $50/month: 10 sign-ups; 6 cancellations; Total= 4
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, Abi Frost,
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
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
I am not the person to review this movie. I have never seen the "Scooby-Doo" television program, and on the basis of the film I have no desire to start now. I feel no sympathy with any of the characters, I am unable to judge whether the live action movie is a better idea than the all-cartoon TV approach, I am unable to generate the slightest interest in the plot, and I laughed not a single time, although I smiled more than once at the animated Scooby-Doo himself, an island of amusement in a wasteland of fecklessness.
[...]
I pray, dear readers, that you not send me mail explaining the genius of "Scooby-Doo" and attacking me for being ill-prepared to write this review. I have already turned myself in. Not only am I ill-prepared to review the movie, but I venture to guess that anyone who is not literally a member of a "Scooby-Doo" fan club would be equally incapable. This movie exists in a closed universe, and the rest of us are aliens. The Internet was invented so that you can find someone else's review of "Scooby-Doo."
FINE LINES: Jim Bennett discusses his Anglosphereophilia, and how it differs from Anglophilia, but, here:
Anti-Americanism has itself been globalized, with a sort of McChomsky franchise in every city.
Would you like vegan fries with that, made by unionized workers paid a living wage using organic potatoes bought at the co-op (progressive values a must!)? Slow food only, of course! Hey, hey, ho, ho, fast food must go! Buy McChomsky's!
You'll particularly love the colorful red-headed figures of Professor Chomsky in the Children's Revolutionary Non-Competitive Playground Area! He's lovable, yet anti-imperialistic! Peace!
BERKELEY AND THE EVOLUTION OF THE POLITICS OF PROTEST: Karen Alexander has an interesting piece on why anti-semitism has been so virulent at San Francisco State University and UC Berkely that's worth reading in entirety. But here's a 'graph that leapt out at me:
As UC Berkeley philosophy Professor John Searle--who in the '60s became the first tenured faculty member to back the Free Speech Movement--lamented to The San Francisco Examiner on the movement's thirtieth anniversary, "The saddest thing was that it gave a whole lot of people a model of political life which is totally unrealistic. They wanted to keep sitting in buildings and then finding that policies change."
It's an interesting counterpoint to the report I linked to here. Then there's this:
Of the nearly 27,000 students enrolled at SFSU, there are only 50 to 60 Palestinians, estimates Fadi Shamieh, a student organizer of the General Union of Palestinian Students. UC Berkeley, which boasts a student body of 31,000, has fewer than 1,200 students of Arab descent. But Arab students have found eager allies among the Bay Area's preexisting, off-campus lefty groups. The pro-Palestinian organization at UC Berkeley, for instance, receives assistance from Left Turn (a Socialist group), the Revolutionary Communist Party, and the International Socialists Organization (ISO). The pro-Palestinian camp at SFSU also benefits from such outside help. "I don't know their background or their history," SFSU Palestinian activist Shamieh says of his ISO allies, "but all I know is they support us in anything we do."
I mention this to try to explain to some of my lefty friends that this is just one example of why I can't remotely view "leftism" as in the slightest an unmitigated good, any more than can I so view "rightism."
And as just one example of why "socialist" isn't a an auto-good word, either, no matter that it's not "communism" nor "Stalinism." (Hi, Charlie Stross!) This sort of thing is hardly the only reason, of course -- I'll leave discussion of economic systems, and their political implications, for another time, post, and the river -- but it's an example in front of me this minute.
Meanwhile I recommend this story for some facts on one way the "hard left" has a large thread of evil running through it, and has no more claim to Virtue Though Proclamation than, well, fascism.
SECRET SERVICE AGENTS FLEEING SERVICE, UNSECRETLYaccording to US News &WR.
[...]
Defections in the elite corps of White House countersnipers, who stand watch on the roof of the presidential mansion, and even by K-9 officers, are further testing the agency's limits, sources say. After the TSA was created in November, so many uniformed officers began applying for jobs online from White House computers that the Secret Service blocked access, allowing officers to view application forms but not complete them.
I hope their protective measures are generally more effective than that sort of boneheaded move.
Secret Service brass refused time off for some officers to go to TSA for job interviews, according to service insiders. So one night, frustrated TSA recruiters showed up at the Secret Service Uniformed Division guard booth at the northwest gate of the White House to speak with job candidates.
Maybe not. There's a lot more in this cover story.
Special Agent A. T. Smith was the head of Hillary Rodham Clinton's White House detail after serving on the Presidential Protective Detail (PPD). According to several sources and a divorce pleading filed by Smith's wife at the time alleging adultery, Smith was conducting a widely known extramarital relationship with Catherine Cornelius, President Clinton's cousin. Cornelius worked in the White House scheduling office around the time of the Monica Lewinsky affair. Smith accompanied Cornelius to numerous White House social events and eventually married her after the divorce from his wife.
Man, I wish I could have worked in the Clinton WH; it was one partying place.
Merletti at one time was head of Clinton's detail. So was Stafford. In affidavits provided to U.S. News, six current Secret Service agents stated that Merletti and Stafford, while protecting Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, were widely believed to be involved in extramarital relationships with women who worked in the White House.
Who doesn't want a Big Strong SS Agent (TM)? It's hardly unique to the Clinton WH: remember Susan Ford, President Ford's daughter, marrying the head of her protective detail? How about the first Bush Admin and President Reagan?
In Los Angeles, an agent guarding former President Ronald Reagan was found guilty in 1997 of having sex with a 16-year-old girl, possession of methamphetamine, and violently resisting arrest.
The case came to light when the girl's father–a close friend of Agent Timothy O'Brien's–saw his daughter returning from the agent's house next door one morning, wearing only pajamas. Testimony indicated that O'Brien had sex with the girl for hours, often night after night, then gave her tabs of methamphetamine, or "speed," to help keep her awake during school the next day. When the girl's father confronted O'Brien, the agent drew his service weapon and threatened to shoot him, says William Pounders, the Los Angeles Superior Court judge who presided over O'Brien's trial. O'Brien was arrested at gunpoint but only after a brawl with two officers, in which one was injured. While O'Brien was not charged with perjury, in court, he lied repeatedly, says Richard Rosenthal, the Los Angeles County prosecutor who handled the case. "He was the worst perjurer I think I saw," Rosenthal said, "in 15 years of being a prosecutor." Pounders says, "In 18 years as a judicial officer, I have never had another case involving so many violations of so many different laws by someone who should have been above reproach."
You can't make this stuff up, and have it believed. How about this White House?
In just the past few months, there have been several instances of Secret Service agents' driving under the influence of alcohol, even to their posts at the White House.
This White House is a happen' place, too:
Secret Service agents assigned to the elite Counter Assault Team (CAT), which responds to any attack on the president, sometimes watch pornography on White House satellite channels in the "band room" in the basement of the executive mansion. That's where the CAT stashes its weapons and the Marine Band keeps its instruments. When the president and first lady retire for the night, several sources say, agents will often "put some skin on." Other agents watch pornographic videotapes on the ground floor of the mansion but only after posting an agent as a lookout, the sources add.
And the story goes on. Geez, given the access the SS has to the private lives of protectees, ya gotta wonder what sort of prurient interest they might take in some. Are Presidential Family sex tapes going to show up sometime in the future? This could explain the selection of John Ashcroft!
6/15/2002 09:40:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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White House advisers say their proposal for a department of homeland security will be a critical element in their election-year strategy to portray President Bush and the Republicans as moving aggressively to protect Americans from terrorist attack.
To sell the message to voters and to pressure Congress to rally behind the plan, the White House intends to dispatch cabinet members around the country this summer and is already preparing slogans promoting the new department.
In an example of how Republicans view security as a potent political issue, the National Republican Senatorial Committee this week began broadcasting a television commercial promoting the work of Representative Saxby Chambliss on a terrorism subcommittee and saying that for him, "national security has always been a top priority." Mr. Chambliss, of Georgia, is favored to take on the incumbent Democratic senator, Max Cleland.
This is not a surprise, but it makes me feel unclean. You can't ask for bipartisan support on your bipartisan plans to protect the nation, and then do this. It's sickening, and, of course, breathtakingly hypocritical.
But far worst of all, it's so bad for the nation, words fail me. It's the opposite of asking people to act in the best interests of the nation over political advantage. It's completely destructive to that.
And that, ladies and gentlemen, truly moves me to feel that, if this play continues, these people should be thrown out of office, and people who actually place the interests of the nation first, installed.
"Really good policy is really good politics," said Mark McKinnon, a White House adviser who was Mr. Bush's chief media consultant in the 2000 campaign. "It's the right thing to do for the right reasons."
So wrong, even the "is," "to," and "the" are wrong. Yes, good policy is good politics, in the sense that if you get good results, it's good for you, but, no, no, no, it doesn't mean "we should trumpet our efforts on an issue we swear is bipartisan as why you should elect only our partisan side."
"It also throws a huge blanket over the entire domestic agenda. The domestic agenda right now is security. It's covering up everything else."
"HOMELAND" IS A CREEPY, GERMAN, UNAMERICAN WORD, points out Mickey Kaus, seconding Peggy Noonan (!). When you have these two agreeing -- and I've yet to see an American say "gosh, I like this term 'homeland'!; why didn't we hear more of it before?" -- you know it's pretty surely right. (Sure, England has "the Home Islands," but a) it's not the same term, and b) much as we have in common, the US is neither England, nor Britain, nor the UK, nor the British Isles [and, yes, British readers who don't know me, I can easily explain the differences; thanks for asking].)
If "homeland" is the wrong word, what's the right word? The problem, of course, is that the right word is taken. The right word is "defense." In a linguistically honest government, what's now the Department of Defense would become the Department of War, which is the best description of what that institution is, and the projected "Department of Homeland Security" would be called the Department of Defense, which is the best description of what it is.
Works for me. Of course, the "Department of Defense" replaced and consolidated the former Departments of War and Navy in the tremendous National Security Act of 1947, which also created the National Security Council, CIA, Air Force, and pretty much our entire contemporary set-up, so there would be wonderful irony in using this present reorganization to restore One Of The Classics.
6/15/2002 08:35:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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55 CANCRI: That's the address where a nice Jupiter-type planet lives in a nice Jupiter-type orbit, a mere 41 light-years away, just discovered. This means it's quite possible an Earth-type planet, or at least a Mars-type planet, is in the proper orbit, as well. My proposal: we make plans to drop by and say "Hi! We're your new neighbors! Here's a a nice babka. Can we borrow a cup of milk, and a million tons of hydrogen, please?"
6/15/2002 07:31:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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"Shukan Jitsuwa sent its hacks to Nagoya to check out the poop on the Paco Paco. They were greeted with a woman who bent over backward while thrusting her pelvis skyward. Her female partner stood in between her spread legs and they ground their crotches together. Nearby another pair of women drove their pelvises into each other and leaned back as they rocked away to the heavy beat of the music. This is apparently the most popular form of dancing the Paco Paco but other variations include riding on top and doggy style. Hundreds of women split into pairs to perform the dance, while men scream, rant and cheer into megaphones as they watch."
DON'T SLEEP THROUGH THIS STORY: Too much sleep is as bad for you as too little.
New research suggests that sleeping too little — or too much — can be the death of you. Results from two studies show that adults who get seven to eight hours of shut-eye a night live longer and are less likely to develop heart disease than people who slumber shorter or longer.
[...]
The new studies — both out of Boston — support this connection, but pinpoint seven to eight hours as the optimal amount of nightly sleep rather than the five to seven suggested by the earlier report.
[...]
In one study of 4,541 men and women, people who slept for nine hours or longer were 70 percent more likely to die over a 14-year period than those who slept seven to eight hours. And those who slumbered for six hours or less had a 50 percent higher chance of dying.
Of course, the full story goes on to make clearer that no cause and effect has been established, and that even the link is not fully proven, and one explanation is that some people have a deadly underlying condition that causes them to sleep longer. So don't worry too much, yet. And be sure not to lose sleep over it.
6/15/2002 06:11:00 AM |permanent link| | Main Page |
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RENFREW, IS THAT YOU?: Like Dracula or vampires? Then you want to visit the Dracula theme park!
BUCHAREST, Romania –– Tourism officials rejected criticism Friday that construction of a Dracula theme park in Transylvania threatens a nearby medieval citadel.
Dracula Park is to be built in Sighisoara, hometown of the 15th century prince Vlad the Impaler, who inspired novelist Bram Stoker for his practice of impaling captured Turks and other enemies on stakes.
[...]
The park, to be privately funded, will cost about $15.6 million, with an additional $19 million needed for infrastructure improvements.
The park will include amusement rides, a golf course, a Gothic castle wired with spooky effects, a zoo, horseback riding, restaurants and shops.
The government hopes the park will attract tourists and improve the region's ailing economy.
Can't wait to see what's served in the snack bar: love them spiders! Presumably the restaurant will specialize in steak tartare.
I'm still trying to work out the Dracula/golf tie-in, but obviously the course can only be open at night. I can see some of the obvious miniature golf holes, though, with coffins everywhere!
And a Loove Motel nearby, featuring Dracula gigolos: a must!
STATISTICS AND DEATH, AND WHAT MATTERS Justin Weitz of The American Kaisernotes:
According to Jerusalem Media & Communications Center, a Palestinian research organization (which isn't too keen on Israel), 37 Palestinian women were killed between September 30, 2000 and May 7, 2002. This is 2.8% of all Palestinians killed in that period. During the identical period, according to figures issued by Israel's Foreign Ministry, 126 Israeli women were murdered by Palestinians. In other words, 25% of the total Israelis murdered were innocent women. Another Palestinian research group, the Palestinian Monitor, recorded that 11.7% of those killed were children under the age of 15. 57.7% of all Israelis killed were under age 15. In other words, nine Israeli women were murdered for every Palestinian woman, and five Israeli children for every Palestinian child.
That's worth noting. Facts are always worth noting. Justin asks "where is the outrage?," and that's worth asking.
I also seem to recall that somewhere in the Talmud is a statement to the effect that "when a person dies, a universe dies," and thus each human life is of infinite value. And thus, in our statistics of death and killing, we must use infinities.
WELL, THIS IS DRAMATIC: The Washington Post reporter was right there when the car bomb blew at the American Consulate in Karachi:
Two or three minutes before a car bomb exploded outside the U.S. Consulate here this morning, a young man in traditional Pakistani dress approached me as I hurried inside to an appointment.
"Brother, this is the American Embassy?" the man asked.
He spoke in Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, but his accent said Punjab, the hot plains of the north.
"Yes," I replied, a little irritated by the question. I was already five minutes late for an 11 a.m. appointment. And then he had another.
"Do you know, are the offices on the right or left side of the building?"
Instead of an answer, I gave him a hard look. He was cleanshaven, but may not have shaved today. He was young, maybe in his early twenties. In his hands he held two sets of papers, with something between them. I could not determine exactly what, but it might have been a telephone.
It took me another minute or so to walk the rest of the way down the front of the consulate, turn the corner and pass through the security check to the main entrance.
I was standing at the receptionist's desk, watching her tell my host I had arrived, when the phone blew out of her hand.
In the same instant, the bulletproof glass of the reception door crashed a few inches to my left. The deafening roar of the explosion, perhaps 100 feet away, was followed by the screech of tires on Abdullah Haroon Road. Over the noise outside, you could hardly hear the screams of the receptionist, who was now under her desk.
[...]
The floor was so full of broken glass that there was nowhere to walk. From outside, voices emerged from the American Cultural Center next door.
"The library is nearly destroyed," said a woman. "The false ceiling has caved in. All windows have blown inside the library. Bookshelves and computers are all gone."
A pair of Marines appeared. They had thrown combat jackets over their T-shirts and carried guns.
"Don't worry," one of them said. "Everything will be all right. The situation is under control."
Perhaps it was. But outside, the scene was appalling.
[...]
Abdullah Haroon Road was littered with car parts, human parts and blood. Across the street, broken electrical lines sizzled and snapped in the grass of Freere Hall Park, a lovely, tidy expanse of green around a beautiful mansion.
A dozen cars smoldered where they had landed. One, a burgundy Suzuki, had flown into the air, flipped and come down atop a manhole cover that the blast had also flipped into the air.
The bomber had aimed at a space next to an open-sided police post. The policeman, whom I had smiled at a few minutes earlier, was gone. The private security guard standing there had survived, though the explosion stripped all the clothes from his body.
At the other end of the block, another police officer was killed by a metal shard that pierced his side. Motorcycles and scooters lay in the road, their drivers exposed to the full force of the blast.
And so on.
I've noticed how, nine months after September 11th, my reactions have long since calmed and changed from the first month afterwards, when I was in nearly constant trauma and tears. And how they've changed from a couple of months after that, when I was still jumpy as hell, and would have panic reactions when low-flying planes appeared overhead.
Sometime in January, I was reading Clancy's Sum of All Fears (which is damned different from the movie, I can tell you). I was fine with the book until I got to the point where the bomb, in the book, went off in Denver. And I suddenly, reading the descriptions, began to have a full-blown massive reaction.
Nothing like I've ever had reading a book before.
My heart began a full panic drumbeat. I burst out crying uncontrollably. I began shaking.
It all seemed entirely real to me, though I knew perfectly well it wasn't.
It took me a couple of hours to calm down, and, determined not to let it shake me permanently, I picked up the book again the next day, and although I didn't have an easy time for a bit, I was able to get through the remaining descriptions of the blast, and then, still just a bit shaky, the rest of the book.
I've not had a reaction like that since, but I was stunned at my own reaction to a piece of fiction. With all due respect for Tom Clancy, it wasn't the power of the writing that affected me, of course, but classic Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. And, mind, I was on Long Island on September 11th, several miles away from the WTC. But because I'd been in the building so many times, and once, as a young man, briefly worked there -- and then was just a couple of miles from where the plane in Queens went down not long after -- and probably because I have a vivid imagination, I found myself having such reactions.
I mention all this because after noticing at various times in recent months and weeks how much calmer and calmer I am about it all, sorta, kinda, when I read a vivid description of a bombing, such as the one I link to here, I benchmark and notice that: my heart begins to beat faster and faster. I break out in a sweat. I become a bit nauseated, and tears run to my eyes, and the urge to burst out crying rushes up.
Funny thing, the physiological panic response. Funny thing, me, I think. Too over-sensitive a lad. No excuse. But there it is.
And there we have the root of some of my obsessions.
I'm all for full reinstatment of the inheritance tax. The present Republican "war" Karl Rove has declared to permanently abolish it makes me angry, especially given the, in my view, perfectly reasonable Democratic alternative of raising the inclusion level.
But I don't fear its abolishment like I do seeing bloody limbs strewn around me, or having loved ones die, or being killed myself.
My fear doesn't cause me, one notes, to be, say, willing to surrender concern for civil liberties, or from thinking John Ashcroft an ass, and opposing many of his proposals and acts. And so on.
It's not my only concern. But it does affect my priorities of concern. Perhaps I'm just a coward. But there it is.
I JUST WANT TO SAY that aside from the fact that this headline -- Anti-Cloning Bills Stall in Senate; Vote Unlikely Soon speaks of a Good Thing, it make me happy, because it reminds me that I've time-traveled forward to the 21st Century.
HOW REASSURING: Again from the Washington Post, from Israel:
Indications of a significant recent buildup of Iranian and Syrian-backed Hezbollah forces along Lebanon's southern border with Israel, along with a rapid deterioration of humanitarian conditions inside Palestinian territories, have underscored the urgency of jump-starting a Middle East peace process, diplomatic sources here said yesterday.
Sources said signs of a variety of new weaponry, including missiles capable of reaching major northern Israeli population centers and of shooting down planes, have been detected along the border in recent weeks, together with the increased presence and activity of Iranian Revolutionary Guards in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. There was concern an attack into Israeli territory could be launched within the next several days.
ISRAEL'S NUCLEAR TRIAD: This doesn't really have significant strategic value just now, though in the not-distant future, it will. Israel, the WashPoreports, is arming its three new German-built submarines (Dolphin-class, Type 800, though the Post doesn't bother to say) with a new cruise missile which will allegedly be nuclear-tipped.
The key here is to preserve retaliatory capacity against a potential in the near future of Iran or Iraq or another adversary being able to take out Israel's ground-based nuclear force, presumably by nuclear missile strike of its own.
And thus our now-client state, to a degree, recapitulates Big Daddy's nuclear strategy (which, incidentally, was not at all the mirror image of the OpForce Soviet Union, who, although they had nuclear ballistic missile submarines -- Oscars, most significantly -- never depended on them for strategic retaliatory surety the way the US depended on the reliable preservation of Polaris and, particularly, Trident).
That this story has leaked is unquestionably absolutely deliberate; Walter Pincus, the writer has always had excellent military and intelligence sources -- he did some of the best reporting on Iran-Contra, which I collected when I was at Avon Books in the mid-Eighties, for a possible deal on an instant-book which never happened -- since Israel, of course, never admits to a nuclear force, thus putting off a diplomatic crisis over it, they have to have such material leaked to make the threat credible.
Regardless of reality. But the threat is useless if the message doesn't contain credible details, whether in the leak, or through other channels, to their enemies. Threats must be credible, or they're dangerously counter-productive.
Pincus's story also quotes extensively from Joseph Cirincione, author of a Carnegie Endowment for International Peace book, and director of the Carnegie Endowment's nonproliferation project, including this sound observation, which isn't paid enough attention to:
The book attributed Iran's decision to seek nuclear, chemical and biological weapons to its experience during its war with Iraq in the 1980s, when Iraqi President Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against Iranian forces. Iran is influenced by its "extended neighborhood [where] it sees Israel, India and Pakistan with advanced nuclear weapons" and Iraq's weapons program no longer subject to inspection by the United Nations, the book said.
Iran is not likely to give up nuclear weapons programs unless it perceives itself no longer under threat, or at least, that the benefits are greater than the risks. No more than the US and USSR started to make deals until they so felt. That's not an irrational attitude of the mullahs, much as the desire of some to kill all the Jews is (fortunately, they are unlikely to desire to risk the destruction of Jerusalem, which means biological and chemical weapons could still be used; we can only hope that they might actually desire to not risk killing untold number of Palestinians and Israeli Arabs, along with the Jews, but I wouldn't want to count on that). Meanwhile, there's deterrence.
Addendum: at risk of being overly rambly, here's some digressive material I wrote in e-mail to a friend: Those subs are cute little things, by the way: a crew of only 35, and can only go 20 knots (comparison: a US Los Angeles class can hit at least 31, possibly more, which is about the same speed most significant US warships can do, which means if you can detect them far enough away, all you have to do is run away before you're in the Israeli sub range of attack -- but while topline major power ships might do this, the ~60-mile range of the Harpoon missiles the subs can fire makes them lethal to pretty much anyone else -- and whether they might also carry anti-ship cruise missiles similar to Tomahawks, I've not yet looked into, but that would give them a longer reach for a sub attack than anyone but the US -- however, entirely limited by targeting capacity; they might be able to hit a ship 200 miles away, but only if something else told them exactly where it was, and kept reporting while ship and missile are traveling).
And really the only navy that's a significant threat -- capability -- to Israel is Iran, which has some fine left-over ships sold by the US to the Shah; all the other Arabs have only fast little missile ships, which are great against, well, freighters, or lesser missile boats (pretty much the key with missile boats is that whoever fires first wins, though both sides sinking each other is also likely) and a small threat to Israel's missile boats, but basically all the Arabs put together have pretty much zero anti-sub capacity (maybe a few helicopters).
But Iran's ships and Israel's missile boats play on opposite sides of the Suez Canal. Iranian don't tend to ply the Med, which is where the Israeli Navy solely operates (just imagine the IDF wanting to be dependent on using the Suez Canal, or sail all the way around Africa! Ha! Besides no reason for them to go anywhere else; particularly not the other size of the Canal, which would be unsupportably hostile in a war situation, unless the US navy had a carrier group supporting. Among other things, Iran has a lot of shore based anti-ship missiles (largely bought from China), not to mention a large Air Force.
And where else would the Israeli want to go? To fight North Korea? Brazil? The Israeli/threat naval situation is pretty much kids in a bathtub stuff -- but with new added missiles! Which does make the use of Israel of subs as nuclear strike launchers a new ball game.
The Big Thing I left out is that US and Sov nuclear missile boats were nuclear, and stay underwater for months; the Israeli subs are diesel, and thus can hide for only days -- but none of their opponents have a thousandth the anti-sub capacity the US do and Sovs did, and thus until either the Arabs string a SOSUS net throughout the Med, or have major radar satellites of their own, diesel-level hiding is sufficient.
NECESSARY LIMITS ON EXECUTIVE POWER: The WashPost gets it right:
The question is not whether the government can detain an enemy combatant bent on doing America great harm but whether it can designate anyone it chooses as such a person without meaningful review.
The government's position would be easier to swallow were it not actively seeking to frustrate judicial review of the president's designations. When the government detains a citizen as an enemy combatant, that person must be permitted to consult with counsel and challenge the lawfulness of the detention in court. Without that, every citizen is at the mercy of presidential whim. Formally, the government recognizes that federal courts have jurisdiction to consider the legality of detentions -- including military detentions -- in this country.
[...]
The idea of indefinite detentions of Americans who have not been convicted of any crime is alarming under any circumstances. Without the meaningful supervision of the courts, it is a dangerous overreach of presidential power. If such a thing were happening in any other country, Americans would know exactly what to call it.
The full piece is worth reading, as was their caution on the 10th:
The government's dilemma here is real. People bent on bringing terrorism to the United States, even U.S. citizens, must be stopped. Prevention may require acting before a suspect has actually committed a crime, or while the evidence is highly classified. It seems suicidal to argue that the government should have to release people bent on detonating dirty bombs.
Yet the government's actions in this latest case cut against basic elements of life under the rule of law. If its positions are correct, nothing would prevent the president -- even in the absence of a formal declaration of war -- from designating any American as an enemy combatant. Without proving the correctness of the charge before a court, the military could then detain that person forever. And having done so, it could prevent that detainee from hiring a lawyer to argue that the government, in fact, has it all wrong. If that's the case, nobody's constitutional rights are safe. The administration owes the country a more thoughtful balance; Congress's role -- the patriotic thing to do -- is to help find it.
Prominent Americans have issued this statement on the war on terror
Friday June 14, 2002 The Guardian
Let it not be said that people in the United States did nothing when their government declared a war without limit and instituted stark new measures of repression.
We Wrote A Letter. Bravo! Applause!
What bravery and courage! This changes everything! Who could not admire such personal sacrifice to take such effective action? Gandhi and Sgt. York would both faint in shame.
PSYCHO-CONSPIRACY THEORIST Michael Ruppert is taken down by frequent The Nation writer David Corn.
When I read, a while back, Ruppert's own website and writings, it was so plainly obvious on the face of it, to anyone familiar with signs of paranoid schizophrenia, that Ruppert obviously suffered from the disease, I was amazed that any intelligent blogger or reader could take him seriously.
I've subsequently considered that not everyone is as familiar with the signs of paranoid schizophrenia as I am (my father was a psychologist and psychiatric social worker -- and, not incidentally, a nutbar himself -- and most of my parents' friends were in that milieu, so I grew up sucking on psychology and psychiatric scholarly works). But, still.
...he can now take posthumous credit for having got the three great questions of the 20th century essentially "right." Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all -- the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism.
[...]
In Orwell's own mind there was an inextricable connection between language and truth, a conviction that by using plain and unambiguous terminology one could forbid oneself the comfort of certain falsehoods and delusions.
[...]
Anyone engaged in political and cultural wars should be very wary of party-mindedness and party allegiance: Orwell did briefly join a small leftist party in England but never wrote as a loyalist or mouthpiece and often published self-criticism of his previous positions.
[...]
He was an egalitarian and a socialist but thought of Stalin's great "experiment" (what a revealing word) as the negation of socialism and not as a Russian version of it. In The Captive Mind, written in the early 1950s, Czeslaw Miloscz wrote that Eastern European intellectuals, reading 1984 in clandestine editions, were amazed to find that its author had never visited the Soviet Union. How then had he captured its mental and moral atmosphere? By reading its propaganda, and by paying attention, and by noticing the tactics of Stalin's agents in the Spanish Republic. Anybody could have done this, but few had the courage to risk the accusation of "giving ammunition to the enemy."
BARE, INDEED: N. Z. Bear has a blogroll list based on number of incoming links. Fascinating to some of us bloggers, perhaps less so to others, butcha never know. Some of the ranks quite surprise me. Particularly that Glenn Reynolds so towers over Andrew Sullivan at 466 to 167. Me, I'm at 51. Of course, the site does caution that it's in beta, and "may contain inaccuracies." I suspect so; I just wonder by how much. Looking more closely, I conclude: a lot. These can't possibly be corrrect: JasonKottke (21), WilWheaton (21), for example. Presumably errors undercount, rather than overcount, though.
I imagine I could raise my ranking considerably if I believed in "trading links," as I'm asked on a daily basis to do, but: I Don't.
This is a hair's breadth from Eric's match with "Jane Galt." Is everyone "similar," or just bloggers, or what? Of course, I did more or less agree with ~18 of Eric's Top Ten Reasons I'm Not A (Left) Liberal/Conservative. (I think the second sentence of reason 6 of the first list is a bit over-stated, whether for punch or not, and I'm one of the few in the blogging world, apparently, who feels somewhat positive about Bill Clinton.) And Eric is an sf fan, and I did almost entirely agree with his porn esthete. On the other hand, I'm a moderate on gun issues who doesn't care passionately one way or another, but would argue with the extreme on either side, if I felt strongly enough to argue, and "Jane Galt" is distinctly considerably more conservative than I am. But, then, enneagrams aren't tests of opinion.
Eric divides bloggers into "thinkers," "linkers," or "diarists," or mixes, similarly to Steven den Beste's division a while ago. I'm distinctly a mix of linker and thinker, depending on mood, and not at all the diarist, though I will include personal experiences relevant to what I'm thinking or linking about, as occassion warrants. But you know this.
SCREWBY-DO: I'm not the only one who never found Scooby-doo in the least amusing, right? There are some other of us darned kids?
Now, Rocky & Bullwinkle, there was a funny set of cartoons, or, of course, The Simpsons, or if we're talking "kids adventure," the classic Jonny Quest, or....
MAINSTREAM STORIES ON BLOGGING: There have been so many of these in recent months that I long ago ceased blogging them; once they became an every-day affair, and clearly every venue that could remotely get an angle on a blogging story -- or a series -- such stories ceased being notable. This recent NY Timesstory on the now rather dated "rift" between the warbloggers and Old Tyme Bloggers is an exception, though, in that although the actual events largely took place almost years ago in Blogger Time, which is faster than dog years, which is to say, a couple of months ago, the story is reasonably accurate and decently, if not outstandingly, grounded.
Myself, I feel like a neither-here-nor-there, as I'm certainly not an Old Time Blogger, having only started in December, 2001 -- although I've been writing identical material on Usenet, and in newsletters and fanzines for, cough, close to thirty years (actually I first started writing for sf fanzines in 1971, when I was 12 , but the material was juvenile enough for a couple of years to be, well, come to think of it, quite comparable to my present stuff) -- but although politics, including the politics of war, is certainly one of my main topics, I also write, as mood and reading spur, about science, funny stuff, weird stuff, science fiction, history, general culture, a bit on sex, and just whatever strikes my fancy at a given moment.
So I'm kinda loosely affiliated with the "war bloggers," I certainly don't regard myself as wholly one, though I have more overlap with them than I do with techie blogs, as I'm not a techie (I'm highly interested in reading techie material suitable for us non-techies, but I can't offer a techie-expert perspective). Also, I surely don't write from a strong conservative, or even libertarian, perspective, though some entries, as some of my beliefs, are entirely compatible with one.
As usual, I'm just not comfortable with being encompassed by a label, whether in my politics, or "camp" of blogger. I is my own camp.
Everyone else, of course, is an identical clone, and as I am unique in my individuality, my blog is ever so superior to other blogs.
WHERE IS ZAMMAR?: This sort of thing -- and it's hardly uncommon these days -- gives me furious pause, as my opinions are distinctly ambiguous.
It would be terribly easy to take a position towards the absolutist, in either direction, and either say "well, he's a terrorist, and who cares about how he's treated, we need to be safe," or say "the only value is the preservation of civil liberties, and we mustn't compromise them an inch."
But while I don't care much about how actual terrorists are treated, in the sense of caring if they, as people, suffer some hardship, the problem here, of course, is the danger of allowing the government to unilaterally decide that they know certain people are guilty terrorists. Because sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't; sometimes they get it wrong.
And we can't, of course, simply not care because "these people" are Arabs, or Moslems, or, horrors, foreigners, and thus we are in no danger of being caught up in a Kafkaesque fiasco of confusion and mistreatment, as clearly some Moslems have. A) If they come for "them," sometime they may indeed, at a later date, come for us. B) It's inhuman to treat people differently based on Them not being Us.
This is not "political correctness," but simple humanity and justice, and, indeed, self-protection.
So the dilemma is how far to trust the government to make such determinations correctly, in secret? I'm willing to cut a little slack, but we need to carefully watch this sort of thing, and, despite dangers of not catching actual terrorists, draw lines, and have clear mechanisms for seeing they're not crossed. I'd like to see some transparency on what the policy is, and I'd like to know what the mechanism to make sure the policy is enforced. We may need to cut some corners, but we can't allow simple free rule for the US government to act in whatever arbitrary manner its agents desire. Elsewise the cure, though longer-term and more subtle, could indeed turn out to be worse than the disease.
On the other hand, while I'm entirely well aware of the history of FBI abuses in the past, I'm somewhat less concerned about information being gathered than I am about a) actual activities against people, such as being "disappeared" or held in custody, and b) what is done with information being gathered.
I have little objection to the FBI being authorized to follow-up on suspicious activity or statements or meetings, despite the potential for intimidation and abuse; what I'm more concerned about is how such information might be disseminated, what possibilities will there be to have it eventually corrected, how it might indeed be used to intimidate or threaten. Most of all, despite the horrors of J. Edger Hoover, which I'm quite well-read on, the worst events were harassment, down to the more or less deliberate killing of Black Panthers (not that I romanticize them, but deliberate killing can't be condoned, of course). Then, of course, there's how information plays into politics; one hopes we'll not sometime see "are you now, or have you ever been, a terrorist supporter?" Information-gathering is more of a potential abuse than a direct abuse; it's the use of information we need to be most concerned about, and then, even more, more dangerous infringements on civil liberties, such as the aforementioned questionable detentions and potentially worse (will we start assasinating terrorists?; one would need darned good reasons, such as saving immediate life, and one would need to be damned sure one is right).
