Last week, the court denied a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to release portions of past rulings that would explain how it has interpreted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. There are legitimate national security concerns at stake, but the court should share its legal reasoning with the public.Dear Children,
-The Times Editorial Board
Here is a person who's never had a serious thought about politics or the operations of power. The analysis is as superficial as anything on the cable news. It locates no precedents. It offers no examples. Societies are at some point good, and then they "go over to the dark side." Government is "leashing the beast within." (Hobbes, circa that dude in Intro to Continental Philosophy, Oberlin College, 1999.) It's all a lot of strange, Arcadian nonsense. It's in vein with the liberal anti-torture argument that goes: In World War II, we didn't torture the Nazis. True, mostly. Then again, in World War II:
For the most part, it's just wrong to idealize states as moral agents. This isn't to say that the actions states take lack moral content or moral import. Torture is wrong. Yet it isn't specifically wrong for America to torture. The idea that "we"--meaning America--don't torture is entirely hollow, a comforting but meaningless nostrum. In the first place, we do torture; at least, the agents of our state torture. In the second place, all states torture, just as they kill, bribe, starve, besiege, regulate, investigate, survey, record, and otherwise violate every principle of individual moral and legal conduct. The liberal will argue that in the properly functioning, liberal democratic state, violations of rights aren't arbitrary, but rather bound up by law and tradition, and that danger comes when some villain like George Bush arrogates himself of the right to act "unilaterally" and by executive whim. But the truth is that those limits are all defined by the very entity that they are meant to constrain, which holds as a fundamental principle that it has the right to violate them in war, or in time of emergency, or to "fight" crime, or for a thousand other reasons.
The problem with locating in "America"--more particularly some reified idea of the American character--the prohibition on torture is that it imputes moral agency to a fundamentally amoral actor. No matter how many hoary, medieval body politic metaphors one dredges up from half-remembered civics courses, no matter how much one wants to locate the soul of a civilization in the principles of its government head, the truth is that virtue rests in the individual, not in the state, the government, the national mood, or the national myth. It is true that America is nominally democratic, structurally a republic. These are held to be exceptionalisms of a moral sort. Why? America has launched wars of aggression and territorial expansion, practiced genocide, held human chattel, segregated its own society, tortured. America is neither uniquely good nor uniquely bad; it is a state like any other. Appealing to some losing, lost America in order to protest torture is mere political theater. But Digby is a partisan, so that is precisely the point.
The United States is such a half-assed empire that we can't even railroad a lot of ignorant palookas. I'm struck, though, by an unattributed factesqueoid in the linked article:
The defendants — five Americans and two Haitians — worked in a small construction business owned by Mr. Batiste and were members of the Moorish Science Temple, a sect that blends Islam, Christianity and Judaism and does not recognize the authority of the United States government.Doesn't recognize the authority of the United States government to do what, precisely? I think our intrepid journalist has confused authority and legitimacy. I mean, I don't recognize the legitimacy of the United States government myself, by I sure as shit recognize its authority.
[W]henever liberals hear conservatives or libertarians talk about race they automatically leap to images of Nazism or Fascism when virtually all serious or mainstream rightwing thinkers endorse, at most, benign neglect AKA colorblindness. You can take exception to such arguments, even passionate exception, but it is outrageous to suggest that Murray or Bill Bennett (remember his Freakonomics hypothetical?) or pretty much any other conservative or libertarian worthy of the label wants to use state power to oppress or eliminate minorities. It is a slanderous projection of liberal biases onto conservatives and it has been with us since the days when Herbert Spencer was demonized for being a radical liberal.Now there are at least two jokes here, so I'll just hurry on to the punchlines. Exhibit A:
-Goldberg!
Wanted: Herbert Spencer Expert [Jonah Goldberg]Aaaaaaaannnnnnd, B:
I'm working on a chapter of the book which requires me to read a lot about and by Herbert Spencer. There's simply no way I can read all of it, nor do I really need to. But if there are any real experts on Spencer out there — regardless of ideological affiliation — I'd love to ask you a few questions in case I'm missing something.
What we need is a concerted campaign to demand of our Democratic "leaders" an answer to the question: "What is the real reason you are so cowardly and unwilling to hold this administration to account and stop the bleeding?" What is the real reason that "impeachment is off the table"? What is the real reason why you keep passing bills that make America into a dictatorship, continue the disastrous occupation of Iraq, and piss off the whole country?Dear Avedon,
-Avedon Carol
I endorse this angry wombat for President of the United States of America. He will "chitter" at our enemies, and should they choose to defy us even in the face of his bold, decisive chittering, then he will cause them to follow him into his burrow, where he will crush and asphyxiate them against the ceiling with his disproportionate strength and his toughened, cartilaginous posterior.
Yeah. Move those deck chairs!
A commenter opines, emphasis mine:
I am so tired of Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Just think what could have been accomplished if they were true to us. Instead all we got was their baffling behavior. Remember Harry Reid's scheduled filibuster - what a joke, he thinks we are so dumb.Asked and answered, counselor!
Henry Kissenger explains why you can't be trusted. It is an interesting thesis: Only by serving at the sole behest of the executive branch can the intelligence community attain independence. Obedience-as-freedom is Kissinger's Christological teleology, oddly enough for a Jewish guy. In fact, it's very Catholic. Or Masonic. But of course the fraternal organizations stole all their entered apprenticeships and degrees from the clergy anyway, who stole it from an older clergy still. It posits an ordained hierarchy of secrets. It is not ours to question why.
The people who still call themselves conservatives have an especially deluded notion of America today. On one hand, Sodom. On the other hand, the last beacon of virtue in the world. The catalog of their bogeymen is positively bizarre. "Ethic balkinization?" Qu'est-ce que ça veut dire alors ? If the negroes and spics really were so genetically fucking inferior, wouldn't it make sense to keep them away from our subdivision? "He speaks often about the toll of fatherlessness in this country." Yes, and next up, he'll close the workhouses and open the debtor's gaols!
I can totally get behind Guv Huckabee's pivot to anarchoprimitivism late in the race. Tactically, it's quite brilliant, and it plays in well with his personal fitness thing. You ever meet a fat hunter-gatherer? Neither have I. Anyway, if he chooses John Zerzan as a running mate, I'm in.
It's refreshing, in any case, to find a Republican candidate willing to break from the generally Soviet tone of the contest. Rather than advocating for an ideologically robust, hyperpowerful, mecahnized state organized around a principle of political missonarism and colonial militarism, which is the basic GOP line these days, you've got a guy willing to embrace a total, Khemer Rouge-inspired devolution from the interlocking sociocultural and economic units that define and circumscribe modernity at its most fundamental level to a preagrarian, neolithic arcadia. God Bless you, Buck Turgidson. "I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed."
The quintessential Liberal Fascist isn't an SS storm trooper; it is a female grade school teacher with an education degree from Brown or Swarthmore.I mean, not to get all filmity here, but what's the takeaway, Jonah? Why am I caring? What's the reveal? Grandfather was secretly a Jew? Dad abused her? Mom had affairs? Why did the school teacher turn to evil? Maybe some kind of Rosemary's Baby angle? Listen, thanks, man. We'll call you.
-Book Description of Goldberg!'s new one
Progressives discovering that the CIA is secretive and unaccountable. Who knew?!
I have just learned that Dana Perino, White House spokescreature, doesn't know what the Cuban Missile Crisis was. "I think it had to do with Cuba . . . and missiles." At least that proves she'd be able to figure out butt plugs on the fly.
Via our Defeatist friends, this unmissable cri de cul. What I like is the part where the fat guy says, "They have something called a Jesus butt plug." He says this in such a way as to suggest that he, as a fat conservative, doesn't actually know what butt plug is or associate himself with any butt plugs, sort of the way your mom might say something like, "I don't really know about that rap music." And yet. Butt plug. What you have there is not only a name, but a descriptor, like, say, fabric scissors or garage door. What is a butt plug? Well, friends, it is a plug for your butt.
Crusader AXE asks where these people--meaning the sort who call on the Speaker of the House of Representatives to publicly disavow butt pluggery--come from, and I'm unable to formulate a reply, in part because the butt plug was preceded by the world's only ex-black transgendered ex-transgendered black woman, which is still distracting me. Sex aids are as old as civilization--the Romans used stale loaves of bread as dildos. Imagine the chafing! Jesus died on the cross, for Jesus' sake. You'd think he could handle an hour in someone's butt. Theologically speaking, doesn't his membership in the Triune God make him omnipresent, and therefore ineffably plugging my butt, your butt, and all butts already?
Here is the first paragraph of a novel I am thinking about writing. Should I write it?
The thing about the future is that goddamn it’s not the future to any of us who live there. For instance, you lucky bastards can get excited about flying cars and virtuporn, but all I’ve got is a bill from the mechanic because the SMAGS went bad again. That’s self-magnetizing anti-gravity system, by the way, and I’ve got about as much idea how it works as you do how your, what?—your catalytic converter converts catalysts, or whatever. As far as I can tell, it’s just a lot of metal that attaches one way to one thing and another way to another. And you probably thing it’s fantastic that I have a device that can conjure any object of sexual desire, imbue her, him, or it with personality and desire, and project her, him, or it in three tactile dimensions into the comfort and privacy of my home. Except, of course, that in three hundred years of trying no one has ever written a vagina algorithm that doesn’t jam up, and our homes are neither especially comfortable nor private, although they are very, very beautiful, for the future, my long-deceased friends, is the deep dream of Jeremy Bentham, and when we pray, we atheists in our floating glass houses in our cities of light and gossamer on our world of man-wrought miracles, we pray to nothing that he give us the gift of loneliness.
I won't link to any stories or posts about Democratic foreknowledge of America's renewed dedication to torture. You know where to find them. The fact that the leadership of the party is committed to establishing a secret, extrajudicial, international gulag in which to indefinitely detain prisoners and torture them to extract mostly false confessions is indicative that the party itself is committed to such principles, and that those "good Dems" routinely pimped by Atrios and Kos and the rest of the gang of internet enablers are mere feckless outsiders without power, influence, or significance. To cast a vote for any Democrat at the national level is to cast a vote directly for the torture of other human beings. It is not acquiescence or acceptance; it's endorsement. If you call yourself a Democrat, you're a torturer. If you vote for Hillary Clinton, you're a torturer. There you go. Simple as that. This is not a complex moral equation. There were members of the Nazi party who did not personally approve of the elimination of European Jewry through genocide. There were members of the Soviet Communist Party that did not personally approve of the purges and the gulags. But they signed their names.
