Shifting rationales: A Few Good Men edition

Check out this nifty bit of writing from Anonymous Liberal:

This entire debate has progressed in an almost surreal way. For a long time, the Bush administration and its right wing apologists were in pure denial mode, claiming that the U.S. did not torture and conceding that torture was a bad thing ("what's a Code Red?"). After Abu Ghraib, the official line was that torture is against the law and these acts were the work of a few bad apples disobeying clear orders from above ("the men were specifically told that Private Santiago was not to be touched"). Eventually as the extent of the torture began to be reported, the Administration's apologists began to defend the concept of torturing terrorists in the abstract, while still not admitting to any specific conduct ("Private Santiago is dead and that is a tragedy, but he is dead because he had no code. He is dead because he had no honor, and God was watching.") With the release of the torture memos, however, we've now reached a whole new stage. Dick Cheney and his defenders are now in full on Jack Nicholson meltdown mode ("You have the luxury of not knowing what I know, that Santiago's death, while tragic, probably saved lives. And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. . . .you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall!"). I just hope we eventually get to the frog march stage ("You fuckin' people, you have no idea how to defend a nation. All you did was weaken a country today.")

So I guess that makes Eric Holder Tom Cruise.

Man, I don't think those two have ever been in a sentence together until now.

(Extra thought: damn, Google, how come you don't have a "search within sentence" feature? What if I want to search for sentences that have specific words in them? Get on the fucking ball.

I mean, seriously: why doesn't Google have the craziest-robust search queries of all time?)

Obama's riddle

For some reason I found myself watching today's White House Press Corps briefing, which consisted pretty much of 45 minutes of grilling about Obama's position on prosecuting war crimes. Here's the three propositions that the Obama administration appears to be clinging to:

1. The rule of law will be upheld; no one is above the law.
2. No one who carried out torture will be prosecuted if they were acting in good faith in compliance with the OLC memos.
3. The Attorney General will make all legal interpretations and prosecution decisions, independent of President Obama's influence.

So, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is saying that (1) and (2) do not contradict, because anyone who is in compliance with the OLC memos is adhering to the law. But the problem here is that this view rests on a specific legal interpretation--namely, an interpretation that says that OLC memos are as good as law, even if they're written in bad faith and egregiously incompetent. But according to (3), Eric Holder determines legal interpretations, not Obama. So it seems that Obama cannot assert (1) and (2) without contradiction unless he violates (3) by assuming a specific legal interpretation.

In other words: the Obama administration is either full of shit, doesn't know what it's saying, or both.

Shifting rationales

One of the surest signs of deception is a shifting rationale. Sullivan spots such a shift in Cheney's defense of torture:

One statistic has finally broken through the Orwellianisms, like the Abu Ghraib photographs tore off the lid of the Cheney mode of war. Hence the shift in the argument. We don't torture. We don't torture. We don't torture. Let's move on. Look: it worked.

Indeed, Cheney is now advocating that the US declassify the results from torture, so that he can start openly making the case for torture on the merits. Which is pretty cynical, actually, since he and others were opposed to Obama releasing the OLC torture memos on national security grounds. Wouldn't it also be compromising national security to release this information, as well? And if it wouldn't compromise national security to release this information, why wasn't it released a long time ago? How is it that something can be legitimately classified for national security purposes if you can go ahead and declassify it at your convenience, when doing so benefits you politically?

Nom d'internet

The utility of having a consistent and unique nom d'internet is becoming increasingly clear to me. Before when I posted comments anywhere I would enter as my name "david morris", in a gesture of gutsy earnestness ("I stake my very reputation on this blogge post comment, goode sir", it seemed to say), but now I see that I should be signing them "thedavidmo", since this is a) pretty much unique and therefore Google-able, and b) consistent across many different bullshit internet venues (Twitter, any forums, etc.). Also, for some reason signing blog comments with your real name makes you look like kind of a boner.

Okay I'm gonna go to Germany now bye

I couldn't come up with an appropriate Sid Ceasar pun for the title of this post

Via Sullivan, it turns out that at least some ancient Romans were fairly competent jokesters, as evidenced by a recently discovered 1,600 year old joke book:

Another "identity" joke sees a man meet an acquaintance and say "it's funny, I was told you were dead". He says "well, you can see I'm still alive." But the first man disputes this on the grounds that "the man who told me you were dead is much more reliable than you".

That Philogelos. What a cutup.

I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room

In case you haven't seen it, I highly recommend taking a look at the International Committee of the Red Cross confidential report that details the torture of prisoners held in US captivity. The ICRC is tasked by the Geneva Conventions to provide an objective analysis of the treatment of prisoners, and if violations of the Conventions are discovered, the country in question must proceed with an investigation or else violate the terms of the treaty. Typically these reports are confidential to encourage government cooperation, but this report was leaked to the New York Times.

The report details the abusive treatment of 14 different detainees. All the claims are "alleged" because they are based on interviews with the detainees themselves (and I think some US officials as well), but there is not much doubt as to the authenticity of their accounts because of their high level of detail and consistency with one another.

Especially gripping are the excerpts from interviews (Annex 1 and 2 in the report), which give you a true idea of how far off the deep end the United States went in prosecuting the "war on terror". An excerpt of the excerpt:

“I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room.... After some time...I was transferred to a chair where I was kept, shackled by hands and feet for what I think was the next 2 to 3 weeks.... I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go the toilet, which consisted of a bucket....I was given no solid food...while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit...Very loud, shouting type music was constantly playing. It kept repeating about every fifteen minutes twenty-four hours a day....

I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to fall asleep one of the guards would come and spray water in my face....

Later, the "real torturing" starts:

I was taken out of my cell and one of the interrogators wrapped a towel around my neck, they then used it to swing me around and smash me repeatedly against the hard walls of the room. I was also repeatedly slapped in the face. As I was still shackled, the pushing and pulling around meant that the shackles pulled painfully on my ankles....

After the beating I was then placed in the small box. They placed a cloth or cover over the box to cut out all light and restrict my air supply....The wound on my leg began to open and started to bleed. I don’t know how long I remained in the small box, I think I may have slept or maybe fainted.

He then goes on to explain that he was routinely waterboarded after that, as well as beaten by being slammed into the wall with the towel as described above. The account of the worst of the treatment ends with this chilling, Nazi-esque image:

I collapsed and lost consciousness on several occasions. Eventually the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor.

The United States tortured, and these actions were authorized at the highest levels within the Bush administration. They were done in accordance with secret memos of dubious legal merit that were drafted by the President's lawyers--memos that were kept secret not just from the public, but from the other co-equal branches of the government. We now know that for seven years since the attacks of September 11, the executive branch continuously and systematically flatly breached the Constitution of the United States--by violating the Fourth Amendment, by internally declaring for itself the power to violate any other number of provisions in the Bill of Rights (including those contained in the First Amendment), by assuming for itself the power to unilaterally strip citizens of their habeas corpus rights, by violating the United States' obligations under the Geneva Conventions...

If these deeds go unacknowledged, let alone unpunished, it means that the Constitution is de facto non-binding. It means that everything that America proclaims itself to be, at it's core--a free nation, a nation of laws--is a simple factual untruth, because it will be the case that any President who has the will can violate those freedoms and ignore those laws without consequence.

So I am now watching the Obama administration with extreme interest, and hoping that he understands the following: that after this serious a bout of lawlessness and quasi-despotism, reinstituting a proper liberal democratic regime is not enough--that he must pro-actively take steps to address what happened in the previous administration, and establish a precedent that such lawbreaking at the highest levels of government will have consequences. If he does not, then he reveals himself to be not a President but a Napoleon--a benevolent dictator who chooses to allow us our freedoms and who chooses to circumscribe his own power in accordance with the Constitution, but is by no means actually required to do any of these things.

Of course, in a way, this is already a lost cause, because I am reduced to pleading to the executive branch to enforce the Constitutional limits of executive power. Just as a legitimate democracy can't be founded by executive decree, a broken democracy can't be relegitimized by executive decree--because the ultimate source of democratic legitimacy is not the decree of a single will, but the consensus of many wills. Sadly, there does not seem to be a sufficient consensus in 21st century America--neither amongst the public, the press, nor the members of Congress--that basic tennants of democracy such as the rule of law and due process are not mere suggestions, but real and rigourously enforced contraints on power.

Discount Cameras

In my search for a digital camera I came across a store called Discount Cameras which, apparently, is horrible. The reviews are pretty funny, esp. the obviously fake 5-star ones.

Mayor KJ

I didn't know until tonight's Lakers-Kings game that the mayor of Sacramento is Kevin Johnson. Like, from the Suns. WTF???

PS: I'm not sure, but I think KJ is also a Cal alum. I'm too lazy to verify it, though.

Countering the "judicial activism" argument

From Anonymous Liberal, a good argument about why a judicial decision that contradicts social norms, popular opinion, and even judicial precedent is not necessarily an instance of "legislating from the bench":

In 1948, in Perez v. Sharp, the California Supreme Court struck down California's anti-miscegenation law, ruling that it violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution.

...

Today no one questions the correctness of the Perez decision from a legal standpoint. And that's important to remember. It proves that just because a panel of judges is the first to recognize something, just because a judicial decision upsets prevailing societal norms, doesn't mean it's an example of improper activism or "legislating from the bench." The first judge to say something is just as right as the last one to say it. Sometimes the right answer, from a constitutional perspective, is pretty clear; it's just that no one has the courage to stand up and say it.

He then brings it home by explaining the proper role of the judge:

Judges have a role to play in our democracy besides merely confirming and enforcing the pronouncements of our legislatures. Sometimes they are called upon to give actual meaning to the words enshrined in our Constitution, even when legislators and their fellow judges have for decades (even centuries) chosen to ignore the logical implications of those words. Many of the biggest leaps forward we've had as a nation have been the result of judges who had the courage--in the face of contrary public opinion--to be the first to take the words of our constitution to their logical conclusion. I'm not saying judges never overreach. They sometimes do. But sometimes what seems like overreach is really anything but. This is one of those cases. The merits of these decisions will withstand the test of time.

Incidentally, I'm experimenting with doing something that I've seen done on some blogs, which is that they bold the key parts of a largish block of quoted text. The idea is that if you don't feel like reading the whole thing you can kind of skim the bold parts and basically get the gist. We'll see how it goes. (Also I notice it's physically easier to get through with some variation in the boldness of the text--which is maybe why comic books have that convention of arbitrary bolding..)

The end of philosophy in 800 words or less

David Brooks gets under a lot of liberals' skin, but one thing I've always appreciated is that he seems to have a pretty deep interest in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, and is willing to write about it in his op-ed columns. Even if a lot of what he says is not exactly cutting edge stuff, I think he's still performing an important function: introducing key concepts from the brain sciences to a mainstream audience. So when he writes an article called "The End of Philosophy" trying to get across the notion that the Enlightenment-era conception of the mind as the "seat of reason" has been shown by science to be completely inaccurate, I'm sympathetic.

However, plenty of people aren't so sympathetic, and in fact they have a pretty good reason not to be: Brooks' column is terrible. From John Cole's Balloon Juice:

David Brooks has another of his patented “science explains social things but I won’t tell you how or cite any actual articles” pieces today. This one is about the “science of morality.”

And, indeed, Brooks does not cite any articles, and many of the claims he makes are as vapid as they are pithy (e.g., "The rise and now dominance of this emotional approach to morality... challenges the bookish way philosophy is conceived by most people." Huh?). While a person who is already familiar with philosophy and cognitive science (ahem) can charitably fill in the blanks, everyone else is left scratching their heads.

The problem, I think, is that Brooks is working in an incredibly constricted format--the newspaper op-ed. Consider all the advantages of a blog: there is no length limit, you can post as often and as much as you want, you can include links, you can include as many images as you want, you can go back and edit posts to make them clearer, you can dialog with commenters or other bloggers, you can vary the difficulty of your posts (as for example Krugman does with his "wonkish" versus non-wonkish posts), etc. Maybe if he were blogging Brooks would do a good job conveying all these difficult ideas to a mainstream audience--but as it is, he is trying to cram everything into 800 words of newspaper print, which I'm pretty sure would be impossible even for Socrates.

Oh, and in case you don't know who Socrates is or what he is famous for, let me give you the Brooks capsule summary:

Socrates talked.

Got that?

Krazy Korrelations

Via Krugman, some pretty striking charts depicting the high correlation between wealth inequality and political polarization. Kind of makes intuitive sense, I suppose: when the national mood is one of "we're all in this together", you're going to see more sharing (redistribution of wealth) and more cooperation in Washington; and when the mood is more towards the "every interest group for itself" end, you see less redistribution of wealth and more rancor.

Improving Amazon reviews

Amazon reviews are, of course, indispensable. But what could make them even more indispensable, I think, is if--rather than write a full review--you also had the option of specifying individual pros and cons. Then these individual pros and cons could be weighted by other users, e.g. like Digg. So basically, it would be just like the system in place now, except more granular.

Takadanobaba = YouTube!!!

Ok--this is really fucking cool. Basically this research firm evaluates the most trafficked domains on the internet and, to put it in perspective, maps the results onto the Tokyo subway system!

Mapping information metaphorically onto a totally different, familiar system like this seems to me like a very legit way to represent information in a way that humans can easily digest. It'd be great to see this method used more often.

You can see a good image of the map here.

A little more about identity...

Another thing to notice about identity is the role it plays in the enlightenment notion of equality (as in, "everyone is equal"). In order to derive that kind of equality, we deliberately factor out precisely the properties of a person that constitute that person's identity--the person's race, religion, creed, lineage, etc. It is not that the Christian and the Muslim are equals qua Christian and Muslim, but rather, they are equal qua human beings, independent of whatever religious beliefs they happen to subscribe to.

And, in fact, you see precisely this process of "factoring out" take place in Rawls' Theory of Justice, with the whole original position thing and it's 'veil of ignorance' (a good, brief summary of the original position can be found here).

A preliminary thought on identity

Lately I've been thinking a bit about identity, and have been meaning to write a post about it but it keeps turning into an out-of-control ramble. So for now I'll just note the following.

Identity seems to rest on this weird ontological transformation, where the fact of something comes to have a quality of there-ness. For example, the fact I was born in America becomes a thing that is there: an American. And in undergoing this transformation from fact to person, this thing exits the domain of reason and ideas and logic and is smuggled into quite a different one, the domain of human social interaction, which is governed by a very different set of rules. It's a move from the rational to the psychological, from the universal to the contextual--and it seems to be a precondition for participating in the grand social project of living a human life.

Anyway, I'll stop there. But that's the entry point I'm taking in thinking more about what identity is and the role it plays in human being.