Category: The Dish

A reader remonstrates:

Andrew, no. You weren’t supposed to capitulate. At all.

These are how Freedom of Speech incursions snowball, and you should know this by now. They do not form because some evil person or stupid person with a grand scheme outright plans for the construction of checks on discourse. They are viral disorders in otherwise honest and informed discussion regarding the nature of discussion itself.

The disorder in this case is an fallacy of definition in Tim O’Reilly’s perceived idea of "managed civil dialogue". They define "managed civil dialogue" as dialogue without the trash-talking.  Yes, this is a fallacy.  In a scheme filled only with positive definitions ("managed civil dialogue is…"), you cannot define what it is not. Say, in a simple model, 100 years down the road, Tim gets what he wants, but all of the definers of "managed civil dialogue" are long dead. Then future dialogue is civil by our standards (which no one remembers), but people are still ordered to exterminate any "uncivil" discussion, which in our time existed but in theirs does not. Then "uncivil" dialogue will start to describe some other (incorrect) form of discussion, and more exterminations of discussion take place in this vein until censorship is in full effect.

Tim is obviously well versed from the days of BBS and USENET, and he’s right in that when you throw out the majority of useless discussers, dialogue becomes much more efficient. But he forgets that he knows what "useless" talking is, yet he ultimately seeks to remove knowledge of it from future principal debaters.  Your gut instincts were correct:  you cannot mess with an inherently pure ideal like freedom of speech, or you will corrupt your own well-meaning definitions.

Actually, I did not capitulate on this issue. At all. The whole concept of "managed civil dialogue" is a creepy abomination. But I shouldn’t have been so rude. Which is managing my own civil dialogue, not anyone else’s.

If you haven’t read Mark Bowden’s illuminating account of how we found and killed Zarqawi, go buy the new Atlantic or subscribe at the DIsh-reader discount in the ad above. For a review of Bowden’s piece, and what it tells us about the counter-productive deployment of torture in interrogation, Scott Horton has, as always, a smart take.

Belle Waring tackles the non-nuke enviros; Megan McCardle tackles some others.

POTUS meets a hybrid car. Of course, I wouldn’t know where to plug the re-charging outlet in either.

There are very few occasions on which I agree with Ezra Klein but the issue of cell-phones and wi-fi on airplanes is one of them.

More readers pile on:

You really might want to avoid throwing stones at Tim O’Reilly. O’Reilly has a long and distinguished history in technology publishing. The "Nutshell" handbooks that O’Reilly published were some of the definitive source materials that were used to build the Internet. Stating that O’Reilly should "crawl back under a rock" makes you petty, foolish, and above all ignorant. Moreover, it seems more than a bit hypocritical to chastise O’Reilly for advocating "managed, civilized, dialogue" when you yourself refuse to implement any kind of comments or feedback structure on your own web page.

For the record, its quite easy to combine filtering with the free speech that you claim to value. Technology sites like Slashdot.org were implementing collaborative filtering systems back before you started your first blog. These systems provide end users with the ability to build personalized filters and dramatically improve the signal to noise ratio during heated discussion. (It’s important to note that end users have enormous choice regarding whether they wish to use a filter and choose how these filters will be implemented).

I’ve removed the rock swipe.

A reader observes:

During the the hostage/POW (depends on the context) ordeal, British "confessions" offered contrite prisoners, apparently well-treated and healthy. After a relatively brief period, they were returned home where they immediately repudiated the "confessions" as coerced.

The conventional wisdom response: "of course they were coerced." Honestly, did anyone believe for a second that the British Navy had equipment so sketchy that they couldn’t settle their location? No, the sailors said what they needed to in order to get home.

Meanwhile, the U.S. position is that torture (or torture-like) techniques garner valuable information as opposed to false statements engineered to end discomfort. Anybody else see a disconnect here?

Count me in – but the public doesn’t seem to grasp this. It’s especially telling since we dismiss the statements of the captive British soldiers as the fruit of coercion even though their treatment was like a bed and breakfast compared to what has taken place at Abu Graib, Camp Cropper, Bagram or Gitmo. Why are we unable to make the same assumptions about other coerced testimony?

One possible answer is simply that as long as the victims of torture are not white or Western, they are not seen as fully human victims of torture – and therefore none of the rules we apply to full human beings count. Since any information from sub-humans is sketchy anyway, why not torture it out of them? It’s as legit as anything we’re likely to get out of them by conventional techniques. "Treat them like dogs" was General Miller’s express instructions at Abu Ghraib. And he saw the prisoners as dogs. In fact, if animal shelter workers in the West treated its dogs as some US forces have treated some detainees, they’d be fired for cruelty.

The scenario changes instantly when the victim of coercion is white or an allied soldier. It’s striking, isn’t it, that the only cases of torture in Gitmo and elsewhere that have had any traction in the wider culture have been people who do not fit the ethnic profile of Arabs. Jose Padilla is Latino; David Hicks is Australian. When they’re tortured, we worry about the reliability of the evidence. But when we torture "information" out of men called al-Qhatani or Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the information we get is allegedly saving "thousands of lives." How do we know this? Because the torturers, i.e. the Bush administration, tell us so. And so the circle of cognitive dissonance tightens until it becomes airtight.

(Photo: Royal Navy personnel (from L) Mne Joe Tindell, OM Arthur Batchelor, Cpt Christopher Air, Lt Felix Carman, Mne Adam Sperry and OM Simon Massey speak during a press conference about their experiences while being held captive in Iran at the RMB Chivenor in Devon, 06 April 2007. The 15 British sailors freed by Iran told Friday how they were subjected to intense "psychological pressure" and threatened with prison during their two weeks in captivity. By Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty.)

The guardians of the blogosphere are up in arms over my dismissal of the nannying instincts of Tim O’Reilly:

O’Reilly has been a veteran of more phases of internet culture than you’re even aware of. You’re a late-comer to this party, my friend, and you probably should do some homework. Tim witnessed the development of the current rhetorical tone on the internet as USENET (do you remember USENET?) transformed from a collaborative media for researchers, to a generally thoughtful meta-forum for discussing a variety of topics of interest, into a trash-talking, low-signal, spam-ridden wasteland. Blogging itself was a response – a kind of diaspora – from that culture.

Attacking Tim like this without understanding the historical position that blogs played within the context of other computer-mediated discourse is embarrassing. As in, "I didn’t know Paul McCartney used to be in a band!" embarrassing.

I was unaware that such authority figures counted for something in the blogosphere; unaware that there was a hierarchy of authorities within it; unaware that due deference is owed to such luminaries. But clearly, deference is due. I bow down before it; and urge all to pursue only constructive interaction as pioneered by USENET in its glory days before all these hideous naifs trashed the place with their freedom of speech.

Iran is ramping up centrifuge production. Many new estimates of when Iran might have the potential for nuclear weaponry are beginning to come out – and all of them suggest a sharp decrease in the amount of time we have to prevent a nuclear theocracy in Tehran. This might help explain the recent British sailor hostage-taking. It may have been a device to further split Britain from the US, and to weaken the alliance that’s attempting to tighten sanctions on Iran. What the mullahs see, I think, is the inherent brittle weakness and deep strategic incompetence of the Bush-Cheney administration. If you think of Bush as another Carter with respect to the collapse of US soft and hard power under his presidency, then you can see the Iranians forcing an end-of-administration crisis for him, just as they did for Carter. Any Cheney-led military attack on Iran in response would result in massive bloodletting in Iraq, with Shiite and Sunni militias unleashing rage on the US forces, without even an assurance of much delay in nuclear potential for Iran (and a possible Islamist revolt in Pakistan that could easily topple Musharraf). And with 170,000 troops in Iraq, and more and more of them in smaller, more exposed urban outposts, the US will be at its most vulnerable at the very time Tehran may be engaging in nuclear brinkmanship.

Stanley Kurtz is absolutely right that the conditions in Iran are far more worrying by any measure than those the neocons feared existed in Iraq before the invasion. The stakes are also much higher now that we have so incompetently started a war we cannot win in any realistic time-frame. What to do then? By fall, the Congress will have the first and last chance to make the critical decision the country is now fighting with the White House over: to pull out of most of Iraq or to double-down for another decade of Muslim civil war policed by Americans. At the same time, we may have to decide whether to acquiesce in a nuclear-armed Iran. We can and must make every effort between now and then to build, cajole and support the U.N.-based coalition against a nuclear Iran. And since Bush will not relent in Iraq, we must pray that the surge manages to work some kind of miracle.

And as these dual crisis in Iraq and Iran come to a head, we will be facing a general election. The most important hope, as far as I’m concerned, is that the heart of the crisis does not occur under the current president and vice-president. We know they can be relied on to damage our security and also have the capacity for spectacular error and recklessness. Tehran knows this as well, which is why I suspect they’re rushing their nuclear plans to be ready before Bush leaves office. It’s going to be a nail-biting two years. And the president who inherits the Bush legacy in the Middle East will be less like Reagan inheriting Carter, than Churchill inheriting Chamberlain – with all the troops still stuck in Dunkirk.

(Photo: Technicians prepare to wash the reactor of the Bushehr nuclear power plant at the Iranian port town of Bushehr, 1200 Kms south of Tehran, 03 April 2007. By Behrouz Mehri/AFP/Getty.)