Month: April 2011

Good for them, I have to say. Lindsey Graham's insinuation that the First Amendment might have to be compromised because we are at war is indeed an affront. But where were these defenders of individual liberty in war time when the last president effectively suspended the Fourth Amendment? Daniel Luban goes for the jugular:

Steyn and McCarthy profess to be shocked — shocked! — that the Bill of Rights might be abridged for American citizens as a result of what’s going on “over there.” But in fact, Graham’s proposal is rather mild compared to the views of, say, John Yoo, who suggested in a notorious October 2001 memo [PDF] that the President during wartime can override the Fourth Amendment — and by implication, the entirety of the Bill of Rights — at will, provided he deems it necessary for the war effort. (Graham at least seemed to be proposing that the First Amendment should be restricted through legislation rather than presidential fiat.) …

But since leaving the Bush administration Yoo’s been welcomed with open arms by the American right — not least, National Review, which has brought him on board as a contributor along with Steyn, McCarthy, and Stuttaford. If Steyn and McCarthy, at least, have expressed any misgivings about Yoo’s analysis, I haven’t seen them. (Stuttaford is more reliably libertarian.)

Like much of the American right, Steyn and McCarthy seem to have no objection to rescinding the constitutional rights of American citizens provided it only happens to “them” (brown people with funny names) and not to “us” (nice, patriotic white people). They might want to consider, however, whether this is really a tenable line — or whether, as Graham’s proposal suggests, the slope is more slippery than they would allow.

A reader writes:

I think as Yemen continues to get worse, it's important to keep in mind that they are second in per capita gun ownership in the world (the good 'ol USA is #1), which means if things get ugly, they can do so quickly and be very widespread.

EA is picking up on fresh violence today. Joe Klein worries about a new report showing that unrest in Yemen is causing the government to neglect counterterrorism efforts against al Qaeda:

It seems to me that this is a more appropriate focus for US military attention than Libya. It may even be a more appropriate focus for US military attention than Afghanistan. (No, I'm not calling for an invasion–just…attention.) I hope to be proved wrong, but I continue to worry that the bright shiny object (Gaddafi) has diverted our attention from the tumor in the region.

Emily Bazelon calls yesterday's PSA about anti-gay bullying "the right kind of response to bullying." She can't say the same of the above ad:

When she saw the video, Nancy Willard of the Center for Responsible Use of the Internet worried that it makes killing yourself seem like the perfect revenge against bullying: No more misery for you, and the culprits get punished.

She wrote to the ABA, which responded, "Although it would probably be impossible to design a dramatic treatment of this important and highly complex topic in a fashion that perfectly calibrates all the key messages and possible take-aways to every possible concern, we believe our video strikes the right balance." But the video has nothing in it about how Jenna could have gotten help, no models of kids or adults reaching out to her, nothing to help kids remember that however awful bullying feels in the moment, high school doesn't last forever. It's like the dark opposite of Dan Savage's It Gets Better project, offering hopelessness instead of hope. My own hope is that it's too cheesy and unrealistic for kids to take seriously. 

Noah Millman argues that "if the Libyan intervention is to be justified at all, it should be justified on the basis of what we are doing in Libya, and not some larger doctrine that it supposedly represents":

It strikes me as exceptionally unproductive to base our foreign policy on the idea that we can fool other countries into thinking we’re going to do something we aren’t going to do, or that we’re not going to do something that we are. And one thing we are not going to do is be strictly rule-bound in our approach to foreign affairs.

The United States is a huge country with a very large and conflicting array of interests and, being both a democracy and a country with a divided central government, limited ability to set policy at the government’s discretion. To most countries, we will inevitably be a relatively fickle friend. When the rulers of Uzbekistan ask themselves “can we rely on the United States?” the answer is inevitably going to be “to an extent – but not really” – and not only is there nothing the United States can do to change that impression, it’s not clear to me that we should want to change that impression, because that is the truth, and I don’t see what is gained by trying to convince the Uzbeks that we are more trustworthy than we really are.

Nathan Yau tenses up:

Waze, in collaboration with Gray Area Foundation and Nik Hanselmann, visualize 24 hours of traffic in Los Angeles, a subject that holds a bitter spot in my heart. It starts at 5pm, right in the middle of rush hour, slows down in the late hours, and then of course picks up again around 7am, as people commute to work. Red dots indicate high levels of traffic and green dots indicate hazards, which I assume are accidents.

"I don’t understand the murder. He was a man who was totally there to deal with the things he believed in and I find it hard to understand the twisted rational of the people who did this. He was a special person, brave but crazy to do what he did," – actor Alon Abutbul, speaking of a remarkable Israeli peace activist, Juliano Mer, who was assassinated by a masked gunman at close range in Jenin. More on this horrible news at the Guardian. A reader writes from Israel:

People I know here in Israel just can’t stop crying. Juliano Mer was the Nazareth-born and bred son of an Israeli Jewish mother and an Israeli Christian Arab father, both lefty activists, and they clearly did something right because instead of losing his mind, he tried to quietly and with dignity remake the world we live in.

It’s not Libya, but it’s a bone-chilling night here too.

Will Wilkinson ponders David Foster Wallace’s depression and wonders how it interacted with his fiction:

There’s some evidence that the moderately depressed are less self-deceived. “Depressive realism” is said to leave us less disposed to happy illusions about our abilities or our degree of control over our behavior. It’s easy to see how an unblinkered sense of the self could be an asset to a novelist.

Moreover, an unshakable sense of dissatisfaction and hopelessness in the face of the forces that control us, even if muted, can act as a powerful prod to serious contemplation of the conditions for happiness and autonomy. Of course, if depression can make seeing the truth about some things easier, it makes doing everything more difficult. And Wallace appears to have adopted, by choice or chance, demanding standards both in literature and life, and these standards seem not to have been unreasonable. He could, sometimes, live up to them.

But a foible of neurology that keeps us from meeting our own high standards consistently can put us in a terrible bind.

Much of the same could be said of Elliott Smith, another sad genius who took his life too soon.

Ilya Somin debates the morality of voting:

There is only an infinitesmal chance that any one vote will be decisive. So individual voters have strong incentives to remain ignorant. But not every form of rational behavior is morally defensible. Sometimes, rational individual behavior leads to terrible collective outcomes. Consider the case of air pollution, where individuals might rationally choose not to limit their emission of dangerous pollutants because any one person’s behavior has only a tiny effect on overall air quality in the area. Widespread voter ignorance is a kind of pollution of the political system.

Today on the Dish, we got a warm welcome at the Daily Beast and heard your take on the changes, with a reader's solution to blocked feeds at work here. Andrew feared the blood, pus and tears from popping the Qaddafi zit, and parsed the implications of Richard Goldstone's op-ed on Israel. We followed the stalemate watch in Libya, and Ryan Calder explained why you can't fist pump in Libya. Gideon Rose counseled against pulling out, and Greenwald and Drum went another round on trusting Obama's judgement. Gregory Djerejian sought out a full Middle East strategy, Yemen descended into more chaos, and Andrew categorized KSM's military trial in the same sad category as Gitmo.

Andrew anticipated Paul Ryan's debt reduction plan, and reax from the blogosphere trickled in. We tallied TARP's profits and Andrew patted Obama on the back for handling Bush's programs effectively. Huck destroyed records from his past, Romney still aimed to please, and Obama entered the race selling his personality more than his politics like Reagan. Mark Blumenthal didn't discount Palin, and Conor Friedersdorf catalogued Limbaugh's Libyan misinformation. Walter Russell Mead and Yglesias debated black flight to the south, and Keith Humphreys reminded us of the danger of taking half steps in ending the war on drugs.

Andrew remembered being gay in high school, Catholic acceptance of gays tracked with the rest of society, and some opponents still wanted gays just to be friends. Google determined how we find our recipes online, and McSweeney's couldn't crack the Brian Wilson beard code. Readers rationalized the popularity contest between Mickey and Bugs, Andrew surfed virtual museum collections, and Matthew Wollin buttressed himself against awkwardness. We measured the safety of cycling, the era of 99 cents ended, and Gavin McInnes taught us how to pee in public.

Real life Angry Bird here, short history of sissy bounce here, cool ad watch here, dissent of the day here, quotes for the day here and here, VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

–Z.P.

Senator Graham responds to the outcry over his opposition to First Amendment rights for Koran-burners. It's worse than I realized. I'm reeling from this sentence:

You know what? Let me tell you, the First Amendment means nothing without people like General Petraeus.

To place views of military commanders over the First Amendment is mind-boggling. And, of course, Graham wants a ban on flag-burning.