Month: January 2009

Steven Landsburg worries about Obama’s economic overreach.

Carolyn Kellogg reviews a new book. A whole world of heart can be summarized in very few words:

I loved the idea of you. — Audrey Adu-Appiah

Tomorrow, maybe, I’ll sell the ring. — Matt Tanner    

He posted our sex tape online. — Lauran Strait    

Heartbroken, until the bitch finally died. — Christopher Moore    

It hurts even worse in French. — Derek Pollard

Inevitably, his obituary didn’t mention me. — R. Sue Dodea

I thought we had more time. — Joe Hill

I always thought I had less.

The news from Gitmo – and we are bound to discover more – is that brutality and incompetence were indeed the watchwords for these goons and thugs. Benen:

The previous administration a) tortured detainees, making it harder to prosecute dangerous terrorists; b) released bad guys while detaining good guys; and c) neglected to keep comprehensive files on possible terrorists who’ve been in U.S. custody for several years. As if the fiasco at Gitmo weren’t hard enough to clean up.

I’m reminded of something John Cole said the other day: "The moral of this story is not the danger for Obama going forward with his Gitmo decommissioning, the moral is that when venal, shallow, small men are given unfettered power and authority, they do incompetent, stupid, and evil things."

So says P. W. Singer:

The reality is that the human location “in the loop” is already becoming, as retired Army colonel Thomas Adams notes, that of “a supervisor who serves in a fail- safe capacity in the event of a system malfunction.” Even then, he thinks that the speed, confusion, and information overload of modern-day war will soon move the whole process outside “human space.” He describes how the coming weapons “will be too fast, too small, too numerous, and will create an environment too complex for humans to direct.” As Adams concludes, the new technologies “are rapidly taking us to a place where we may not want to go, but probably are unable to avoid.”

The irony is that for all the claims by military, political, and scientific leaders that “humans will always be in the loop,” as far back as 2004 the U.S. Army was carrying out research that demonstrated the merits of armed ground robots equipped with a “quick-draw response.” Similarly, a 2006 study by the Defense Safety Working Group, in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, discussed how the concerns over potential killer robots could be allayed by giving “armed autonomous systems” permission to “shoot to destroy hostile weapons systems but not suspected combatants.” That is, they could shoot at tanks and jeeps, just not the people in them. Perhaps most telling is a report that the Joint Forces Command drew up in 2005, which suggested that autonomous robots on the battlefield would be the norm within 20 years. Its title is somewhat amusing, given the official line one usually hears: Unmanned Effects: Taking the Human Out of the Loop.

So, despite what one article called “all the lip service paid to keeping a human in the loop,” auton­omous armed robots are coming to war. They simply make too much sense to the people who matter.

John Schwenkler argues that Benedict was right to lift Holocaust denier Richard Williamson’s excommunication. But I wasn’t arguing that the man’s poisonous views demand excommunication. In canon law, that makes little sense. I argued that rescinding excommunication when the man still holds this kind of dark Vatican I view of the world and the church is a provocation – to the Jewish people, civilized people everywhere and to Catholics who thought we had left this kind of poison behind in the 1960s. It is another signal of how much contempt Benedict holds for the Second Council. Schwenkler quotes Damian Thompson:

[The Pope] could have pointed out, in plain language, that since Williamson was not excommunicated for his opinions – Holocaust denial is not an excommunicable offence – they were not technically a barrier to the lifting of the decree. And he could also have expressed his repugnance at those views.

Should the excommunications have been lifted? Yes. I don’t think Williamson should be allowed to block the eventual reconciliation of the SSPX with the Holy See, something he does not want to happen.

My thoughts here. The Pope did nothing to condemn the Holocaust-denial rhetoric. I cannot see how the state of Israel can welcome Benedict at any point in the near future. By returning the church to its darker past, Benedict is shutting off dialogue in favor of a smaller, more orthodox and more insular form of faith.

Remember that CBO report the Dish linked to earlier this week? It doesn’t exist.

Sam Wang weighs in on Forbes list:

The problem appears to be that “liberal” was not a clearly defined term (although the authors claim to have used concrete criteria such as a desire for universal health care and opposition to the Iraq war). Perhaps the practical criterion was “liberals plus people who annoy us Republican loyalists.” In this light the list makes more sense. Too bad they didn’t pause to consider that many of these people annoy quite a broad political demographic.

There’s a second advantage to defining liberalism in a way that includes nonideological or middle-of-the-road pundits. It never hurts to work the referee, i.e. call someone liberal as a way of getting him/her to lean further rightward. In this light, the inclusion of the NYT and WaPo op-ed directors (Shipley and Hiatt) as well as the WSJ news director (Seib) makes perfect sense. Even assuming these three people are actual liberals, in practice they don’t carry out editorial policies that lean left.

Tim Ash has a refreshing piece on the subject in the NYT today. I like the word "liberal" and am very comfortable with the word "classical" in front of it. Many American conservatives are liberals in the deepest sense – they back the free market, the First Amendment, the broad balance of the American constitution, a decent respect for the opinion of mankind. But what has emerged in recent years is a darker, more authoritarian strain of conservatism – rooted in the cultural and racial conservatism of the South, partial to a near-dictatorial war-presidency, believing in American exceptionalism to the extent that it exempts America from the moral norms of the rest of the world, and rooting the legitimacy of the American constitution in only one religious tradition (narrowly defined).

These characters want to redefine conservatism around this theocratic, authoritarian, self-justifying ideology. I am more than happy to share the term liberalism with others. I am not going to have the word conservative coopted solely by these religious radicals.

San Gabriel, California, 11.25 am.

Over to Matthew Parris, whose Tory pessimism often eclipses even mine:

This recession is not a failure of market economics. It is a reassertion of market economics after a decade in which we paid ourselves more than we were producing, and funded it precariously and temporarily by complicated credit instruments that it took a while for the market to rumble. Now a prosperity that always baffled ordinary citizens has collapsed. The collapse of confidence is not irrational; it’s the correction to a long run of irrational confidence. All that stuff about the emerging Asian giants wasn’t just phrasemaking for party conference speeches. It was true. We’re falling behind. We face a mountain of debt: the difference between the life we are able to sustain and the life we were enjoying.

I don’t understand why, after two decades of bubbling our way to phony prosperity through the dotcom chimera and the housing boom, it is somehow a "crisis" that our standard of living is falling. It is surely a good thing that the standard of living is falling. It means that reality is beginning to return. A hangover may be painful but its cure is not a bout of more binging. My fundamental concern with the stimulus is that its spending be focused directly on real investment and immediate demand and that it be swiftly followed by a brutal assault on long-term entitlement and defense spending.

We need to take a machete to social security and Medicare and a very sharp scalpel to all domestic discretionary spending. And we need to think very hard about big withdrawals of troops in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, and about the foreign aid we give Egypt and Israel. Between the boomers at home and the expanding, unending empire abroad, the next generation will have no sane fiscal future unless something is done very very soon.

A reader writes:

Did you notice how many people on the list were seemingly chosen not for their writing or their politics, but rather their identity?  Oprah is a liberal because she is black, Hitch is a liberal because he is atheist, and you are a liberal because you are gay.  These are not just things that are mentioned in the list — they are the primary reasons given which, coupled with any support at all for Obama in the past election, set your name in stone as a liberal one.  I suspect that a few of the choices for that list say much more about the Forbes writers’ politics than it does about yours.

What it mainly tells you is that conservatism is degenerate. But we knew that already.