Andrew Sullivan:
The Daily Dish: [T]he administration originally seized far, far more detainees than it could prove guilty (or ever tried to prove guilty) and has released thousands falsely imprisoned. Of the thousands seized... many were abused and tortured, with over a hundred deaths occurring during interrogation, two score of whom the administration has itself conceded were murder-by-interrogation. All this occurred after the president decided his actions as commander-in-chief could not be constrained by the law, after he had waived the baseline Geneva Convention protections for prisoners in wartime - in violation of the policy of every previous president of the United States from Washington on - and after critical memos were signed allowing American interrogators to do anything to prisoners short of death or loss of a major organ.
Larry Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff explains what this means in terms any morally responsible person would understand:
As I compiled my dossier for Secretary Powell, as I did further research, and as my views grew firmer and firmer, I needed frequently to reread that memo. I needed to balance, in my own mind, the overwhelming evidence that my own government had sanctioned abuse and torture which, at its worst, had led to the murder of 25 detainees in a total of at least a 100 detainee deaths. Death, Mr. Chairman, seems to me to be the ultimate torture, indisputable and final. We had murdered 25 or more people in detention; that was the clear low point of the evidence.
And all this was done not in the chaos of a battlefield or even by rogue units or POW camps. It was not done in a war with anything like as many soldiers and battles as World War II. It was done in a closely managed war by a professional military and intelligence service in every theater of combat as a concerted policy... authorized directly in the chain of command by the president, who knowingly broke the law and hired lawyers to tell him he hadn't. No clever argumentation that "only" 270 prisoners remain at Gitmo can gainsay that.... Now, you could argue that the administration, after initial understandable over-reach, has tried to set things right. But you would be wrong....
[I]t may be true that the administration would, in an ideal world, have preferred that every person they seized was actually guilty; and that every person they tortured gave up accurate information. Police states would love it if this were true as well. But the point is that this cannot happen and has never happened in the real world - and recognizing this fact is a core principle of Western civilization. If you suspend the Geneva Conventions, give the green light to anything that will get intelligence, round up thousands all over the globe with reckless disregard for guilt or innocence, you are effectively and knowingly issuing orders to seize innocent people and torture them. Any president who decides to do that and then says it was not his intention to do that is a fraud or a fool. It matters not a whit what fantasy the president had cooked up in his own mind about what he was doing. This is what he was doing.
Major Gen Antonio Taguba, trusted enough by this administration to run an earlier report on the abuse scandal, puts it plainly enough:
After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account...
Worth following:
How to play (and win!) the New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest | Radosh.net: The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest is an interactive — no wait, Web 2.0 — parody of The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest. Every Monday, when the New Yorker publishes a new uncaptioned cartoon, I post that same cartoon on this site. But while the New Yorker is looking for (and rarely finding) good captions, I'm looking for the worst captions possible. I'll choose one winner and two finalists who will be "rewarded" with a prominent spot directly under the cartoon and web links if any were provided. Below those I'll post any number of anti-captions deserving honorable mention...
Dancing along the gemeinschaft-gesellschaft community--associative society tightrope, we have Alameida of Unfogged on teh Singapore Nannystate:
Unfogged: I have a sponsee now... a Singaporean heroin addict, she has used off and on, sometimes staying clean for a few years, in and out of jail, but is just now giving the 12-step thing the old college try.... The other interesting thing is her attitude towards the state that imprisoned her for possession for so many years. I was angry on her behalf, because I think it's a terrible system of laws. She was more philosophical, taking the view that the government meant her well, that they were trying to force her onto the right path but their efforts failed because of her own weakness. The time in jail itself she speaks of almost positively. No drugs (unlike in a US jail), healthy food that wasn't bad at all, nothing to do but get exercise, read, and educate herself (she did her A levels from prison, tutoring herself with a workbook.) She did a lot of self-reflection, but it was never enough to keep her clean once the gates swung open.
Tyler Cowen sends us to Weintraub:
ECONOMICS: First, Kill the Economists: It is not often that a scholar with no particular historical or philosophical expertise trashes the Western.... Stephen A. Marglin's argument in The Dismal Science is that economics--with its focus on an individual's preferences, the freedom to engage in activities to promote his or her well-being, and the pursuit of self-interest variously construed--perverts a natural moral order:
the foundational assumptions of economics are in my view simply the tacit assumptions of modernity. The centerpiece in both is the rational, calculating, self-interested individual with unlimited wants for whom society is the nation-state.
And what modernity shunned was "community."
His main line is that "The market undermines community because it replaces personal ties of economic necessity by impersonal market transactions.... Economics is not only descriptive; it is not only evaluative; it is at the same time constructive--economists seek to fashion a world in the image of economic theory." Economics and thinking like an economist are bad for the health of the world....
The argument about the proper way to do economics is an old one. An 1832 complaint in The Eclectic Review charged the work of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo with leading the public far from "the true path of inquiry" and making political economy "a hideous chain of paradoxes at apparent war with religion and humanity."... The professionalization of economics was a late 19th century phenomenon. Cambridge's Alfred Marshall, in attempting to construct a scientific economics, was not able to establish economics as a separate discipline until the death of Henry Sidgwick, the university's professor of moral philosophy, under whose direction lectures in political economy had been organized....
The kind of economics from which Marglin recoils is, however, not of the sort that was present in writings of individuals (e.g., Smith, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Marshall, and John Commons) who have been claimed as ancestors by modern economists. It is instead what developed in the post-World War II stabilization of economic discourse and the final professionalization of the discipline. It was during that postwar period, not in the Enlightenment, that economic science became normal in Thomas Kuhn's sense.
Marglin... believe[s] that the ideas he engages and then casts aside (ideas about the economic agent, preferences, equilibrium, models, and markets) all grew up not in the 20th century but hundreds of years earlier--and that those ideas have had stable meanings ever since:
For four hundred years, economists have been active in the enterprise of constructing the modern economy and society, both by legitimizing the market and by promoting the values, attitudes, and behaviors that make for economic success. No apology is due for this--except for the pretense of scientific detachment and neutrality and the unwillingness to confront the ideological beam in our collective eye.
The ahistoricity of such a statement is startling; for instance, it assumes wrongly that there were individuals called economists 400 years ago and that science in 1600 meant the same thing as it does in 2008.
In his critique, Marglin moves back and forth between moralizing about the loss of community and contempt for the economists' tools and models. He claims:
By promoting market relationships, economics undermines reciprocity, altruism, and mutual obligation, and therewith the necessity of community. The very foundations of economics, by justifying the expansion of markets, lead inexorably to the weakening of community...
From the first times economic arguments were parsed and markets described, there were those who found both contemptible, and this was well before the Enlightenment. Attacks on money lending at interest go back even earlier than Jesus on the temple steps.... William Coleman showed how over the centuries the very idea of economics has been loathed by left, right, and center; Christian, Jew, and anti-Semite; pope and communist dictator; lawyer and business mogul; and scientist and humanist.
In this same tradition of anti-economics, Marglin sees the future of the field as bleak, with the current generation of economics students avoiding large questions in their search for career advancement. And the problems that economics creates will only get worse, he claims, because globalization will make the national community as obsolete as the market has made the local community.
I note in closing that the lead dust-jacket blurb for this volume was provided by the noted economist and social theorist Bianca Jagger (sic). Whatever was Harvard University Press thinking?
I have always found it remarkable that Marglin cannot but assume that "personal ties of economic necessity" are a good thing. Whenever I hear somebody say that they wish I were bound to them by "personal ties of economic necessity," I think that what they really mean is:
I want a world where you don't get to eat unless I approve of what you are doing, so you will be very careful to do only things I approve of.
I don't like that world, much.
Perhaps the most ironic thing about Marglin's rants against associative gesellschaft society in general and economics in particular as destructive of normal, natural, good, right, just, human, blood-and-soil, gemeinschaft community is that Stephen Marglin has spent his life not in a gesellschaft but in a gemeinschaft: for forty years he has been a tenured professor in Harvard's economics department. Few positions in the world today offer a life more embedded in a structured traditional community than his.
The gemeinschaft that is the professional community of Ivy League economists in which Marglin has been embedded for the past forty years has not treated him with "reciprocity, altruism, and mutual obligation" but has--rather--in a very gemeinschaftlich way done what gemeinschaften traditionally do to corral their deviant members and to discourage others from imitating them. It has not been pretty.
But it seems to have had no effect on Marglin's thinking, none at all, for reasons I do not understand.
Hoisted from Comments: Frank:
Grasping Reality with Both Hands: The Semi-Daily Journal Economist Brad DeLong: impact rates based on the cratering record are pretty much in line with estimates based on the population of Earth-crossing asteroids. Size distributions roughly fit an inverse square law distribution (i.e., 2 x diameter = 1/4 probability; 1/2 diameter = 4 x probability). Using this one can calculate impact rates based on a probability of a 500 m impactor every 100,000 years. So on average, 50 m projectiles should impact every 10,000 years or so (10 x 10 times more frequent). Once you get down to about 50 m the probability of the projectile exploding in the atmosphere (like Tungusaka) is quite high. Much smaller events might be like nuclear explosions, but they are rare and very unlikely to hit populated areas.
More to the point of the Easterbrook article, I've searched the Web of Science publication database for papers by the chief protagonist in his article. DH Abbot has not published a significant paper in 5 years and has never published anything other than unreviewed abstracts on this subject that I can find. Looks like a squeeky wheel getting Easterbrook's attention, but no follow-up to credible experts in this field.
And then there is the cross-section problem: we have what? 6000 cities each of roughly 100 square miles = 600,000 square miles of devastating impact cross section in a world of 200M square miles. That means only 1 out of 400 50M impacts will be "devastating" if we say that a 50 meter meteorite--2 megatons, Barringer crater-sized--hitting a city is our threshold for "devastating."
So we are down to one devastating every 4,000,000 years--not the one every thousand years of the Atlantic Monthly's lead to Gregg Easterbrook's article.
Outsourced to Publius of Obsidian Wings:
Obsidian Wings: "So Called Quote Habeas Corpus Suits": Marc Ambinder has been spending a lot of time lately defending John McCain. But this post on habeas was too much. Ambinder claims that “on the question of what should be done to the Gitmo detainees, the candidates' rhetorical differences are greater than their policy differences.” That’s wrong. Really really wrong.
First, and before I get to policy differences, the larger problem is that Ambinder is ignoring the fact that political rhetoric matters. McCain has adopted the worst sort of demagoguery on the habeas case. He claimed the decision was one of the worst in history. He also referred to writs of habeas corpus — one of the oldest civil liberty protections in Anglo-American law — as “so-called, quote, Habeas Corpus suits.”
In doing so, McCain is providing support for the political movement to deny the detainees all legal rights. It doesn’t matter what he privately thinks or what he said years ago. Today, when it matters, he’s siding with the “no rights” crowd — and his actions have consequences. (And for the record, the point of protecting those rights is not to release terrorists but — say it with me people — to determine if these people are terrorists in the first place).
But that aside, Ambinder’s also off on the policy. It’s frustrating to even have to say this, but McCain and Obama have major policy differences on the Gitmo detainees.
First, Ambinder claims the McCain’s gripe is procedural rather than constitutional. That distinction, however, doesn’t make much sense. He writes:
[McCain’s] concern now... is procedural, rather than constitutional: the detainees' having access to habeas in our federal courts would create a tangled web of lawsuits, would expose intelligence secrets, and would needlessly draw out these legal proceedings.
Ugh, where to start. It’s true that there’s a difference between rights and remedies. It’s also true that habeas is a procedural remedy to vindicate a pre-existing right (e.g., due process). The problem, though, with Ambinder’s statement is that this particular procedural remedy (habeas) also happens to be a guaranteed constitutional right. Indeed, its purpose is to prevent precisely what Bush is doing. Thus, McCain’s problem with “procedure” is necessarily a constitutional problem. And the fact that constitutional rights are messy is, you know, the point. I mean, I guess the Fourth Amendment would be ok and all if didn’t make police do messy things like get warrants. It just really drags out the process needlessly.
Things get worse in the next part though:
McCain believes that it’s OK for foreign-national detainees to have habeas corpus rights, even if they are somewhat restricted...
No he doesn’t. I mean, he may say that. He may even think that. But he’s acted in a completely different way.
Rights don’t exist if you eliminate all procedures to vindicate those rights. Otherwise, the rights become only words on paper, rather than living breathing liberties that must necessarily be enforced.
In short, actions speak louder than words. And in the world of action, McCain has been a consistent opponent of habeas. In fact, he’s consistently voted to completely strip ALL habeas protections from the Gitmo detainees. For instance, he has (1) supported the DTA; (2) supported the MCA; and (3) filibustered a bill to restore the habeas rights eliminated by the prior two laws. Collectively, these votes completely eliminated habeas remedies and replaced them with kangaroo courts. Maybe Ambinder could take a stab at squaring these actions with McCain’s words and press releases.
To repeat, it’s impossible to support a right if you oppose all remedies to vindicate that right. A right without a remedy isn’t a right at all. And on that very note, Ambinder writes:
[T]he [Bush] administration favors indefinite detention and opposed the granting of any habeas corpus rights; McCain clearly took another approach.
“Clearly” different approach, eh? Again, it doesn’t matter what McCain says about indefinite detention or limited habeas. Actions are what matter. And McCain’s actions (and Bush’s and the GOP’s and several spineless Dems’) have led to indefinite detention and the complete elimination of habeas rights. Further, McCain’s Hannity-esque rant politically strengthens the more extreme anti-habeas positions and gives them credibility.
Finally, Ambinder argues the candidates simply differ on who will oversee the combatant review process. He writes:
For McCain, the military would oversee those hearings; for Obama, federal judges would.
That's extremely misleading. First, I don’t like the framing here — it’s essentially saying “military versus liberal meddling judges.” In any event, it’s also factually incorrect. The DTA and the MCA incorporate a federal court (the DC Circuit) into the review process. To be sure, the laws provide for only a narrow and excessively limited review of a kangeroo court process, but those meddlin’ federal courts are in fact involved.
But even assuming that no federal court is involved, there’s a larger problem with Ambinder’s characterization — it’s not as simple as “military” versus “federal judges”. A better way to describe the choice is (1) “an extremely limited review process run by the military with no habeas protections” versus (2) “an extremely limited review process run by the military with habeas protections to ensure there is actually evidence for the detention.”
It’s not like the federal courts are going to take over everything, as Ambinder implies. Further, once the government faces the prospect of habeas, it will (ironically enough) lessen the need for habeas litigation. That’s because the government will respond by actually producing evidence and, even better, making the initial trials and review processes less kangaroo-ish.
In any event, these are major differences about vitally important rights. It’s not just angry rhetoric masking a broad consensus about some trifling procedural point.
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
He reads Slate, so we don't have to poison our minds. And comments on William Saletan:
TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect: this is the same logic that people used to justify homeowners who didn't want to rent to minorities. That's just terrible, they clucked, but I wouldn't want to live in a world where the government told people who they could rent to. Well, as it turns out, that world is a lot better than the one it replaced...
It is a good point. Consider:
William Saletan on contraception:
William Saletan, 2008: You bring your scrip to the pharmacy, and the guy at the counter says, "Sorry, we don't stock contraceptives." That's annoying and, in my view, stupid. But nobody's walling you in. Your burden consists of finding another pharmacy...
William Saletan on fair housing:
William Saletan, 1978: You go to the open house, and the real estate broker says, "Sorry, we don't sell to Negroes." That's annoying and, in my view, stupid. But nobody's walling you in. Your burden consists of finding another house to buy...
Is there a difference between these two?
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
From Avedon Carol:
The Sideshow June 2008 Archive: You know, when William Saletan was complaining that pro-choice people never do anything to promote ways to reduce the need for abortion, I figured he'd just been hit on the head with an Acme anvil and got amnesia about the existence of organizations like Planned Parenthood. However, I see that His Lordship actually thinks it's no big deal if women can't get contraception, so I'm beginning to suspect that, his protestations to the contrary, Lord Saletan is actually a secret supporter of forced pregnancy...
Why oh why can't we have a better press corps?
From Oberlin College, we read:
Meteorite Impact Structures Student Research:
Meteorite Impact Structures Student Research: The most incredible Chinese report is that of the Chíing-yang Meteorite Shower of 1490. Supposedly, tens of thousands of people were killed during the shower in the Shansi province. Yau et al. tell us that "[t]he Chíing-yang incident seems rather implausible in terms of the total number of casualties and the narrow size distribution of the meteorite fragments (Yau et al. 1994)," but they also point out its similarities to the Tunguska event, which would have devastated a populated area.
Yau, K., P. Weissman, and D. Yeomans. "Meteorite Falls in China and Some Related Human Casualty Events." Meteoritics 29, 864-871. [Geobase]
Impact event - Wikipedia: Near misses and forecasts: