Month: December 2008

Jon Henke calls out Democrats impugning the patriotism of Republicans.

Poulos responds.

And says nothing – nothing – about why his 2004 position that those responsible for Abu Ghraib should be jailed or executed has evaporated. My own position on torture has been consistent from Day One of the war. It genuinely didn’t occur to me that any president would adopt the standards of Communists and Nazis in prosecuting it. So yes, discovering such an atrocity was perhaps the deepest reason I changed my position on Bush entirely. Finding out that a man you supported in good faith is actually a war criminal will do that. But what I have also done is make a deep, grueling and long attempt to take responsibility for my original misjudgment, and show how my own changed position on Bush has much to do with what we subsequently discovered and that was, at the time, unknown to me.

Reynolds, in contrast, has never provided an ounce of accountability for his own support for Bush and Cheney and Rove and their entire legacy these past few years. Nowhere is this clearer than on torture, a position that reveals that his alleged libertarianism is simply a cover for a defense of raw power and brute, often vicious, force and brutality.

Remember: back in 2004, his position was that what happened at Abu Ghraib was torture, period, and that those responsible should face jail or execution. His position now is that no legal sanctions should be applied to those responsible for the torture, let alone jail or executuion. In fact, he opposes even further investigation of these war crimes. And what he once called torture, he now defers to Jack Goldsmith’s judgment thus:

The people in government who made mistakes or who acted in ways that seemed reasonable at the time but now seem inappropriate have been held publicly accountable by severe criticism, suffering enormous reputational and, in some instances, financial losses. Little will be achieved by further retribution.

So Jack Goldsmith and Glenn Reynolds believes that the techniques revealed at Abu Ghrain seemed reasonable at the time? To whom? Certainly not to Reynolds. And bringing torturers to justice is now "retribution"? And notice the kind of justice this law professor supports: Lynndie England is thrown in jail but the man whose orders she was following remains untouched? What England did was a crime but what those who ordered her to do it were merely making mistakes? Sometimes the corruption of justice fomented by Bush and dutifully echoed by hacks like Reynolds is really brought into the light.

Alan Jacobs praises the Kindle:

…once you start reading a book on the Kindle the technology generates an inertia that makes it significantly easier to keep reading than to do anything else. The Kindle, unlike many other artifacts of the digital age, promotes linearity — it creates a forward momentum that you can reverse if you wish, but not without some effort.

The first book I read on my Kindle was Neal Stephenson’s new novel Anathem, a behemoth of a book, and that experience was delightful because there was no awkward manual management of a large heavy book, and limited temptation to repeatedly investigate the book’s apparatus — Anathem has a wonderful glossary to help readers deal with Stephenson’s many neologisms, but my tendency when offered something like that is to wander around in it and forget to get back to the story. Reading Anathem on the Kindle, I knew that I could get to the Glossary if I needed to, but it didn’t constantly tempt me. Instead, I became utterly absorbed in the story itself.

Move over, Aristotle:

Although the researchers don’t speculate on the specific chemical reactions that created life, they explain that the molecules involved most likely underwent a series of more and more complex reactions to minimize mutual energy differences between matter on Earth and with respect to high-energy radiation from Sun. The process eventually advanced so far that it cumulated into such sophisticated functional structures that could be called living. “The most important idea in our study is that there is no distinction between animate and inanimate,” Arto Annila told PhysOrg.com. “Processes of life are, in their principles, no different from any other natural processes.” In this sense, life is a very natural thing, which emerged simply to satisfy basic physical laws. Our “purpose,” so to speak, is to redistribute energy on the Earth, which is in between a huge potential energy difference caused by the hot Sun and cold space.

(Hat tip: Sunil)

Saletan reacts to Boston banning the sale of tobacco products at colleges:

I detest smoking. But if there’s no secondhand smoke and no secondhand driving effects, what are the grounds for telling a 20-year-old college student—let alone a 25-year-old professional school student—that tobacco is off limits? And if that kind of paternalism can be extended so easily from minors to 25-year-olds, who’s next?

Another trip down memory lane. From Jonah Goldberg in April 2004:

Even if all of these pictures were staged this would be an outrage. The fact that they are real makes this staggeringly awful. The awfulness is twofold. First, there’s the illegal, morally corrupt — and corrupting — evil of torturing people for the pleasure of it (and taking pictures of it!). Second, there’s the counter-productive stupidity of it. Even if these guys were the worst henchmen of Saddam’s torture chambers, the damage this does to the image of America is huge. How do we look when we denounce Saddam’s torture chambers now? How many more American soldiers will be shot because of the ill will and outrage this generates? How do we claim to be champions of the rule of law?

Well, there is one way. This needs to be investigated and prosecuted. If there’s more to the story — whatever that could conceivably be — let’s find out. But if the story is as it appears, there has to be accountability, punishment and disclosure. Indeed, even if this turned out to be a prank, too much damage has already been done and someone needs to be punished.

Under Saddam torturers were rewarded and promoted. In America they must be held to account.

I couldn’t agree more with every word of this. That it was torture; that it was evil; that it was stupid and counter-productive; that it was a total violation of the rule of law; that the people responsible need to be punished. But like Reynolds, once it emerged that president Bush was actually responsible for it, Goldberg changed his mind. Why?

James Surowiecki sees an imminent reckoning for newspapers:

For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime—intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on—and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.

Ross is upset by liberals calling Planned Parenthood pro-choice because of its contraception funding:

Planned Parenthood’s commitment to performing hundreds of thousands of low-cost abortions annually is a feature, not a bug. But telling people who are against abortion that they’re "pro-herpes" because they don’t support channeling three hundred million public dollars a year to America’s largest abortion provider is the equivalent of me accusing a fierce and moralizing anti-theist like Sam Harris of being "anti-education" because he doesn’t want his tax dollars being used to, say, fund the Catholic school system. The phenomenon of an institution that does good with one hand and evil with another is a familiar one in human history – even Hezbollah does a lot of impressive humanitarian work, I believe – and it does not by any means follow that those who oppose the evil are morally obligated to support the institution anyway just because it does other, less morally problematic things besides.