Friday, June 11, 2004

A bit of good news, for a change. The Saudi grad student who was on trial for the "terrorist offence" of running a discussion forum on Middle East politics has been acquitted.

Well, good news to a point. One juror had a bit of a surprise in the jury instructions:

"The part that surprised me was when I read the First Amendment instructions. I was surprised to learn that people could say whatever they want ... providing it would not cause imminent action."

You have to wonder what this guy thought "it's a free country" meant.

And even though the poor guy was acquitted on the terrorism counts, the jury hung on some immigration counts whose sole basis, from what I gather in the press, is

is that he certified repeatedly that he was entering the country “solely” to study, but actually engaged in other activities outside class, including volunteer work to operate and maintain Web sites.

First I've heard that student visas come with a gag rule...

via slashdot.

Thursday, June 10, 2004

One of the things about blogs is that they aren't necessarily comprehensive, and aren't necessarily meant to be. Blogging is just a goddam hobby, and no blogger is obliged, by virtue of having a blog, to write about any particular subject.

Suppose, for instance, that the Wall Street Journal releases a memorandum from the White House that says that the President has the power to set aside any law, to authorize torture, and to ignore the other two branches of government in doing so. And let's suppose that there's a law professor blogging about civil rights issues when it happens. It's entirely within the guy's rights to concentrate his attention on school speech codes, and the rather distant possibility of a revival of the flag-burning amendment. That's his prerogative. Maybe he thinks that his readership, seeking out diverse views, will have already seen a detailed, and caustic analysis from another professor. Maybe he just can't think of anything to say.

These, at any rate, are the excuses arguments I come up with when dinged in email for not writing anything about the Darfur genocide now ongoing in Sudan.

But some people do have professional obligations. Senators, for instance. If the White House is claiming the authority to unilaterally set aside the laws, and Congress does not strongly object, then the process of checks and balances which is supposed to safeguard our liberties is shot.

Which brings us to the question: is there anything that Dubya's crew could do which is so outrageous that even sitting Republican Senators will call it an outrage, or are they so "animated by a spirit of faction", in the words of the Federalist Papers, that Reagan's Eleventh Commandment entirely trumps the other ten?

The memo hasn't been floating around for more than a couple of days yet, and one understands that it might take a little time to put together a strategy, even if they do tend to strongly object. But initial soundings are hardly encouraging....

One of the things about blogs is that they aren't necessarily comprehensive, and aren't necessarily meant to be. Blogging is just a goddam hobby, and no blogger is obliged, by virtue of having a blog, to write about any particular subject.

Suppose, for instance, that the Wall Street Journal releases a memorandum from the White House that says that the President has the power to set aside any law, to authorize torture, and to ignore the other two branches of government in doing so. And let's suppose that there's a law professor blogging about civil rights issues when it happens. It's entirely within the guy's rights to concentrate his attention on school speech codes, and the rather distant possibility of a revival of the flag-burning amendment. That's his prerogative. Maybe he thinks that his readership, seeking out diverse views, will have already seen a detailed, and caustic analysis from another professor. Maybe he just can't think of anything to say.

These, at any rate, are the excuses arguments I come up with when dinged in email for not writing anything about the Darfur genocide now ongoing in Sudan.

But some people do have professional obligations. Senators, for instance. If the White House is claiming the authority to unilaterally set aside the laws, and Congress does not strongly object, then the process of checks and balances which is supposed to safeguard our liberties is shot.

Which brings us to the question: is there anything that Dubya's crew could do which is so outrageous that even sitting Republican Senators will call it an outrage, or are they so "animated by a spirit of faction", in the words of the Federalist Papers, that Reagan's Eleventh Commandment entirely trumps the other ten?

The memo hasn't been floating around for more than a couple of days yet, and one understands that it might take a little time to put together a strategy, even if they do tend to strongly object. But initial soundings are hardly encouraging....

Tuesday, June 08, 2004

A note on two items which have been circulating a lot in the lefty blogsphere over the past few days.

The first is the DOD torture memo that the Wall Street Journal floated yesterday, the one containing the much-remarked advice that

To protect subordinates should they be charged with torture, the memo advised that Mr. Bush issue a "presidential directive or other writing" that could serve as evidence, since authority to set aside the laws is "inherent in the president."

Which is to say that if torture is used, Dubya should authorize it explicitly, since activities he chooses to authorize are above the law. But relax, folks -- they surely don't mean to authorize anything; in practice, this will surely be limited to the activities of Republicans. The memo is also noteworthy for its invocation of the Nuremberg "just following orders" defense (so called, as Billmon notes, because it was rejected at Nuremberg).

But beyond the individual howlers (though should one really look beyond an assertion that Dubya is allowed to authorize anything?) is the general tone, described in Phil Carter's much-quoted analysis that Dubya's administration is less focused on doing the right thing than on getting away with the wrong thing. How did we arrive at standards of conduct where this is considered proper?

Another item making the rounds is a Hannity and Colmes segment on George Soros, featuring charming little tidbits like this:

BLANKLEY: [Soros] said that he has no moral responsibility for the consequences of his financial actions. He is a self-admitted atheist. He was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the holocaust. ...

BLANKLEY: When a man with this kind -- when a man is with this kind of money, and he's spending it on trying to influence the American public in an election -- trying to buy the election; he is not going to -- we have a right to know what kind of an unscrupulous man he is.

Now, allusions to anti-Semitic tropes are all over this thing, and I don't mean to discount them. (Exactly how is it supposed to be a sign of his "unscrupulous" nature that he "figured out a way to survive the holocaust"? And that's far from the worst that Soros's critics have dished out lately.) But lost in that is that one of Tony Blankley's charges is in fact true: Soros's book, "Open Society" does make the claim, and defend it at length, that neither Soros nor any other participant in financial markets is morally accountable for their actions:

I insist that there is no point in applying moral judgments to decisions that have no outcome -- and that is the case regarding the social effects of individual investment decisions. Those decisions affect only the profits of the individual, not the prices prevailing in the market. That is what I mean when I say that markets are amoral: The anonymous participant need not be concerned with the social consequences of her decisions. By contrast, political actions, such as voting or lobbying or even arguing, do have social consequences. ...

I arrived at this precept when I was an anonymous market participant. That covers my career in finance up to and including the devalutaion of sterling in 1992. I blew my cover when I allowed myself to be identified as "the man who broke the Bank of England." Since then, ... I have become a public person whose utterances can influence the outcome. I can no longer escape having to make moral judgments. This has made it practically impossible for me to function as a market participant.

This is an odd argument -- there are many markets where individual participants hold positions big enough to influence prices without that fact, or their actions, attracting public notice. (Think Cargill in grain, for example). And Soros does go on to claim that moral accountability is on society at large for setting up the market mechanism in the first place, and goes on to inveigh against arguments for the primacy of markets as a social decision making mechanism, for exactly that reason:

Financial markets are amoral, and that is why they are so effective in aggregating the views of the participants. Exactly because of that quality, they cannot be left in charge of deciding the future.

But the bottom line is still that Soros does claim that his financial transactions -- so long as they follow market rules -- are subject to no moral standards beyond that.

But even so, it's still very strange for Blankley to cite it in a bill of particulars against Soros -- because Soros's views on the point are not really exceptional. It's a truism in financial circles these days that the sole responsibility of the management of not just, say, a hedge fund, but of any corporation, is fiduciary duty to the shareholders -- conceived quite narrowly as maximizing their financial return. All other considerations are supposed to be set aside. What makes Soros exceptional is not his willingness to live by this, but that he's bothered enough to try to rationalize it.

The upshot of this is that we, as a society, have a stratum of powerful decision makers who believe it is not just their right, but their duty, to set moral considerations aside in their professional activities. At best they're supposed to live within the bounds of the law; pushing those bounds -- relocating corporate HQs to Bermuda, for instance, to avoid paying their fair share of taxes -- is seen as innovative and praiseworthy, at least in some circles. Should it be such a surprise that, confronted with legal barriers of a slightly different sort, the administration of an "MBA President" acts the same way?

More: Here's a New York Times Magazine piece by Michael Lewis on the strained quality of modern business ethics in America:

When you are honest only because honesty pays, says Birkenstock's C.E.O., you risk forgetting the meaning of honesty. When you are socially responsible only because social responsibility pays, you lose any real sense of what responsibility means.

via Rafe Colburn...

Besides which, embarassing examples of the same ethic at work are easily found far closer to Dubya -- Dick Cheney, whose Halliburton funneled drilling equipment to Saddam through a French subsidiary; his various brothers and friends who have been in trouble with bank regulators over the past few years. And who could forget Ken Lay?

Monday, June 07, 2004

The religious art of medieval Europe, and the Renaissance, wasn't worried much about historical accuracy in the imagery of Bible stories; they showed the characters in what was, for the time, contemporary garb. Which had the effect (perhaps deliberate, perhaps not) of making the stories more immediate and more accessible for their audience, and making it easier to identify with the characters.

Tanya Steinberg is trying the same thing with her paintings of the stations of the cross, each picture quoted straight off the newswires -- some from Latin America, some from Africa, some from here at home, and one apparently from Iraq. In Stations of the Cross 3 -- Jesus falls for the first time, three cops in riot gear are dragging a prisoner; in Stations of the Cross 12 -- Jesus dies on the cross, a dead, emaciated child is suspended in the hands of another, head blocked out, leaving only the body as a cross. The pictures are unsettling, moving, and a lot more impressive close up than in the snapshots on the net -- if you can make it to the Nielsen Gallery on Newbury Street before June 19th, that would be highly recommended.

(By the way, the gallery has faced no harrassment, which is nice to see -- a staffer there was shocked to hear about the trouble a gallery in San Francisco faced when showing a slightly more topical exhibit; that gallery was forced to close).

Also recommended, if you have the chance: the video installations at the Rotenberg gallery, collectively "Google-ing the Real", also through the 19th, and Melora Kuhn's all-too-knowing little girls at Chase through the 26th.

A little news from Boston: the Massachusetts State Lottery is trying to make people feel good about gambling with them, with a series of radio ads on the theme of "even if you lose, you win", by paying for, well, government services. I hesitate a bit because they never use the g-word; instead, they talk about towns using the money to fill in potholes and hire extra police. Years of relentless propaganda by Rush may have given "government" a bad name, but I gather the lottery's focus groups don't connect that to street repair. Yet.

Lotteries are, of course, a horrid way to fund government -- in practice, they amount to a heavily regressive tax. (It evidently takes billion dollar jackpots to tempt even the moderately well-off into buying tickets). But I guess in this day and age, an ad campaign to make people feel good about paying their taxes just wouldn't wash.

Though as long as I'm doing ad peeves again, I might as well mention there's one thing that liberals and libertarians can agree on without qualms -- the nursery-rhyming "Land of No" ads for the anti-cholesterol drug Crestor are incredibly annoying...

Ronald Reagan died this weekend. Condolences are due the family, and his loved ones. But it's disturbing how the hagiographers, not just in the blogsphere but in the mainstream press are giving him credit for stuff that he simply didn't do. Jeanne D'arc believes that brutal honesty about Reagan's record, no matter how justified, would not be good for the soul right now. And perhaps she's right -- but neither is hero-worship blown up to outright lies...

Update: Jeanne couldn't take the lies either:

... I don't think death is an excuse for blatant prevarication or profiteering of any kind either, and anyone engaging in either of those things has to be called on it. I would simply say to anyone who lies about Reagan that the man was no wimp and his memory, if he's as great a president as his supporters think he is, can stand up to the truth.

I don't think it can, of course, but anyone who does believe it ought not to be afraid of facts. The facts are here. Here. Here. Here.