Month: April 2009

Roger Scruton celebrates the West:

Forgiveness and irony lie at the heart of our civilization. They are what we have to be most proud of, and our principal means to disarm our enemies. They underlie our conception of citizenship as founded in consent. And they are expressed in our conception of law as a means to resolve conflicts by discovering the just solution to them. It is not often realized that this conception of law has little in common with Muslim sharia, which is regarded as a system of commands issued by God and not capable of, or in need of, further justification.

Norm Geras isn’t quite so ready:

As regrettable as Obama’s fudging of this issue – his failure, that is, to state forthrightly what is being sacrificed to the political goal of avoiding disunity – are the large numbers of liberal commentators who simply endorse what he did, as if it were to them the most routine matter. Of all people, Philippe Sands:

Obama is right not to target the interrogators in the sense that real responsibility lies much higher up.

No, that is not how ‘real’ responsibility is distributed. Those who order torture are indeed responsible; and so are those who torture. You’d expect Sands to know this. There’s more of the same from Michael Tomasky, who gives out both the ‘real’ blame and the superior authority justifications. And from Ken Gude. And from the LA Times. And from the Boston Globe. Not to prosecute torture flies in the face of both international law and ordinary morality. But here it’s like water off a duck’s back – as if the politics were everything and law and morality of no account.

It all starts on YouTube.

I can only verify this from the Drudge Report, but Cheney is apparently asking that the results of the torture sessions he approved be declassified and made public. I'll wait for the full interview, but this seems to me to be a real opportunity to set up the Truth Commission many of us have been asking for. Release all the data on the torture – all of it – alongside the intelligence we got from it. At least then we will have the data needed to see this in full perspective. It needs to be in context and it needs to be assessed by an independent panel – bipartisan and widely respected – along the lines of the 9/11 Commission. Decisions to prosecute could be made after all the material is laid out. This will take time – and should be done carefully and exhaustively. But it is vital if the US is to remain within the legal and moral bounds of Western civilization.

A new gig.

Hilzoy wants to know why Republicans oppose universal health insurance:

Though I don't agree with them, I can see the argument for not providing help for problems that are in some way people's own fault, or that might lead to big problems with moral hazard. But health care isn't like that. While some illnesses are due to people's choices, many are not. When you get sick, you can be ruined financially, whether  or not you have been prudent. When acts of God ruin like hurricanes or earthquakes ruin people's lives, we step in to help. I have never understood why health care should be different.

Drum pores through studies:

One of the things I've found out over the past few weeks is that virtually all of the research related to cannabis is, perhaps fittingly, sort of hazy.  The research is hard to do, it often points in contradictory directions, and natural experiments are hard to come by.  We know a fair amount, but our confidence level in what we know isn't all that great.

JL Wall reflects on the case of American journalist Roxana Saberi who was sentenced to eight years in prison last week for “espionage”:

Regardless of guilt or innocence, she’s a political prisoner in Iran. And, despite Ahmadinajad’s best open-collared posturing, nothing’s going to make that a safe or pleasant experience. Iranian political prisoners exist as individual human beings only at the mercy of the state, and history has shown that this is a state with a short supply of mercy.

She’s being held in Evin Prison, compared to a “torture chamber” by its former residents, and Amnesty International has noted a “risk of torture or other ill-treatment” for those held there.

And the US will have a hard time complaining about mistreatment as it justifies its own torture of detained terror suspects.

… they made a kick-ass music video that looks like it was made in Turkey.

Directed by Eric Wareheim (of the indescribable comic duo Tim and Eric):

Tommy Sparks "She's Got Me Dancing" from Eric Wareheim on Vimeo.