Wednesday, August 31, 2005

A quote from the below link..

The overwhelming empirical evidence of discriminatory results in grading suggests the existence of serious flaws in exams, particularly issue-spotting exams. In their article on grade normalization, Downs & Levit observe: "A vast amount of research in educational testing theory suggests that the preferred method of testing in law schools is one least recommended by professional educators. A single examination followed by a course grade prevents professors from giving students repeated feedback, which many theorists say is essential to deep learning. A one-shot examination highlights inaccuracies in evaluation that may result from student illness or personal troubles, or imbalances between student coverage and selective testing."

In his article '"Uncivil Procedure: Ranking Law Students Among Their Peers," Douglas Henderson claims that "[j]udged by the standards of established psychometric theory, the law school essay is neither precise nor accurate -- both of which are necessary foundations of validity." Researchers consider the examination process to be a misrepresentation of legal practice because it ignores more complex forms of thinking. Some researchers suggest learning theory rejects stringent time limits. Kissam notes that, "Multiple grade categories can be generated and explained to students most easily by establishing the final exam as a race and then observing the order in which contestants cross the finish line."

Adding to the internal flaws of examinations, discrepancies in grading are ubiquitous. As Henderson remarks, "The standards in grading law school essay exams vary between professors and between exams graded by a single professor. Little direct evidence is available to show how law professors evaluate examination answers." Henderson elaborates by suggesting that "Law school policy which permits the standards to vary from teacher to teacher causes its evaluation process to be grossly misleading to the public and arbitrarily discriminatory to its students."

Law school grading...arbitrariness

Law school grading is arbitrary?

The linked article provides some interesting insights, and while I'm not sure about the overture to "feminine thinking" I do agree that the one-shot essay exam is perhaps the most inadequate assessement tool I have ever seen in my ten years of education. Granted, I only taught high school, but I'm quite familiar with educational psychology, and the medieval methods employed by law schools are there for one reason; to narrow the ranks of the competition. The Law school filter bears little, if any relationship to the ability of an attorney to accomplish tasks in the field. Imagine if you will a client walking through the door.

"I am not going to tell you what my case is about except that it is going to be about civil procedure, and I will be back in fourteen weeks, at which time you will have three hours to figure out the facts that I give you. Thanks!"

Tuesday, August 30, 2005

THis is funny...

The Poor man

Selected author bios from National Review Online:

Michael Ledeen, an NRO contributing editor, is most recently the author of The War Against the Terror Masters. He is resident scholar in the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute.

also:

Bruce Bartlett is senior fellow for the National Center for Policy Analysis.

and:

Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.

another:

James S. Robbins is senior fellow in national-security affairs at the American Foreign Policy Council, a trustee for the Leaders for Liberty Foundation, and an NRO contributor.

last and least:

Andrew C. McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, is a senior fellow at the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

And he was great in “Pretty in Pink”.

One thing you notice, if you pay much attention to the professional wingnut class, is that they all seem to have some fancy-sounding, quasi-academic positions at organizations that you’ve heard of, but have no idea what they do; or which you think you’ve heard of, but you’re actually thinking of some other organization that you also have no idea about what they do. Most of these organizations appear to be “think tanks”, a term which once meant something (RAND, Brookings), but now appears to have devolved into what we used to call “propaganda mills”, but without the icky working-class connotations. I don’t mean to denigrate all such institutions - some people express sincere admiration for the work of AEI, for example - but, as a class, they seem mostly to exist for the sake of existing, existing so they can gussy up some otherwise undistinguished CVs. Well, I’ve got as undistinguished a CV as any of these National Review guys, and I want in on the action.

I have reviewed the websites of the above-mentioned organizations, and have determined that the following six things are required in order to make a think tank:

1. Lots of poorly-reasoned, under-informed, platitudinous essays on policy, politics, and society.

2. A website.

I think I can state, without fear of contradiction, that I’m all over these two.

3. A name, which includes at least two of the following words: American, Democracy, Foundation, Institute, Center, Policy, Freedom.

Done. This blog online magazine proto-think tank is now “The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony“.

Then come the three toughies:

4. A crackpot economic theory which is overtly supported for one reason, but secretly supported for another. Generally, this is some kind of deregulation nonsense combined with a modified Laffer Curve that goes like 1/t.

5. A social scapegoat. Gays are good, liberals and the media are reliable stand-bys, but immigrants are the fresh new hotness.

6. Lots of impressive-sounding titles given to utter tools.

We’ll take these one at a time:

4. A crackpot economic theory which is overtly supported for one reason, but secretly supported for another.
========================
read more on the link...the blogger here has correctly shown how dangerous old people are as a class and how their alternative lifestyle of choosing to be old endangers us all...

Think like a lawyer?

Five minute law school

Five minute law school

There are those who have drank the kool-aid and believe there is something special about law school education, that the three or four year ritual is something other than an elaborate shell-game designed to discourage people from entering a profession and competing with the mostly quite untalented lot of us who hide our insecurity behind a facade of competence (that is bullshit)for a ever shrinking share of the pie. There are those who don't. Read this if you don't buy into the cult. Ignore it if you do.

A new medal from the French...

Monday, August 29, 2005

The Sierra Nevada

I've spent some pretty large portions of my life hiking around the mountains and deserts of California. Having lived in Yosemite for a year I spent so much time on my personal growth that I've basically ended up penniless in my mid-thirties with a rich inner life and not a pot to piss in.

The Sierra Nevada is a block of Granite about four hundred miles long and about a hundred miles wide, one of the largest unbroken mountain ranges in the world. It is tilted toward the west coast so that it rises rather gently from the floor of the San Joaqin valley, California's midwest breadbasket, and steeply from the floor of the desert on the eastern side of the Sierra. Vast forests still exist on the western slopes, mostly in preserves, though increasingly the Sierra is becoming deforested and destroyed by populations moving into her. The Eastern Sierra is bleak desert, hot as hell in the summer and cold as hell in the winter; it is also in my opinion the most spectacular and beautiful place I have ever been.

Yosemite is considered the crown Jewel of America's park system, and visitors for the most part arrive in throngs to be brutalized by the terrain or coddled in their RV's. The more daring of them venture into the high country to be burned, stung, and bitten, then left exhausted. Every year a certain number are swept over the waterfalls in the valley and no amount of warning or signage can prevent this; they are to accustomed to a world with handrails and signs. You can't sue god, so the deaths continue.

The high country, along the Tioga road is the true wilderness of Yosemite, and Tolumne Meadows is the point of origin for much of the really good wandering.

My favorite place is the Owens Valley; a barren desert surrounded by the desert range and led by the White Mountain, one of California's "fourteeners" and the eastern Sierra, probably the most spectacular mountains in America for their sheer rise from the valley floor of thousands of feet. The unmatched King of the Sierra, Mount Whitney near Lone Pine, is more than a little imposing and the highest mountain in the lower fourty-eight.

The volcanic activity in the Owens Valley and the Mammoth area make for interesting terrain as well as some natural hot springs one can find in guide books or by accident when traveling around there. Wonderful to soak in after your unseasoned muscles have been abused, it's worth the search.

Rock climbers come from quite far to climb in the Owens River Gorge, a mostly empty river gorge drained by LA's considerable thirst and shipped by pipe to their swimming pools. Yet another reason to hate LA. The story behind it all is an interesting one and I recommend Mark Reisner's "Cadillac Desert", a tour de force for the environmental movement and a primer on western water politics.

This of course connects with Mono Lake, a salt-water lake with bizarre "tufa towers" rising from her waters as a result of LA's drainage and now the focus of efforts to preserve it for the sake of the birds who use it to feed on their way south. It is the first thing one sees when leaving Lee Vining Canyon east of the Yosemite Park entrance and like most of what I describe here, probably worth at least five days for the visitor who demands a deeper experience.

I recommend reading "A Natural History of the Sierra Nevada" during such a visit.

Sunday, August 28, 2005

My summer vacation

Time is short here so I'll just post some pictures of the places I went in the last week for the record and get back with the details later...

Here are some photos of the eastern Sierra Nevada from the Owens Valley, along highway 395, by far some of the most beautiful desert mountains I have ever seen. The canyon goes up to Bishop Pass, on the way to Dusy Basin and the John Muir Trail. A well visited and well-respected wilderness area whose bleakness tends to drive the unobservant visitors away.

Bishop Pass

Bishop Pass

View from Bishop

Mt. Tom

Volanic activity creates natural hot springs in the Owens Valley around Bishop and north toward Mammoth and Yosemite. This area bubbles hot water into a river where popular spot has formed...while fourteen people have died there, most at night, it is really quite safe and enjoyable for most careful people. It smells a bit due to the sulphur.

Hot Creek

Tenaya Lake

View from Lambert Dome, Tolumne Meadows

Hot Creek

Saturday, August 20, 2005

The cult of the attorney..

I got an evaluation the other day from the firm I used to intern for in the city. To say the least, I was completely shocked.

They were a young boutique firm who I ran into on Craigs' list...nice people really. But I was disturbed by the fact that they didn't specialize in anything; as brilliant as they may be, I don't think you can really get good at anything that way. When you are doing conservatorships and litigations and unemployment and real estate it's a real opportunity for malpractice and I personally think a client is poorly served.

I would come in and sit there at the computer; they would never real have anything for me to do. When I signed onto this, the lead guy said he would "treat me like a real attorney". At the time I didn't realize this would mean absolutely no help, almost ever. I hardly ever drafted pleadings, spoke with this guy maybe once a week and he always had this odd look on his face like I was imposing. He would roll in at eleven o'clock, if at all that day and lock himself in his office. I mostly worked with their lead clerk, who was a really helpful, good guy.

His charicature of what I did was insulting. He said I only "sometimes" finished assignments on time (assuming I had one), he took specific instances where I fucked up and inflated them into my whole experience, but he didn't recall me pointing out in his litigation pleadings that total mistatement of the law by his junior associate, didn't recall my ability to find things no one else could find. A specific critism he had was that I didn't "defend" my position; an extraordinary claim since I thought we would work this through together. He mistook my humbleness and self-effacing manner for lack of confidence. Apparently he didn't know what the fuck was going on with this cases, but that was okay. It was only if I didn't that there was a problem.

I took care of researching their key pro bono case. They didn't know the main defendant was in bankruptcy until I told them. They didn't have the slightest clue what was happening with that case.

I would often bring work over to the law clerk and have him look at it, and he would dismiss it flippantly. Then I had to point to a specific sentence on the page, after which he would go "oh, okay" and then take it.

The law profession appears to have this strange dynamic. People go off half-cocked and act like they haven't. I'm beginning to realize this air of apparent confidence is a facade they all walk around with, feeding the cult of superiority and myth of competence.

The last assignment they gave me was ridiculous. I called the lexis rep who was completely worthless, and asked for help. The lead clerk,now associate "helped" me and got it wrong. Then the associate who asked for the help emails me, telling me I misunderstood the question. Then emails me back saying "oh, wait,that is what I asked."

I think most notable in my mind was trying to type notecards for her oral argument. I dont' know about you but nobody can do that for you. In fact, if you have more than a page in front of you, which you probably won't read,then you are screwing up. I spent an afternoon typing some befuddled headnotes but it was pointless. What I then regarded as my incompetence now appears quite different to me. I would NEVER have someone else type of notes for MY argument; how could it make any sense? Didn't I know the law?

It was a bitter experience. I wrote some ass-kissing note back to the guy and he wrote me back; I think he may have realized he had gone to far...

In the end, though, I listen carefully. I want constructive criticism. But when some guy who is barely familiar with my work acts like he's been there looking over my shoulder and is intimately familiar with what I do, and then puts me in a bad light, I have the right to be outraged. Life isn't fair, but that doesn't mean that the forces you set in motion won't come back to you. What comes around goes around.

Thursday, August 18, 2005

Buddhism and just war

Westerners have a habit
The Buddha taught nonviolence not pacifism

of westernizing Buddhism; this is to be expected and probably a good thing, as Buddhism like anything has always taken on the trappings of native religions when it has arrived. The teachings, however, are a subject of controversy. When people imagine Buddhists they imagine people committed to pacifism. They will not fight, they only eat meat, in short, westerners see Buddhists as the ultimate pacifists. Yet there is ample evidence this is not the case.

There are also a fair number of people who look upon the past and say "see, we could have avoided that if we had thought it through." That is certainly the point of history; but with the benefit of hindsight, there is no shortage of people who think incredibly difficult decisions were easy and that had only THEY been President, WWII, Hiroshima, all of that could have been avoided. It has been said that reality has more imagination than we do. To those who believe that we have no enemy today, or that the enemy is us, I can only shake my head and wonder how many train stations, discos, synagogues and mosques need to explode into a pile of body parts before we conclude that we have become the vehicle for their Karma.

http://www.dharma.org/ij/archives/2002a/nonviolence.htm




The Budhha Taught Nonviolence,
Not Pacifism
Paul Fleischman, M.D.

Paul Fleischman is a psychiatrist and a Teacher of vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. He is the author, among other workss, of Cultivating Inner Peace and Karma and Chaos.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I have found myself musing about nonviolence, its contributions, its limits, and its place in the Buddha’s teaching. I have also been surprised to hear many of my acquaintances confuse the Buddha’s teaching of nonviolence with pacifism (which I will here take to mean the objection to any kind of violence for any reason), so that, due to their confusion, they find themselves either rejecting nonviolence as hopelessly naive and inadvertently destructive, or embracing the politicized group allegiances of pacifism, which they imagine incorrectly to present what the Buddha taught.

The Buddha did not intend to form either a religious or political position, nor a philosophy of society. Historically, he lived before the era of organized, systematic theorizing about the human collective. He addressed himself as an individual to individuals. Even when he spoke to large groups, as he frequently did, he focused on individual responsibility. He understood every group - for example, the democratic states that existed in the India of his times – as resting upon the insight, conscience, and actions of each of its participants. He had no theory of, nor belief in, supervening collective structures of society or government that could amend or replace the bedrock of individual choice.
...Nonviolence as the Buddha taught it was directed at each interaction in each moment but was not a comforting myth for denying inescapable truths. Dhamma is a long path, a footpath, rarely culminated by the rare few, and not a fantasy exit from the exigencies of the human condition. There are no global solutions even hinted at anywhere in the Buddha’s dispensation of Dhamma. His followers practice non-violence because it anchors them in alertness and compassion, expresses and reinforces their own mental purification, builds identification with other beings, human, animal, even seeds; and because it is their most cherished realization: mind matters most; cultivation of love, peace and harmony is always the only irrefutable doctrineless meaning that people can experience.

Buddhism and just war

Westerners have a habit of westernizing Buddhism; this is to be expected and probably a good thing, as Buddhism like anything has always taken on the trappings of native religions when it has arrived. The teachings, however, are a subject of controversy. When people imagine Buddhists they imagine people committed to pacifism. They will not fight, they only eat meat, in short, westerners see Buddhists as the ultimate pacifists. Yet there is ample evidence this is not the case.

There are also a fair number of people who look upon the past and say "see, we could have avoided that if we had thought it through." That is certainly the point of history; but with the benefit of hindsight, there is no shortage of people who think incredibly difficult decisions were easy and that had only THEY been President, WWII, Hiroshima, all of that could have been avoided. It has been said that reality has more imagination than we do. To those who believe that we have no enemy today, or that the enemy is us, I can only shake my head and wonder how many train stations, discos, synagogues and mosques need to explode into a pile of body parts before we conclude that we have become the vehicle for their Karma.

http://www.dharma.org/ij/archives/2002a/nonviolence.htm




The Budhha Taught Nonviolence,
Not Pacifism
Paul Fleischman, M.D.

Paul Fleischman is a psychiatrist and a Teacher of vipassana meditation in the tradition of S.N. Goenka. He is the author, among other workss, of Cultivating Inner Peace and Karma and Chaos.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I have found myself musing about nonviolence, its contributions, its limits, and its place in the Buddha’s teaching. I have also been surprised to hear many of my acquaintances confuse the Buddha’s teaching of nonviolence with pacifism (which I will here take to mean the objection to any kind of violence for any reason), so that, due to their confusion, they find themselves either rejecting nonviolence as hopelessly naive and inadvertently destructive, or embracing the politicized group allegiances of pacifism, which they imagine incorrectly to present what the Buddha taught.

The Buddha did not intend to form either a religious or political position, nor a philosophy of society. Historically, he lived before the era of organized, systematic theorizing about the human collective. He addressed himself as an individual to individuals. Even when he spoke to large groups, as he frequently did, he focused on individual responsibility. He understood every group - for example, the democratic states that existed in the India of his times – as resting upon the insight, conscience, and actions of each of its participants. He had no theory of, nor belief in, supervening collective structures of society or government that could amend or replace the bedrock of individual choice.
...Nonviolence as the Buddha taught it was directed at each interaction in each moment but was not a comforting myth for denying inescapable truths. Dhamma is a long path, a footpath, rarely culminated by the rare few, and not a fantasy exit from the exigencies of the human condition. There are no global solutions even hinted at anywhere in the Buddha’s dispensation of Dhamma. His followers practice non-violence because it anchors them in alertness and compassion, expresses and reinforces their own mental purification, builds identification with other beings, human, animal, even seeds; and because it is their most cherished realization: mind matters most; cultivation of love, peace and harmony is always the only irrefutable doctrineless meaning that people can experience.

Wednesday, August 17, 2005

From the old school anti-fascist left...

A matter of principle

I read an excerpt from this book and it looks promising. Of course I'll be too busy with my intellectual potty-training in business organizations and remedies to be able to read it...not that I have enough money to buy new books anyway...
================
Current debate over the motives, ideological justifications, and outcomes of the war with Iraq have been strident and polarizing. A Matter of Principle is the first volume gathering critical voices from around the world to offer an alternative perspective on the prevailing pro-war and anti-war positions. The contribu-tors--political figures, public intellectuals, scholars, church leaders, and activists--represent the most powerful views of liberal internationalism. Offering alternative positions that challenge the status quo of both the left and the right, these essays claim that, in spite of the inconsistent justifications provided by the United States and its allies and the conflict-ridden process of social reconstruction, the war in Iraq has been morally justifiable on the grounds that Saddam Hussein was a brutal tyrant, a flagrant violator of human rights, a force of global instability and terror, and a threat to world peace.

The authors discuss the limitations of the current system of global governance, which tolerates gross violations of human rights and which has failed to prevent genocide in places such as Bosnia and Rwanda. They also underscore the need for reform in international institutions and international law. At the same time, these essays do not necessarily attempt to apologize for the mistakes, errors, and deceptions in the way the Bush administration has handled the war. Disputing the idea that the only true liberal position on the war is to be against it, this volume charts an invaluable third course, a path determined by a strong liberal commitment to human rights, solidarity with the oppressed, and a firm stand against fascism, totalitarianism, and tyranny.

Cindy Sheehan...anti-semite?

Upon taking notice of Mrs. Sheehan as most people have in the last few weeks my initial reaction was one of sympathy. Nobody has sacrificed more than her for this cause, and nobody has more right to speak up and share her views. In the grand scheme, I too, dislike Bush, I dislike his policy, I was against the war, I'm against the continued occupation, but my views are balanced by a lot of considerations and subtle nuances that seem to have evaded her. I don't think Sheehan is more than halfway eloquent, but I do think she has positioned herself in a way that makes her appear to be handled.

All of this is fine.

I disagree with her because I was never convinced the war was about WMD. Like Friedman, it was obvious to me that it was about 911. It was about going into the heart of the mideast and smashing the most powerful arab nation there, because they made a target of themselves, and showing the arab regimes that their existence may well rest on their ability to control the fanatics they have sheltered and nurtured, or at least winked at. We are not soft, afraid, or devoid of strong beliefs. We will fight and die, crush armies and we will do it in their land the way they did it in our land. To show this mass totalitarian movement, this cult of suicide and death which niether liberals nor conservatives really understand, that they have awakened a sleeping giant. I have elaborated before, as have others, about prosecuting a clausewitz-style war against an enemy who lives in a fantasy world in which we are merely a prop, but that isn't the point here.

I think Sheehan is wrong, but I agree with what she wants. I want the US to withdraw because we already appear weak. Conservatives who argue that we need to stay to appear strong don't have a clue. Propping up a weak, prefabricated regime without legitimacy makes us look weak. We have already lost our chance to do it right, from the getgo. Which is why Rumsfeld and Rice will go down in history as some of the worst Presidential advisers in history.

But the real thing that caught my attention was this quote;
=========
Am I emotional? Yes, my first born was murdered. Am I angry? Yes, he was killed for lies and for a PNAC Neo-Con agenda to benefit Israel. My son joined the Army to protect America, not Israel.
=======================
I consider this at best borderline anti-semitic, the kind fed by the overtly anti-semitic European left and emulated here in the states. To say that this vast, selfish, and greedy nation run by old white men, oil companies and whatnot gives a rat's ass about Israel is in my mind anti-semitic. The Bushies would argue that Israel is a democracy, and we stand with democracy. It is a beachhead in the mideast and it is the threat of democracy that makes her hated and forces the failed Arab regimes to spend their cash vilifying "Zionists" (translation; Jews...Though I believe the Zionists and likudnicks richly deserve a measure of scorn) so that their populations have an outlet for their young male rage.

It would be fair to say that Israel is being used by the US. That classically anti-semitic conservatives have latched onto Israel as a cause celebre to get their hands on some oil and a convenient ally. What strange bedfellows...anti-semitic conservatives and liberal Jews...could it be that they both at varying levels now realize that the enemy they face doesn't differentiate between liberal and conservative? That there is one label..infidel dog? That after watching Israeli pizza parlors exploding in a spray of blood for years and saying "it's not our problem" they now realize that the main reason for homicidal attacks against Israel isn't the savage occupation of the West Bank any more than the reason for 911 was US intransigence in the mideast. That this movement, fed by the "shrewdest intellectual apologists" and the desperation of failed regimes, doesn't hate us because of what we have done, but because of who we are. Because we believe in a wall of separation between church and state. We allow women to have beauty contests. We don't insist upon total subservience to our version of god. I don't know if it was Tom Friedman or Paul Berman who said this first, but some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Sunday, August 14, 2005

A life of fear

One of the things I always hated about teaching was that I was always afraid of getting in trouble. When you are in a situation where there is no way you can truly avoid trouble, no matter how good you are, it isn't healthy. The totally incompetent principals would wander in and out of my class room and I was always afraid of what would be happening at that moment. If I broke up a fight I got in trouble, if I didn't I got in trouble. If a taught to the standards the kids hated me and learned nothing. If I taught history I wasn't doing my job. If I let kids walk all over me it made them worse; if I stood up to them, then some of them would try to destroy me by lying, bringing in their horrible parents, etc...

Now in law school, you get this three hour period to show how much you learned in a fourteen week period. Three questions, and that's it. IT is "sink or swim" in the extreme.

I'm looking down the barrel of community property, the hardest class here at Empire. This guy has something to prove, and I admit I like the way he puts people on the spot when they brief a case. The problem is the seven page fact pattern replete with numbers and facts that create such a dizzying array of issues that the danger is one of vaporlock. But the worst of all, and my greatest enemy on the exam, is the non-issue issue.

The non-issue issue, or "straw man" is a set of facts from which one cannot really discuss anything. When a business grows in value during marriage but is started with separate property, then the community obtains an interest in that business, depending upon whether it is growing as a result of the business operator's efforts or the character of the asset. If it is because he is a great car salesmen, then he gets screwed and the community gets most of the money (yes it is counterintuitive). If a monkey could have done it, then the community gets whatever his salary would have been for that position, and the guy gets the rest. Wife likes the first one, called Periera and H likes the second one, called Van Camp.

SO we get a fact pattern where the property doesn't appreciate in value. Thus no assets, thus no discussion on CP. But without discussing these two formulas in relation to this CP interest that doesn't exist, you are looking at losing ten points. Law professors and students who do well on these tests argue this is fair. I call bullshit. The difficulty is in moving on to things that are AT ISSUE. If there is nothing AT ISSUE, then there shouldn't be a discussion. In fact, you should lose points for discussing non-issues. But that isn't the way it works, my friend.

I had a philosophical debate with myself the other day about a life lived in this kind of fear. Is it worth it? How can you avoid it? Where can you go where you aren't afraid of fucking up, riding on that thin line? If anyone knows, let me know.

Saturday, August 13, 2005

From Paul Berman

Some people have emphasized that, so far as we know, not one of the national states in the Middle East or anywhere else seems to have been directly responsible for the attacks. Thus it is said that without the involvement of a national state, we cannot properly speak of something as capacious as war (as if wars can take place only between national states--when the great majority of wars in recent years have been, in fact, civil wars, meaning, conflicts in which only one side possesses a state). This is another way of making the same minimizing point: that we are not facing any kind of substantial or well-organized enemy, even if we have suffered a disastrous blow. But we are facing a substantial and well-organized enemy. Our enemy is the combat wing of radical and Islamist movements that are genuinely enormous.

Those movements are supported by clerics and businessmen. They are protected by the apologies of the shrewdest of intellectuals. They deploy worldwide networks of organizations. They enjoy popular support not just in one or two remote places--a support that is strong enough to have pushed one state after another into an ambiguous attitude toward those movements: not willing to endorse, and not willing to suppress, either. The few dozen people who are thought to be responsible for September 11 could be arrested or killed, and Osama bin Laden could end up captured or strung from a tree--and even so, with popular enthusiasm and political and intellectual structures to back them up, the terrorist assaults would very likely continue. For the assaults were already under way before bin Laden entered the scene, and there is no reason they could not continue without him.

There is a great deal of liberal and left-wing naïveté about this matter in the United States, and not just there. But there is also a conservative and right-wing naïveté, which may be still greater and is much graver in its possible consequences. (And I'm not even bothering with the Jerry Falwells of this world.) It should be remembered that George Bush the Elder was anything but astute about the dangers in Arab radicalism. Saddam Hussein would never have been able to invade Kuwait in 1990 if Bush the Elder had been on his guard. And Saddam would never have been able to survive his eventual military defeat if Bush the Elder had not decided to let him go. I have always wondered why the elder Bush was so easily taken in by Saddam. Maybe the Texas oil connection had something to do with it. Perhaps Bush had too many friends in Saudi Arabia, instead of too few, and the Saudi friends (being halfway implicated in these movements themselves) advised him to go easy. I don't know; I am speculating.
-from the below link

And furthermore

If you haven't read Bermans' "Terror and Liberalism" then you should. Whether you agree with his thesis, the idea that the "Islamism" is yet another form of fascism is powerfully argued and convincing in many respects.
Terror and Liberalism

But the war between France and Germany in World War II was complicated by Nazism's ability to call on sympathizers and co-thinkers all over Europe, including in France--which is one reason why the French went down to defeat. Communism was likewise an international affair, even if simpleminded analysts on the anticommunist side found it comforting to picture communists all over the world as mere agents of a reconstituted Czarist Empire. Likewise the Warriors of Christ the King, who may have described themselves as narrow nationalists but nonetheless drew their support and even their Warriors from all over the Latin world. And the twentieth-century wars displayed one other pertinent trait. The liberal side in those wars, the side that stood for a liberal and democratic society, was never entirely sure of itself.

The liberal side was internally divided. On the liberal side, there were always people, sometimes in large numbers, who suspected that the antiliberals might be correct in their view of liberalism and might even have justice on their side. And so the twentieth-century wars were ideological in a double sense. There was the struggle of liberalism against its enemies; and there was the struggle of liberalism against itself, a self-interrogation, which was liberalism's strength as well as its weakness.

The present conflict seems to me to be following the twentieth-century pattern exactly, with one variation: the antiliberal side right now, instead of Communist, Nazi, Catholic, or Fascist, happens to be radical Arab nationalist and Islamic fundamentalist. Over the last several decades, a variety of movements have arisen in the Arab and Islamic countries--a radical nationalism (Baath socialist, Marxist, pan-Arab, and so forth) and a series of Islamist movements (meaning Islamic fundamentalism in a political version). The movements have varied hugely and have even gone to war with one another--Iran's Shiite Islamists versus Iraq's Baath socialists, like Hitler and Stalin slugging it out. The Islamists give the impression of having wandered into modern life from the 13th century, and the Baathist and Marxist nationalisms have tried to seem modern and even futuristic.

But all of those movements have followed, each in its fashion, the twentieth-century pattern. They are antiliberal insurgencies. They have identified a people of the good, who are the Arabs or Muslims. They believe that their own societies have been infested with a hideous inner corruption, which must be rooted out. They observe that the inner infestation is supported by powerful external forces. And they gird their swords. Their thinking is apocalyptic. They imagine that at the end they, too, will succeed in establishing a blocklike, unchanging society, freed of the inner corruption--a purified society: the victory of good. They are the heirs of the twentieth-century totalitarians. Bush said that in his address to Congress on September 20, and he was right.

Here it is

IN response to the "WMD Bush lied, people died" argument, which I regard as a red herring to the debate, I offer this piece by Tom Friedman.
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Since my liberal hawkishness regarding the Iraq war was never rooted in the WMD issue, I look at the postwar a little differently. The debate about the Iraq war for me was always a struggle between hope and experience: hope that we could partner with Iraqis to remove the genocidal tyranny of Saddam Hussein and replace it with some kind of decent, pluralistic, representative government in the heart of the Arab world, and my experience—particularly living in Lebanon during its civil war—which left me skeptical about ever producing a self-sustaining, multiethnic democracy in that region. It was a real struggle in my head. In the end, I let hope win. I have no regrets.

Indeed, having visited Iraq three times since April, I feel even more strongly today than I did the day the war started that, while the Bush team has made an utter mess of the diplomacy and postwar planning, it was still the right war and still has a decent chance to produce a decent outcome.

Why? I think there were four reasons for this war, and I identified with three of them: There was the stated reason, the moral reason, the right reason, and the real reason.

The stated reason for the war was that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction that posed a long-term threat to America. I never bought this argument. I didn't have any inside information. I simply assumed that whatever WMD Saddam possessed had to be, after a decade of sanctions, so limited that it was easily deterrable. There was absolutely nothing in Saddam's history to suggest that he was suicidal—that he had the capability or will to attack the United States directly and pay the price.

He was always deterrable and containable. This was always a war of choice.

The WMD argument was hyped by George Bush and Tony Blair to try to turn a war of choice into a war of necessity. They will have to answer for that.

Personally, I believed the right reason and the moral reason for the war were more than sufficient to justify it. To be sure, they would have been a hard sell as a war of choice, but not impossible—had Messrs. Bush and Blair really thrown themselves into it.

The moral reason for the war was that this was a genocidal regime responsible for the deaths of some 1 million Iraqis, Kurds, Iranians, and Kuwaitis as a result of Saddam's internal suppression and external wars with Iran and Kuwait. Saddam was 10 times worse than Serbian thug Slobodan Milosevic, whom NATO took on without U.N. cover.

The right reason for the war, and this was the core of my own argument, was that the real weapons of mass destruction that threaten our open society were not the hidden WMD of Saddam. Those, as I said, were always deterrable because Saddam and his sons loved life more than they hated us. No, the real WMD that threatened us, and still do, are the young people being churned out, year after year, by failed and repressive Arab states, who hate us more than they love life and therefore are undeterrable. I am talking here about the boys of 9/11. I am talking here about all the youth identified in the two U.N. Development Programme Arab Human Development reports—youth who want to run away from the Arab countries they were raised in because they are so frustrated, angry, and humiliated by how their governments and society have left them unprepared for modernity. Sept. 11, I have always believed, was produced by the poverty dignity, not the poverty money. It was the product, as Egyptian playwright Ali Salem once remarked, of young men who felt so humiliated by the world, they felt like dwarfs, and dwarfs search out tall towers to bring down in order to feel tall. Humiliated youth, ready to commit suicide using instruments from our daily life—cars, planes, tennis shoes—and inspired by religious totalitarians are the real threat to open societies today.

Therefore, the right reason for this war, as I argued before it started, was to oust Saddam's regime and partner with the Iraqi people to try to implement the Arab Human Development report's prescriptions in the heart of the Arab world. That report said the Arab world is falling off the globe because of a lack of freedom, women's empowerment, and modern education. The right reason for this war was to partner with Arab moderates in a long-term strategy of dehumiliation and redignification.

The real reason for this war—which was never stated—was to burst what I would call the "terrorism bubble," which had built up during the 1990s.

This bubble was a dangerous fantasy, believed by way too many people in the Middle East. This bubble said that it was OK to plow airplanes into the World Trade Center, commit suicide in Israeli pizza parlors, praise people who do these things as "martyrs," and donate money to them through religious charities. This bubble had to be burst, and the only way to do it was to go right into the heart of the Arab world and smash something—to let everyone know that we, too, are ready to fight and die to preserve our open society. Yes, I know, it's not very diplomatic—it's not in the rule book—but everyone in the neighborhood got the message: Henceforth, you will be held accountable. Why Iraq, not Saudi Arabia or Pakistan? Because we could—period. Sorry to be so blunt, but, as I also wrote before the war: Some things are true even if George Bush believes them.

Unless we successfully partner with Iraqis, though, to build a new and more decent context, that terrorism bubble will eventually come back tenfold. We must get this right. Yes, I know, it may all turn out to be a fool's errand. A decent Iraq may be impossible. But I would rather go down swinging as an optimist than resign as a pessimist. Because if there is no way to produce governments that can deliver for their young people in the Arab world, get ready for a future full of Code Orange and Code Red.

My first experience getting flamed on my blog

Today I finally got flamed by one of the thousand people or so who have somehow come across my blog. It's a good thing and I'll respond.
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So, am I to understand this correctly...we've been convinced that a mushroom cloud was on the horizon if we don't invade this country and depose its leader. It would be appeasement to get out now?
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I was never convinced that there were WMD in Iraq and I didn't see Hussein PERSONALLY as a threat, but what I DO see in the mideast are mass totalitarian movements growing. The nuclear weapon there is a hundred million young men whose minds have been filled with garbage and who, if given half a chance, would exterminate each and every one of us.
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Though it's cute to talk about those crazy people that want to compare us to Saddam it serves only to reinforce the argument that we "stay the course" in Iraq.
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NO it's not cute, is an important moral distinction between liberal democracies and insane megalomanics who commit genocide. People who blur distinctions such as this have been doing it for years. There is no moral equivalency between terrorists dedicated to the destruction of civilization and a liberal democracy prosecuting a war against them.
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What you and Hitchens are advocating is the contiuation of the same policies.
And, those policies are: lie to America that we are in emminint danger of attack, lie to us that Saddam had weapons of mass distruction (Wilson's trip to Niger, mushroom cloud, mobile chemical plants all proven by the 9-11 commission to not be the case and we new it), the Downing Street Memo's that show that indeed was the policy, try to win the war on the cheap without enough troops to secure the place, ignore over a 1000 years of history of not one western civilization has ever EVER succeded in conquering the populace. Soon after the war began the president and his aides OK'd the use of torture to try and secure useable intelligence. It, of course, backfired. Do you really think that Lindsay England was the one responsible for the sexual dog pile? There are a whole bunch of pictures and movies that that a federal judge has ordered the pentagon to release. They have refused. Rumsfeld has said about those pictures that they would make matters much worse. Lindsay Grahm senator from South Carolina has said that these pictures and photos are of activity of such perversion that he can't bear repeat what he saw except that it was the rape of Ten year old boys by men in american uniforms. The policy of torture does not work, it only makes matters worse.
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Niether I nor Hitchens are advocating anything of the sort. If China invaded North Korea, and you were aware that the NOrth Koreans have starved to death around a million people, and the Chinese used lies to get there, would you be going apeshit? I doubt it.
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Abu Graib is not what America stands for. We have the constitution, we have the Geneva conventions, we have the Uniformed Code of Military Justice, we won't defeat anybody by torture. And, we certainly will only destroy our cause and ourselves by shiting on these rules of law that many men and women have sacrificed themselves for.
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This is high-minded and I admire it but the constitution isn't a suicide pact. In dealing with an uncivilized enemy, we may find ourselves in a position of defeat because of this. I don't take anything off the table.
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Abu Graib is not a Nazi extermination camp. Yes, people in the peace crowd make stupid comparisions. But, John McCain knows a little about torture and he says it doesn't work. I tend to think the law he is proposing (to make it illegal to torture) will only continue to see resistance from this incompetent administration.
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The Vietnamese were downright civilized compared to these people.
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Fascim is an easily bandied about word. It's real definition is a bit more illusive. But, I worry far less about religious idiots in dirty night shirts trying to bring about the vision of a perfect 14th century islamic revolution than I do about our leaders and citizens that are ready to staple the patriot act over the top of the bill of rights, take a flame thrower to the Geneva conventions because they are inconvenient, or make our Judge Advocate General officers into a new Starr chamber.
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Then you should pay closer attention. Those 'idiots' have been able to attack all over the world, have leveled the world trade center and DID have control of Afghanistan before 911. If you aren't worried about them, and you think we are the problem, then you aren't paying attention. Berman pointed out that before WWII the French Socialists under Paul Fauriste were convinced the greatest enemy of the world was French militarism. Many of them ended up supporting the Vichy government. It is this same dynamic here; denial of these mass movements, these cults of suicide and death and the inflation of American "imperialism" for political gain.
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Couple this with rhetoric from the talking heads that people that don't agree with the president should be shot (courtsey of one of our own congressman) and the word fascism would probably better apply. Fascism is not something that is applied externally through some sort of strong armed leader. It's a mood created within a population that feels it's being persecuted and that it's looking for a "re-birth", it is an essentially corporatist movement that will demand an ellimination of those who disagree and a resurgance of a purely nationalist identity. It will have no strict comparison to a German or Italian style 20th century fascism. What you must realize is that it will grow from an unexpected movement that seems mainstream but takes it's philosophy directly from the most extreme elements of society.
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Fascism is not something that is applied externally through some sort of strong armed leader.
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Your kidding, right?
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Though Hitchens' points are well taken, I'm much more worried about the demand for one party rule hear at home coupled with this insane desire to destroy the law we've worked so hard to establish. Bin Laden and his ilk will always be able to create terror. We can't always survive the pretzels we tie are selves in responding to its threat.
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The danger is greater that we ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist. This is what we have been doing for years. This is the greatest failing of the American left.

Friday, August 12, 2005

The Spanish Civil War and Iraq

It has been habit as of late for people to begin to refer to the Spanish Civil War in support of their various opinions about Iraq. This dress rehearsal for WWII, in which more than half a million people died, illustrated by Picasso and fought in by Hemingway, appears in the minds of many as a proud, shining moment for western leftists. Spain, only liberated from the fascist Franco in 1975, stands in our minds for for the proposition that appeasement is no option against the forces of reaction, and that today it may be someone else, but tomorrow it will be you.

Christopher Hitchens, in his usual grand and eloquent style (if you will forgive me for kissing his arse), breathes life into that proud moment, or in the case of those who stood by while Hitler bombed children, a not-so-proud moment.

Spainish civil war and Iraq

"Ian McEwan observed recently that there were, in effect, two kinds of people: those who could have used or recognized the words "Abu Ghraib" a few years ago, and those to whom it became a new term only last year. And what a resonant name it has indeed become. Now the Colombian painter Fernando Botero has produced a sequence of lurid and haunting pictures, based on the photographs taken by American war criminals, with which he hopes to draw attention to the horrors inflicted there. But his true ambition, he says, is to do for Abu Ghraib what Picasso did for Guernica"
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If there is one thing that destroys a person's credibility quickly, it is trivializing the horrors of Hussein's Iraq by comparing it to the transgressions of the Americans. Would you rather be forced to lie in a pile of naked men or be hung by a hook, have your eyeballs torn out and your tongue cut off?
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"There's also something indecent about any comparison of this with the struggle of the Spanish Republic. If Fallujah is "Guernica," then the U.S. Marines are Herman Goering's Condor Legion. If Abu Ghraib is "Guernica," then the U.S. Army is a part of the original "Axis" between Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. I wonder if any sympathizer of this view would accept its apparent corollary: that the executions and tortures inflicted by the Spanish Communists—crimes now denied by nobody, though Picasso excused them at the time—axiomatically discredit the anti-fascist cause? And this distortion of the record is all the more extraordinary, since a much more natural analogy is close at hand. Gen. Franco's assault on the Spanish Republic—an assault that claimed to be, and was, a rebel "insurgency" against the elected government—consisted of an alliance of fascist parties, religious extremists, and Muslim fighters. It was led by the frightened former oligarchy, and its cause was preached from the pulpit, and its foot-soldiers were Moorish levies from North Africa and "volunteers" from Germany and Italy. How shady it is that our modern leftists and peaceniks can detect fascism absolutely everywhere except when it is actually staring them in the face. The next thing, of course, if we complete the historic analogy, would be for them to sign a pact with it. And this, some of them have already done."

Thursday, August 11, 2005

The Iraq body count

The body count is, of course, an embarrassing example of the Michael Mooristas in high places. The lancet, a highly respected journal, has totally embarrassed itself on this one, not because of what they actually published, but what they have allowed to be said about their study. Converting a statistical probability of 90% chance that the casualties are between ten and one hundred thousand to 100,000 Iraqi deaths is a victory for Islamofascism and deeply enraging to those who feel the war against this new fascism is undermined by this sort of garbage. This weblog demands that a liberal post this information. Here I am, liberal web-logger..posting this information...
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blogcritics

Although they are war opponents and looking for all the deaths they can find to count, there's a much more sensible count - about 16,000 reported deaths and about 3,000 identified civilians dead - at Iraq Body Count. The interesting thing there is that they are counting all civilian deaths related to the war as part of the casualty count and not differentiating between deaths caused by coalition troops and those caused by terrorist/insurgent activity. From their perspective anyone who dies from violence in Iraq gets blamed on the coalition. But if you look at their actual database of the 3000 fully documented civilian deaths you discover that the overwhelming majority of the deaths they are counting were caused by terrorist/insurgent attacks and assassinations, not by coalition forces. They don't make it entirely clear, but when they attribute gunfire as the cause and Iraqi police as the victims, you can bet it's not the US or the UK shooting them. In actuality less than 500 of the 3000 fully documented deaths can be clearly attributed to the actions of coalition forces. Based on that relationship, a reasonable high estimate of deaths actually caused by coalition military forces, including all of those claimed but not fully documented would be about 2700. This is not far from the estimate of about 4000 civilian deaths released by the US Department of Defense, and even that figure is suspect because when enemy combatants don't wear uniforms it's awfully hard to be sure that all of those non-uniformed casualties were genuine civilians, so the 2700 documented deaths looks like the most reliable figure to work with.

In a nation with Iraq's population of 22.6 million the number of actual civilian casualties is really remarkably low even if you take Iraq Body Coount's most inflated figure of 17,000. That's only a tiny increase over the normal rate of death for a population that size. Any civilian deaths are undesirable, but it's a commentary on the conscientious humanitarianism of the coalition forces that accidental civilian deaths at their hands have been so incredibly low. To put this in context, consider the 1.5+ million civilian deaths in Russia per year during WW2, representing a loss of almost 2% of the total civilian population per year. In comparison the civilian casualties in Iraq make up at most .07% of the civilian population. Civilian casualties are never good, but as numbers go that's remarkably low given all the ordinance flying around.

So the story here is not really the unsupportable claim of 100,000 casualties, but the less alarming but really much more impressive fact that the war and pacification of the country has been carried out with so amazingly few civilian casualties and that in fact the vast majority of the civilian casualties outside of full-scale military operations have been caused not by coalition forces, but by terrorists and insurgents indescriminately bombing and shooting their own population or deliberately assassinating specific civilian targets. Wouldn't it be nice to see that mentioned in the media or on a liberal weblog for a change.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Cops an d do-gooders

liberal hawks and the iraq war

This exchange took place in slate a while back and I enjoy Berman's thinking. I suppose I imagine myself a throwback to the days of the spanish civil war, when fascism was on the rise and people did something about it. The confusion in this day and age is understandable against the backdrop of Bush and American adventurism, but....
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The language of WMD, Bad Guys, humanitarianism, and all the rest cannot describe these movements and their doctrines and their fanaticism. We know how to speak about member states of the United Nations. But totalitarian movements have always been international, with and without state support. We have lost the ability to speak about mass international movements of that sort.

Why is that? It is because most people have convinced themselves that modern totalitarianism no longer exists. The Bush administration has said so itself. Everybody remembers the notorious National Security statement of 2002—the statement that became infamous for declaring somewhat idiotically (because some things are better left unsaid) a policy of pre-emptive war. But the really scandalous part of that statement said: "For most of the 20th century, the world was divided by a great struggle over ideas: destructive totalitarian visions versus freedom and equality. That great struggle is over."

Wrong! The totalitarian visions live on. Only, instead of being called fascism or some other name from the past, the visions of the present are called radical Islamism and Baathism and suchlike, with doctrines duly descended from their European progenitors—the totalitarianism of the modern Muslim world. All the talk about WMD has been hugely misleading, in this respect. As the NRA likes to say, WMD don't kill people; mass totalitarian movements kill people (sometimes using WMD, but more often, not). But our mayor's language of foreign policy has prohibited us from saying so.

What was the reason for the war in Iraq? Sept. 11 was the reason. At least to my mind it was. Sept. 11 showed that totalitarianism in its modern Muslim version was not going to stop at slaughtering millions of Muslims, and hundreds of Israelis, and attacking the Indian government, and blowing up American embassies. The totalitarian manias were rising, and the United States itself was now in danger. A lot of people wanted to respond, as any mayor would do, by rounding up a single Bad Guy, Osama.

But Sept. 11 did not come from a single Bad Guy—it was a product of the larger totalitarian wave, and the only proper response was to comprehend the size and depth of that larger wave, and find ways to begin rolling it back, militarily and otherwise—mostly otherwise. To roll it back for our own sake, and everyone else's sake, Muslims' especially. Iraq, with its somewhat antique variation of the Muslim totalitarian idea, was merely a place to begin, after Afghanistan, with its more modern variation.

How anti-americanism betrays the left

How anti-Americanism betrays the left

This is an outstanding article which again speaks of the old left which was decidedly anti-fascist...
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The left has a long tradition of pacifism. Some of that was ethical or religious, and thus not confined to the left. More of it has come from the historic base of the movements of the left, created from those sections of the population who suffered most from modern wars: the poor who were bombed or shelled in greater numbers, and the poor who were conscripted and died in large numbers, and who had had little direct say in the decisions leading up to war's declaration.

But the dilemmas of modern war and terror are not so ideologically tidy. Individualism - more of a right wing cause than a left wing one - privileges choice and the enhancement of life. Making choices conflicts directly with obedience and honour, which have been the implicit bases of the armed forces. The mass can no longer be treated as a mass, and is not to be mobilised by mass appeals from either right or left.

The left has also had a stronger and more cherished tradition of anti-fascism. It was the left in Germany and in Italy which most fiercely opposed fascism (though it was also sections of the left which helped to create it). The left in Europe mobilised international resistance to the Nationalist forces in Spain during the civil war, and called for their states to intervene on the republican government's side.

These traditions - of pacifism, individualism and anti-fascism now meet another: anti-Americanism, not confined to the left in developed states, but most virulent on it. Inspired by powerful (among the young) prophets as Professor Noam Chomsky, sharpened by the anti-globalisation movement which tends to equate America with capitalism, the emotive force of opposition to the global superpower was gathering strength before September 11: and, ironically, has continued to gather force after it.

Some definitions are needed, particularly for those Americans who attend to European debates. Anti-Americanism is not criticism of the American government's policies, any more than criticism of the Israeli government's policies is anti-Semitism. But there is now a narrative of the left - complete in itself in the way such narratives are - which sees in the US an imperial predator whose actions - all actions - are conditioned by this aspect of its being.

This narrative has ceased to be critical, but become predestinarian: rather as predestinarians divided humanity into those whose actions could never be wrong and those whose actions could never be right, so this strain of left critique arrogates to itself the first and confers on the US the second. It is important not to confuse this grand, totalising critique with criticism, from left or right. The latter is essential for governments, most essential for governments with such awful power as the US commands. But the totalising critique is an intellectual construct, derived from the techniques of 19th century philosophy, which bends all facts to fit the ideological line.

Sunday, August 07, 2005

True story...maybe...

True story..Law Professor here at the Law school has the class meet DURING class for drinks...as a required class...if we miss more than three here in California, we are dismissed from the class. Tells them they will get extra credit if they beat him at pool... Everything I tell you here is inadmissible hearsay and doubtless inflated by the telling...but I've long ago given up on reality and am looking for a good fantasy anyway...

He starts out at the local Hilton/Hyatt hotel on the hill with a lovely view of Santa Rosa throwing back double-scotches...winds up with a 90 dollar bill. Allegedly puts his arm around some of the younger chicks, including my oversexed ex-girlfriend Rong (you would think I could tell by the name she was trouble) from China and another chick.

The evening goes on..most people leave, he ends up in an argument with some young lady who isn't his student...tells her she won't amount to anything...She cries and leaves. Whatever he said may be true, may be the result of a cocky young lady, may be totally uncalled for and rude...I make no claim.

My friend, the witness, leaves and goes off somewhere else...returns later to pick up a car and finds the Professor passed out in the back of his car. The hotel waitress threatens to call the police if they don't get him out of there. They throw him in his car and drive it to his house.

Next day the young ladies' MOTHER calls (like this is high school or something?)the school and complains. The dean investigates....

The class he teaches? PROFESSIONAL RESPONSIBILITY!!!

Friday, August 05, 2005

The turning point

When I first read this article, sent to me by a fellow teacher from Vallejo, my first reaction was "what an asshole". I probably said it out loud as I sat in my studio on Division Street in Napa. Yet an odd feeling crept over me...uncertainty..the article resonated in my mind and I couldn't help but think about it and read again and again.

I don't know if it was several days, or an hour, but eventually, I realized I agreed with him. His attack on Noam Chomsky seemed unfair. But in the aftermath of 911 I watched carefully, and it changed the way I looked at things.

I already despised the PLO and the insane maniacs of Hamas. Though I never thought much of the Israelis, being at least partially Jewish, or sort of Jewish, or tinged with the the taint of Jewishness, I had a certain sympathy for the Israelis. And having been exposed to the bellicose and violently angry Palestinians at SFSU, who utterly disgusted me as much as the Lebanese socialist I met there inspired me, my transformation was complete. I was officially a liberal hawk. Or a neo-conservative (although I really don't know what that means) and as much as I despised the movement toward war, was utterly shocked at the American adventure, I couldn't bring myself to protest the removal of Hussein. I observed impartially, as though China was invading North Korea. A not so good guy taking out a really very bad guy. I couldn't really see how the removal of Hussein was worth even getting off my couch. I knew it wasn't worth MY life, but I didn't begrudge anyone who did. In fact, I felt a sense of jealousy for the people I knew who fought there. Fighting fascism, in whatever form, is honorable. It may be one of my great regrets in life. But then again I'm alive.

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© 2001 The Nation Company, L.P.
http://www.thenation.com
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COLUMN | October 8, 2001

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Against Rationalization: Minority Report

It was in Peshawar, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier, as the Red Army was falling apart and falling back. I badly needed a guide to get me to the Khyber Pass, and I decided that what I required was the most farouche-looking guy with the best command of English and the toughest modern automobile. Such a combination was obtainable, for a price. My new friend rather wolfishly offered me a tour of the nearby British military cemetery (a well-filled site from the Victorian era) before we began. Then he slammed a cassette into the dashboard. I braced myself for the ululations of some mullah but received instead a dose of "So Far Away." From under the turban and behind the beard came the gruff observation, "I thought you might like Dire Straits."

This was my induction into the now-familiar symbiosis of tribal piety and high-tech; a symbiosis consummated on September 11 with the conversion of the southern tip of the capital of the modern world into a charred and suppurating mass grave. Not that it necessarily has to be a symbol of modernism and innovation that is targeted for immolation. As recently as this year, the same ideology employed heavy artillery to destroy the Buddha statues at Bamiyan, and the co-thinkers of bin Laden in Egypt have been heard to express the view that the Pyramids and the Sphinx should be turned into shards as punishment for their profanely un-Islamic character.

Since my moment in Peshawar I have met this faction again. In one form or another, the people who leveled the World Trade Center are the same people who threw acid in the faces of unveiled women in Kabul and Karachi, who maimed and eviscerated two of the translators of The Satanic Verses and who machine-gunned architectural tourists at Luxor. Even as we worry what they may intend for our society, we can see very plainly what they have in mind for their own: a bleak and sterile theocracy enforced by advanced techniques. Just a few months ago Bosnia surrendered to the international court at The Hague the only accused war criminals detained on Muslim-Croat federation territory. The butchers had almost all been unwanted "volunteers" from the Chechen, Afghan and Kashmiri fronts; it is as an unapologetic defender of the Muslims of Bosnia (whose cause was generally unstained by the sort of atrocity committed by Catholic and Orthodox Christians) that one can and must say that bin Ladenism poisons everything that it touches.

I was apprehensive from the first moment about the sort of masochistic e-mail traffic that might start circulating from the Chomsky-Zinn-Finkelstein quarter, and I was not to be disappointed. With all due thanks to these worthy comrades, I know already that the people of Palestine and Iraq are victims of a depraved and callous Western statecraft. And I think I can claim to have been among the first to point out that Clinton's rocketing of Khartoum--supported by most liberals--was a gross war crime, which would certainly have entitled the Sudanese government to mount reprisals under international law. (Indeed, the sight of Clintonoids on TV, applauding the "bounce in the polls" achieved by their man that day, was even more repulsive than the sight of destitute refugee children making a wretched holiday over the nightmare on Chambers Street.) But there is no sense in which the events of September 11 can be held to constitute such a reprisal, either legally or morally.

It is worse than idle to propose the very trade-offs that may have been lodged somewhere in the closed-off minds of the mass murderers. The people of Gaza live under curfew and humiliation and expropriation. This is notorious. Very well: Does anyone suppose that an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza would have forestalled the slaughter in Manhattan? It would take a moral cretin to suggest anything of the sort; the cadres of the new jihad make it very apparent that their quarrel is with Judaism and secularism on principle, not with (or not just with) Zionism. They regard the Saudi regime not as the extreme authoritarian theocracy that it is, but as something too soft and lenient. The Taliban forces viciously persecute the Shiite minority in Afghanistan. The Muslim fanatics in Indonesia try to extirpate the infidel minorities there; civil society in Algeria is barely breathing after the fundamentalist assault.

Now is as good a time as ever to revisit the history of the Crusades, or the sorry history of partition in Kashmir, or the woes of the Chechens and Kosovars. But the bombers of Manhattan represent fascism with an Islamic face, and there's no point in any euphemism about it. What they abominate about "the West," to put it in a phrase, is not what Western liberals don't like and can't defend about their own system, but what they do like about it and must defend: its emancipated women, its scientific inquiry, its separation of religion from the state. Loose talk about chickens coming home to roost is the moral equivalent of the hateful garbage emitted by Falwell and Robertson, and exhibits about the same intellectual content. Indiscriminate murder is not a judgment, even obliquely, on the victims or their way of life, or ours. Any decent and concerned reader of this magazine could have been on one of those planes, or in one of those buildings--yes, even in the Pentagon.

The new talk is all of "human intelligence": the very faculty in which our ruling class is most deficient. A few months ago, the Bush Administration handed the Taliban a subsidy of $43 million in abject gratitude for the assistance of fundamentalism in the"war on drugs." Next up is the renewed "missile defense" fantasy recently endorsed by even more craven Democrats who seek to occupy the void "behind the President." There is sure to be further opportunity to emphasize the failings of our supposed leaders, whose costly mantra is "national security" and who could not protect us. And yes indeed, my guide in Peshawar was a shadow thrown by William Casey's CIA, which first connected the unstoppable Stinger missile to the infallible Koran. But that's only one way of stating the obvious, which is that this is an enemy for life, as well as an enemy of life.

Tuesday, August 02, 2005

Bosnia and Bagdahd

http://www.slate.com/id/2122395/

Above all, what I remember is the sense of shame. A French general named Philippe Morillon had promised the terrified refugees that they would be safe. A Dutch commander had been mandated to make good on this promise. The United Nations, the European Union, the "peacekeepers" of all nations had assured the terrified civilians of Bosnia-Herzegovina that the international community was stronger than Milosevic's depraved regime and the death squads that it had spawned. And those who were so foolish as to trust this pledge were then hideously put to death. On video. In plain sight. Scanned from NATO and American satellites circulating indifferently in outer space. What must it be like to die like that, gutted like a sheep in full view of the vaunted "international community," while your family is bullied and humbled in front of you and while your captors and killers taunt you in their stolen or borrowed United Nations blue helmets? Because yes, all that really happened, too, and meanwhile the nurturing and protective Dutch officers were photographed clinking glasses of champagne with Gen. Ratko Mladic. Shame isn't really the word for it.

========================
This gives rise to the whole discussion about what a just war is. The discredited few who say there is no such thing aren't worthy of our time.

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Monday, August 01, 2005

fear of death

The law is beginning to eat away at me. I've become obsessed with death in a very unhealthy way, namely MY death.

I'm fearful that I have given up three years of my life for nothing. If I were to die today, would this really have been the best use of my time, shutting myself away for four years, spending weekend after weekend pouring over boring-ass, and really quite awful prose? Abusing my intellect in this way?

It's also the subject. Trusts and wills. Death. Criminal law. Death. Torts...wrongful death. Community property, death. Real property, death. Greedy people are set into motion when someone with money dies. It's really quite enraging and disgusting to read.

People need to stop dying in the stuff I read.

What area of law can I focus on where people aren't dying?