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; 22 cancellations; Total= 8
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,
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
WHY CONNECTING THE DOTS ISN'T EASY, no matter how wildly so it looks in retrospect. An excellent examination by Malcom Gladwell on the role "creeping determinism" plays in coloring our retrospective view of inevitability, and how it applies to September 11th, al Queda, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and future intelligence.
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. These points can't be emphasized enough.
THE LONG HISTORY OF ANTI-AMERICANISM is given an interesting look by Simon Schama, complete with a few tut-tuts of his own at the end. I'd not known the bit about Mrs. Trollope, however, and the derivation of her name becoming a common noun-insult.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 if the subject interests you.
Senator Christopher J. Dodd announced today that he would not seek the Democratic Party's presidential nomination in 2004, saying that a run would turn his attention away from working on critical foreign and domestic issues from the United States Senate seat he has held since 1981.
"Also, it has come to my attention that I stand less chance than Al Sharpton, and I have all the charisma of a rotted weasel corpse. But my hair does still look good, doesn't it?"
Read The Rest Scale: nah. Unless you want to read Dodd explaining that he's still Really Really Really Important. Really.
SADDER, NOW: I'm bummed. I really hate it when someone I've admired makes clear that he has long advocated something really stupid.
...or the thing he seems most keen to talk about the Columbia space shuttle explosion.
"They are calling it a disaster instead of a screw-up, which is all it was. They're calling these people heroes. The Columbia isn't a disaster. The disaster is that they're continuing this stupid program.
"One of the things I'm proudest of is, on my record That Was the Year that Was in 1965, I made a joke about spending $20 billion sending some clown to the moon.
"I was against the manned space program then and I'm even more against it now, that whole waste of money. And so, when seven people blow up or become confetti, then they've asked for it. They're volunteers, for one thing."
I shall close my eyes, lie back, and concentrate on his great songs of the Sixties. Sometimes denial isn't just that river... er, somewhere.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5 for more from Tom Lehrer. (Via Tim Blair.)
"I think the dome is amazing," said Shayne Clausson, a computer network technician from San Francisco. "Working and living in someplace this remote, this bizarre, it's only fitting that your habitat should resemble the set of some 1970's sci-fi thriller."
On a coming episode of the television show "Friends," here's what might happen. Ross arrives and starts to whine. Suddenly an armor-clad warrior rushes in and with a blast from a space-age weapon reduces Ross to a pile of twitching viscera. But the show must go on, so Ross pulls himself together and rises to complete his sniveling soliloquy. Just as he finishes, he is slaughtered again. Call this episode "The One Where Ross Is Repeatedly Annihilated by a Plasma Rifle."
Kewl. A real ratings winner! Unfortunately, the writer and people he describes have An Agenda.
[...]
On Saturday Mr. DeLappe and five fellow players will convene in cyberspace to perform "Quake/Friends." The actors will appear on the computer screen as typical "Quake" gladiators, but each will have assumed the role and identity of a "Friends" character. Then, using the game's instant-message system, they will re-enact the real show's 1994 pilot episode in the "Quake" space by typing and transmitting dialogue to other players' screens.
[...]
While the "Quake/Friends" actors won't fire their weapons, unsuspecting "Quake" players will notice that a game is under way and will be able to enter the show with their own guns blazing. In a game whose sole goal is to kill as many as possible, Monica will be mowed down and Chandler chopped in half.
And here we get to the Deep Point:
[...]
At the same time, by executing the six beloved "Friends" characters instead of anonymous warriors, "Quake/Friends" effectively exposes the shameful violence at the heart of many computer games.
(Roll eyes)
They're pixels! They're bloody pixels! There's no violence! It's all in your head! You want to ban wrongthink!
The "Quake/Friends" project is another instance of using a computer game as a medium for creative expression and cultural criticism. While the first examples were mostly commentaries on the games themselves, the latest projects have grander ambitions.
Please, save us from Grand Ambitions to tell you that The Artist Has Deeper Insight Into Morality Than You (You Decadent War-Mongering Bourgeois Pig).
Mr. DeLappe said he was motivated to combine the brutal "Quake" and the genteel "Friends" because both are pop-culture creations that "present a fantasy, a simplistic view" of the world. He said the "Friends" characters' happy life in New York is "this perfect existence, and it's totally fake."
It's a sitcom! OF COURSE IT'S FAKE!
We know!
To him the "Quake" violence is equally phony. "You're killed but you're instantly O.K.," he said. "There's no real consequences to it."
It would be so much more artistically meaningful if, you know, you actually had your arm blown off when your character is shot. Meanwhile, everyone is confused about this "reality" issue. Unlike the Artist involved, most of us can't actually tell the difference between a video game, a book, a movie, a still picture, and reality. Thanks for clearing that up for us! It Takes An Artist to expose us to these hidden, subtle, insights.
[more drivel snipped]
In 2001 Mr. DeLappe started "reading" antiwar poems into computer games like "Medal of Honor," a game that simulates World War II, in an attempt to provoke a reaction from other players.
Changed their lives, it did. Made them put down "violent" video games forever, and thus gentled their coarsened lives, and, as a side-benefit, prevented many future mass murders.
But first they shot Mr. DeLappe. Many many many times.
I'M SO RELIEVED: The official word is that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will not be tortured. Aren't we lucky that the Administration employs such a trusted and respected person as Ari Fleischer, so no one has any cause to wonder about this issue after he's pronounced upon it?
Meanwhile, over in Morocco:
"I am allowed to use all means in my possession" in interrogating a suspect, a senior Moroccan intelligence official said in an interview. "You have to fight all his resistance at all levels and show him that he is wrong, that his ideology is wrong and is not connected to religion. We break them, yes. And when they are weakened, they realize that they are wrong."
We are also reminded:
When the United States ratified the antitorture treaty in 1994, Congress also passed a law making torture committed in the United States or by an American anywhere a felony punishable by 20 years in prison.
YOU'VE BOUGHT THE WAR, NOW BUY THEtoy. Did you know that:
Colin L. Powell was an action figure before he was secretary of state.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5 for detail on war toys. Big disappointment: Colin Powell action figure does not have Kung-Fu Grip. Is there a Tony Blair action figure? Bet he has Kung Fu Grip.
In adulthood, most people lie routinely, if usually harmlessly, to get through the day. In one ongoing experiment, Robert Feldman, a psychologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has had people carry hidden video cameras and record their conversations over a couple of days. Watching the tapes later, the men and women tally their own deceptions. The average fib rate: three for every 10 minutes of conversation.
Read The Rest Scale: 25 out of 5 for interesting detail on pathological and other sorts of lying, including how to get anyone you want into bed with you in less than ten minutes! I was interviewed for this story on my long background as a CIA field operative! While I was on Europa! Where I poured Coca-Cola on David Brin's head!
CAN'T TELL THE PLAYERS WITHOUT A PROGRAM: Did you know there's an Iranian-backed guerrilla brigade in Northern Iraq?
The Badr Brigade is the military wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Founded in 1982 by Mohammed Bakr Hakim and based in Iran, the council is a voice for Iraq's Shiite Muslims. Iraq's Shiites, who are concentrated in the south, have been widely persecuted by Hussein's Sunni-dominated Baath Party. The brigade has 10,000 to 15,000 fighters.
Primarily active along Iran's border with southern Iraq, the Badr Brigade's arsenal, according to local intelligence reports, includes antiaircraft guns, 150 tanks, heavy artillery, Katyusha rockets and mortars. The organization is divided into military and intelligence wings run by Iranian and Iraqi commanders. It has had about 250 guerrillas in northern Iraq, also known as Kurdistan, since 2000.
Read The Rest Scale: 3 out of 5, to further complicate things. It's worth noting that:
Most of the tents around him were empty, and only about 70 fighters were visible, many of them carrying shovels instead of guns, and working to level the ground.
SEND US YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES YEARNING TO BE FREE, but if they're beaten women, return to sender.
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft has decided to reconsider the granting of asylum to a battered Guatemalan woman whose husband has threatened to kill her if she returns to her homeland, a senior Justice Department official has confirmed.
Ashcroft is also considering new gender-persecution regulations for asylum-seekers instead of a proposed set that was left hanging in the final days of the Clinton administration.
The regulations, proposed by Attorney General Janet Reno in December 2000, grew out of the case of the Guatemalan woman, Rodi Alvarado, who said she fled to the United States in 1995 after her husband repeatedly raped her, whipped her with electrical cords, broke windows and mirrors with her head, and vowed to kill her if she tried to leave him.
[...]
The law allows asylum only for foreigners who can show they face persecution in their home countries because of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Before leaving office, Reno vacated the board's decision and proposed regulations that would allow battered women to be granted asylum as members of a social group if they can show government complicity in their suffering. President Bush suspended this and all other pending regulations upon taking office.
Of course he did. Can't have any of that namby-pamby Clinton-Reno thinking around here. Most of these women are probably man-hating lesbian feminazis, anyway. Who would vote for Democrats.
Way to strengthen the notion that the US is a beacon of freedom!
One thing you can say about Ashcroft is that he's consistent (and Bush is responsible for his position).
Yes, asylum can be abused. But gender persecution is as real and terrible as racial persecution or religious persecution or any of the persecutions John Ashcroft actually believes in (the latter, clearly; the former is less clear).
Read The Rest Scale: 5 out of 5. Attention must be paid.
SAD, NOW: I belatedly note that Sarah Michelle Geller has confirmed that this is her last season of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer. However,
But the show may come back to life in some form: Its creator, Joss Whedon, is planning a spin-off that may include some "Buffy" cast members.
It will be pitched first to UPN, "Buffy's" home for the past two seasons; for five seasons before that, it was on the WB.
One hopes that said spin-off doesn't go the way of the long-rumored BBC Giles series and long-planned Buffy animated series.
Or, for that matter, winds up of the short-lived nature of most spin-offs (anyone remember just how many All In The Family or MASH spin-offs there were? Or, say, Beverly Hills Buntz?), though so long as Joss Whedon is in charge I have little fear of any production being of low quality.
Read The Rest Scale 1 out of 5, with slight spoilers on the current season.
gary farber is now a licensed master pundit gary farber is now a licensed journeyman pundit gary farber is so convinced that kos is "a fool gary farber is the only corflu goh not to have been chosen randomly from a hat gary farber is right gary farber is amused by a concerned citizen who writes to tell him that whitehouse gary farber is in gary farber is acceptable is to test it live gary farber is taken out of context gary farber is a busy guy gary farber is back after a hiatus gary farber is back gary farber is most emphatically unimpressed with easterbrook's arguments gary farber is back after a blog break gary farber is almost certainly working on that peter parker gary farber is less lazy than i am when he examines a post by steven den beste that i wasn't awake enough to quibble with when i read it gary farber is right on gary farber is fighting an uphill battle on a topic that you'd think would be a breeze gary farber is just plain not listening gary farber is my arousal center
THINGS I DID NOT KNOW AND DID NOT WANT TO KNOW DEP'T: From the first chapter -- the first paragraph, actually -- of By The Sword, a history by Richard Cohen of, well, guess what?
Remarkably quickly, they became an implement of sport: the oldest known depiction of an actual fencing match is a relief in the Temple of Madinat Habu, built by Ramses III around 1190 b.c., near Luxor in Upper Egypt. (To its right is an engraving of a pile of trophy penises, hacked from the enemy dead -- practice well, the sequence suggests, and this can be your reward.)
Oh, yes, please! I'd like fries with that!
Read The Rest Scale: 2 out of 5 if you're interested in the history of sword-fighting.
Blair: No. The first question is quite simply this: do you have any links with al-Qaida?
Bush: I do not.
Blair: The question is for President Saddam.
Saddam: As I told Mr Tony Benn clearly and simply, if I had links with al-Qaida and I enjoyed those links then I would not be ashamed to tell the world, but since I am ashamed to tell the world of this, it follows that I have no such links.
WHERE'S KHALID?: UPI says the CIA has flown him to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. This is plausible, given the large number of other al Queda suspects held there, but it sets aside, for the moment, concern that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has been handed over to a non-US country which has no qualms about full-scale torture.
I say "for the moment" because it makes the most sense to me that US intelligence would first want to exhaust all possible direct approaches, or should I say "methods," with him before taking the risk of letting a non-disinterested third party possibly muddy the waters. Additionally, such a hand-off is a useful threat that is no longer useful once played.
Mohammed was born in Kuwait; I've not specifically looked into Kuwaiti security procedures, but it's safe to say that they're not going to be more concerned with human rights than the CIA, I think.
Read The Rest Scale: 2.5 out of 5 for more detail.
IN MILITARY MATTERS, THE UN HAS SHOWN PRETTY GOOD JUDGMENTsays Kevin Drum of Calpundit, citing his earlier entry.
This startled me.
I'll say up front that I actually agree with Kevin's general point, which is that the UN, flawed as it is, is still worth dealing with, and often working through, on the political side (he doesn't even make the important case for the functional side, which is also flawed but useful), and shouldn't be given up on (though I'd emphasize that neither should it be ultimately relied upon).
But "good judgment" in "military matters"?
That would be the UN that withdrew the UN Emergency Force in 1967, causing the 1967 Arab-Israeli War? Very effective, that. (Note that UNEF was created on November 5th, 1956; the next day the British and French attacked. The UN didn't stop the Suez invasion; America did. What the UN did was give the okey-doke for war in 1967.)
The UNEF remained in the Sinai as a buffer until told to leave by Nasser in 1967. During the time they were there, 89 UNEF troops had been killed.
[...]
The UNEF left the Sinai in 1967 because it had agreed that if told to leave it would do so.
Good judgment, eh? Kevin cites the UN intervention in Suez as an example of UN success.
His next example?
Soviet troops invade Hungary on November 3. The next day the Soviets veto a Security Council resolution telling them to withdraw, but a General Assembly measure introduced by the U.S. is approved by a vote of 50-8.
That worked out equally satisfactorily. Good work, UN!
A bit later:
1968 - Czechoslovakia. Warsaw Pact troops march into Czechoslovakia on August 20. Czechoslovakia asks the UN for help but none is forthcoming.
Another curious example of UN military success.
1979 - Iranian Hostage Crisis. Iranian revolutionaries seize the U.S. embassy in Tehran on November 4. Both the General Assembly and the World Court call on Iran to free the hostages.
Another sterling triumph for UN military judgment.
Next on Kevin's list:
1979 - Russian Invasion of Afghanistan. Soviet troops invade Afghanistan on December 25. On January 7 the Security Council votes to condemn the invasion but the resolution is vetoed by the Soviets. On January 14 the General Assembly calls for withdrawal of Soviet troops, a resolution that is repeated in several subsequent years.
The UN is just on a streak of uncanny military success.
Kevin jumps to:
1999 - Kosovo. After years of UN dithering, NATO begins bombing of Serbia on March 24.
Curiously, Kevin doesn't mention Bosnia and Srebrenica directly as another example of good UN "military judgment." Possibly that's because when one googles on "Srebrenica" and "UN" together, the word "genocide" appears a lot.
Kevin's conclusion?
This is not a bad record.
I respectfully differ. I agree with Kevin that:
So let's not give up on the UN.
I agree despite the hideous record of the UN in military affairs; not because of it. Kevin's conclusion is based upon whether the Security Counsel or General Assembly produced a nice resolution. I'm looking at, you know, how many people died. Which is more important is left to the reader's judgment.
(Kevin is generally a quite sensible person, as in this post wherein he discusses the way so many pundits conjure up airy theories rather than allow for the fact that people change their mind. He is even gentlemanly enough not to suggest that perhaps many pundits and bloggers can't imagine such a thing because they are themselves nearly incapable of doing so. I won't suggest this, but others have!)
WHATEVER IT TAKES: Interesting look at plans for the growth of anti-war activities. Much is no surprise, but here's a disturbing, if unsurprising, quote, from "Larry Holmes, an organizer in New York for International ANSWER":
"People don't want this war, and they're giving us a mandate to do whatever it takes to stop it."
Some examples of that sort of direct action:
Campaigns to disrupt U.S. forces have also been launched. Besides the dozens of activists who have traveled to Baghdad to volunteer as "human shields" against a U.S. attack, nine Dutch antiwar activists were arrested Tuesday for chaining themselves to the gates of a U.S. military center outside Rotterdam. In Italy, hundreds of protesters occupied train stations and railway tracks for nearly a week to delay trains carrying U.S. military equipment from northern Italy to the Camp Darby military base near Pisa. Irish protesters broke through the perimeter fence at Shannon airport in January and damaged a U.S. Navy plane, causing other planes to divert their flights and refuel elsewhere. Trade union movements in Italy and France are pledging work disruptions and considering general strikes if war breaks out.
Some interesting history:
In Britain, according to organizer John Rees, several hundred activists first got together the weekend after Sept. 11. Most were from the hard core of the British left -- the Socialist Workers Party, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the anti-capitalist organization Globalized Resistance, along with Labor Party legislators Jeremy Corbyn and George Galloway. Within weeks, they had combined with representatives from two more important elements -- Britain's growing Muslim community and its militant trade unions. By October they had a name: the Stop the War Coalition.
Mind the timing here: getting together to protest the weekend after September 11th. September 11th was a Tuesday. Four days later, people hadn't finished dying in the rubble, yet, the plume covered NYC, and these folks -- who do not, mind, speak for most of the protesters this past month -- were already deep into planning. People who did come out to protest in the past month or so might want to be aware of this.
More than 50,000 demonstrators came out in London for an October 2001 peace rally; the same numbers protested in November against the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan. A demonstration last Sept. 28 brought several hundred thousand people to Hyde Park in London to protest war in Iraq and demand "Freedom for Palestine."
Yes, before any military action took place in Afghanistan, in October, 2001, while the plume sickened New Yorkers still, over 50,000 people came out to protest -- well, they didn't know quite what they were protesting yet, but against Bad Things happening in Afghanistan, where the Taliban/al Queda regime should be left to rule as the alternative was far more horrible, and besides, there was no proof that Osama bin Laden had anything to do with September 11th, and there was no proof he was even in Afghanistan, anyway, and, besides, even if and if, it could all be taken care of, and should be taken care of, with an indictment and diplomacy. Yay, peace!
And, of course, war in Iraq, "Freedom for Palestine," same thing, innit? Inextricable link, since it was a protest against injustice, and was equally concerned about Zimbabwe and Mynmar and Chechnya and... oh, wait, that didn't happen. My mistake. It's just that defending the Hussein regime and overthrowing the Zionist regime are the same thing. I guess.
I'd not previously considered the possibility that the basically middle class, honest, sincere, respectable, anti-war protests might spawn extremist offshoots akin to the Weather Underground or SLA, but, while I'd still consider it unlikely any time soon, here in America, at least, the possibility in this sped-up Internet age of flash crowds suddenly seems at least conceivable.
Please note this does not mean there aren't valid reasons to doubt the wisdom of war on Iraq and therefore valid reason to protest it. I have plenty of doubts about the outcome, and follow-through, long-term, myself.
I'm just noting that, while it's utterly possible to patriotically oppose the war, not everyone is thoughtful and reasonable in their opposition. (And if it isn't obvious, no, of course not everyone is thoughtful and reasonable in their pro-war stance, either; plenty of loons to go around on all sides, folks.)
CHIRAC MAKES FIRST STATE VISIT since the end of the Algerian war for independence in 1962 of a French President to Algeria.
I realize that I'm expected to make some sort of anti-French crack about this, but I actually simply think it's historically worth noting.
(If you want to be critical, I suggest starting in the direction of the dirty war against the Islamic extremists in Algeria, in which approximately one hundred thousand people are estimated to have died in the decade since elections were cancelled in 1992.)
Incidentally:
America, which suspended aid to Algeria after the cancellation of the 1992 elections and the ensuing bloodshed, announced recently that it would resume the sale of military equipment to the Algerian government to help it combat Islamic militants.
The EU has also been fostering closer ties with Algiers. Algeria supplies much of the natural gas European consumers rely on.
The recent history of Algeria is a striking example of how a war against Islamic extremism can, from both sides, be quite horrific. One can only hope we can do better.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 for details about a lawsuit against Allstate Insurance, and general trends including the overwhelming hostility courts have shown to age-based suits over other forms of discrimination.
My own view is that it is quite easy to defend the necessity and the justice of separating Saddam Hussein from his lethal devices, which is the same thing as separating him from his power, which is the same thing as aiding in the formation of a democratic government in Baghdad. The only genuine solution to the problem of the proliferation of nuclear, chemical, and biological arms is political development. It comes in many kinds, and often with assistance from the outside. (There is imperialism, and there is assistance from the outside. It is not naive to maintain the distinction, unless one thinks that the imbalance of power is itself an evil; but then one has surrendered the discussion of politics.) And the theory of deterrence cannot be responsibly applied to a dictator who has already used weapons whose use is famously not rational.
Morally, there is no significant difference between Halabja and Srebrenica. Both places were the sites of genocidal crimes that required decisive action by the international community, that is, by an American-led "coalition of the willing." There is a difference in scale, though, and in danger: Unlike the villain of Srebrenica, the villain of Halabja is in the position to perpetrate the same atrocity again, and worse. How can any liberal, any individual who associates himself with the party of humanity, not count himself in this coalition of the willing?
[...]
So can a liberal support this president in this war? I do not see why not. The United States, its needs and its duties, is larger than any of its leaders. The war against Saddam Hussein is just, and it is truly a last resort.
[...]
I cannot imagine any strenuous construction of liberalism that does not include the injunction to fight terror and to fight genocide. Liberalism is not a philosophy of innocence; and it should make tyrants quake, not smile.
Wieseltier, a lion of the left, has plenty more to say, including much that is not kind to George Bush, and the point that I've oft made, that Kim Il Jong is the argument for overthrowing the Iraqi regime before it can deter us.
It struck me as inauspicious that of all the committees in the Future of Iraq Project -- on water, electricity, agriculture and a host of other topics -- only the committee on democracy was deemed a failure.
KUCINICH, MOSELY-BRAUN, AND SHARPTON MAKE HOWARD DEAN LOOK ELECTABLEargues Ryan Lizza from Iowa. I happen to largely like Dean, except for his non-policy of simply being generally anti-war on Iraq (okay, then what?). I'd like to graft Lieberman's foreign policy onto Dean for a candidate I might be able to get behind.
But I have no fear: I'll find more reasons to dislike them all, along with my despisal of Bush/Cheney.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 if you want more discussion on the Democratic candidates and their chances in Iowa.
It was probably halfway through our five-mile tactical march, around the time my platoon came under combination machine-gun fire and chemical attack, that I realized just how utterly unpleasant war can be.
Darn it! General Sherman said it first: "War is unpleasant," he said with his mouth.
I was lying in the snow, fumbling for my gas mask, when it became evident that I probably wouldn't survive an N.B.C. assault (military shorthand for nuclear-biological-chemical warfare). In fact, according to the rules of the game, I was already a dead man, having failed to hold my breath, keep my eyes shut and secure the mask within the prescribed nine seconds. (Certain nerve and blister agents go straight for the warm moisture of the eyes.)
[...]
As prospective embeds -- journalists planted among America's fighting forces -- we were given a crash course in all things military: [...] and what to do with a comrade whose viscera are spilling out (don't try to put them back inside; just place the innards on the stomach and utter reassuring words).
[...]
''We don't want you to be a burden to the units you're attached with,'' said Brig. Gen. George Flynn, who runs the training command, in his welcoming remarks. The subtext was clear: nothing impedes victory like a bleeding reporter.
[...]
An invaluable section in the ''Coping With Captivity'' chapter advises hostages to smile, greet hostage-takers by name and determine common interests. ''Fear of dying is real, and it can become overwhelming, especially during the early phase of captivity,'' it explains. ''Fight despair and depression by keeping a positive mental outlook.''
"Hi! My name is Ted, and I'll be your hostage this evening. Do you have any hobbies? I'll bet we share some of the same favorite movies!"
[...]
One of my favorite battlefield tips was this: always carry a zip-lock bag for blown-off digits.
THE LIE OF DE-NAZIFICATION is well examined. (It's behind TNR's paid firewall; use "cypherpunk" for name and password to access.) This issue is one of my many obsessions.
...Frei underscores the persistent pressure that West German leaders, including prominent figures of the Protestant and Catholic churches, exerted (especially on American officials) to bring the process of denazification to an end and to grant amnesty to those already convicted.
[...]
Frei's contribution is to show that from 1949 to 1954, when democratically elected German politicians first had a chance to act, they passed "a series of parliamentary initiatives, legislative acts, and administrative decisions aimed at its vitiation." This Vergangenheitspolitik, or "politics for the past," lasted half a decade; and it rested on "a high degree of societal acceptance--indeed of collective expectation."
[...]
Frei documents the spirit of the time in many debates in the West German parliament. There the word "victim" often referred not to people who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, but to people who were considered to be "victims" of Nazism's overcoming--that is, previously dismissed officials and fellow travelers. The West Germans invented a new word for such people: Entnazifizierungsgeschädigten, "those damaged by denazification." The term included tens of thousands of persons formerly interned in American, British, and French prisons between 1945 and 1949, when the West German state was founded. Most of them were war criminals indicted and convicted by the Western Allies, along with Nazi criminals condemned in German courts. Judged by their reaction to these measures, other West Germans felt a general burden of wartime guilt lifted, and so, writes Frei, "those who had never personally been held accountable could consider themselves symbolically exonerated." For such persons, breaking with the past meant breaking not with Nazism but with denazification, and fostering "a historical myopia unintentionally aggravated by the war crimes trials." The result was "a triumph of silence," which was broken in waves from the 1960s to the 1990s.
[...]
One of the romantic notions of the New Left in West Germany was its belief that the United States and its anti-Soviet policy bore primary responsibility for preventing a timely anti-Nazi reckoning. Frei acknowledges that the Western Allies gave the West Germans permission to proceed with amnesty and integration; but in many cases "the Allies rejected past political measures desired by the Germans as exceeding the reasonable or acceptable," in particular concerning demands to pardon convicted war criminals. So while Frei takes into full consideration the leniency that characterized the reversal of international fronts from World War II to the Cold War, he gives even more attention to the continuing pressure on the Allies that was exerted by a depressingly broad spectrum of opinion in Adenauer's Germany--including the leading officials of the Protestant and Catholic churches -- to reverse or to ameliorate the results of the Nuremberg-trials period.
As of January 31, 1951, the amnesty legislation had benefited 792,176 people. They included people with six-month sentences, but also about 35,000 people with sentences of up to one year who were released on parole. Frei specifies that these figures include a bit more than 3,000 functionaries of the SA, the SS, and the Nazi Party who participated in dragging victims to jails and camps; 20,000 other Nazi perpetrators sentenced for "deeds against life" (presumably murder); 30,000 sentenced for causing bodily injury, and about 5,200 charged with "crimes and misdemeanors in office."
Support for these measures extended across the political spectrum. It included left-of-center Social Democrats who supported legislation for amnesty and integration to restore social peace. Frei writes that in these early years "not a single politician spoke up" to oppose amnesty as an infringement of the legal structures that the Allies created after the war in the wake of Nazi lawlessness. He argues that the legislation symbolized for the new democracy "a progressive delegitimation of prosecution of Nazi crimes" that encouraged yet more appeals for a "general amnesty" covering the worst sorts of crimes. Frei remarks upon "an almost universally shared conviction that the political purge imposed on the Germans by the occupation authorities had failed monstrously, was unjust in every respect, and needed to be ended as quickly as possible."
[...]
The Free Democrats, associated in the public mind with liberals such as Heuss and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, suffered a very dark chapter of their history in these years. Former civil servants from the Nazi era and even unreconstructed former high-ranking Nazis were able for a while to make it the leading respectable force supporting the amnesty program.
[...]
One of the most effective and deceptive tactics of the amnesty lobby was to claim that the Allied occupation trials amounted to an accusation of collective guilt. The amnesty lobby enjoyed a disturbing degree of success in obscuring distinctions among those accused of crimes during the Nazi era. By spreading the presumed guilt so broadly, those calling for amnesty managed to reduce the number of those "really guilty" to an absolute minimum in the public mind.
[...]
Yet in February 1951 Adenauer asserted -- as he had been asserting since the first year after the war -- that "so long after the collapse of the National Socialist regime, the distinction between politically exonerated and nonincriminated persons should be ended."
Why, yes. Surely a few months of internment was enough that after a whole five post-war years, all should be forgiven and forgotten.
[...]
In a debate in the Bundestag in April 1951, he said that the percentage of the guilty was "so extraordinarily minimal and so extraordinarily small" that "there has been no breach in the honor of the former German Wehrmacht.... No one may reproach the career soldiers on account of their earlier activities and, so long as they are to be employed in public service, place them behind other applicants if they have the same personal and professional qualities. The chapter of collective guilt for militarists alongside activists and beneficiaries of the National Socialist regime must be ended, once and for all."
It's this sort of bullshit and overt support for Nazism that made this issue a bugaboo of mine many years ago (along with the whitewashing of Hirohito and the militaristic tradition of Japan). Why?
The numbers of former Nazi officials able to return to government positions in West Germany as a result of the amnesty were daunting. By the summer of 1950, more than one-fourth of the section managers of new federal ministries were former Nazi Party members. By 1953, 30 percent of the positions in the national government, amounting to 15,000 jobs, were filled by persons who benefited from Article 131, which gave pension rights to officials who had served in the Nazi regime. Specifically, 40 percent of the Foreign Ministry, 42 percent of the Interior (i.e., Justice) Ministry, and 75 percent of the ministry dealing with Germans who had fled from Eastern Europe during or after the war were former officials of the Nazi government.
And there's so much more: the deep involvement of the Protestant Church, and of members of all the parties. Among the results:
One result, which was not to be undone until the historical scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s, was the persistence of the myth that the German military was not deeply implicated in the regime's crimes, or that it was an unwilling tool of a small number of Nazi decision-makers. As a result of the pressures for amnesty, the French and the British had emptied their prisons of Germans convicted of war crimes, and the United States did the same in 1958. Those released included doctors who were involved in experimentation on human beings and members of the SS who were active in mobile killing units.
PICKING WHERE TO LAND ON MARS: It's harder than you think.
The gigabytes of data, and their many interpretations, have made for lots of quibbling -- and very long meetings, like the Arcadia gathering in January. It produced a set of rankings now dubbed "the Consumer Reports guide to landing sites."
Landing engineer Mark Adler's favorite sites are those with the least wind shear, not necessarily ones with the best rocks, or even with any rocks at all. While geologists describe rocks on Mars as "the planet's history books" and "treasure troves," landing engineers call them "scary," "pointy" and "bad."
Read The Rest Scale: 4 out of 5 for nifty detail on how NASA is undertaking the task (hint: it involves lots of eyeballs). Decide if you prefer Meridiani, Isidis, Elysium, or Gusev Crater!
REMEMBER THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN?: After more than half his life in prison, over twenty-five years, after escape and recapture, turning 50, Christoper Boyce is out of jail at a halfway house, about to be fully paroled on March 15th.
Relevant fact:
Boyce and Lee are lucky. They were convicted before Congress eliminated parole from the federal system. Today, only 2,100 federal inmates are eligible for parole in a system that houses 165,000.
A very strong case can be made for keeping Boyce in jail for the rest of his life for his multiple crimes, and many will make it, and have no sympathy whatever with his having been given parole.
But as someone who believes in redemption, I'm inclined to think that over twenty-five years in strict prison, mostly in solitary, for someone who can be given credence for having truly reformed and presenting no danger to society, I'm inclined to think that the hope of parole -- while of course capable of abuse -- can also be a strong motivator in genuine reform and rehabilitation.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5 for interesting details on life in prison and during his escape.
The jury selection questionnaires in a case involving a gang shooting were supposed to be confidential, but there was a glaring clue to the identity of Prospective Juror No. 142 in federal court in Manhattan yesterday.
Where it asks for previous jobs held, he filled in President of the United States.
And where it asked whether he could be fair and impartial, the prospective juror answered yes, despite his "unusual experience with the O.I.C.," otherwise known as the Office of Independent Counsel.
