The Dish

And he has a blog.

Ali G interviews Noam Chomsky. Linguistics will never be the same.

A reader writes:

"Actually, I don’t consider you a conservative anymore either, for the same reasons I don’t consider myself one anymore. In this day, in this country, to be a conservative is to buy into a program of relativism and deconstructionism (scientific knowledge in evolution and climate science is just one "perspective" or is totally unreliable because scientists are a bunch of liberals and science is just a political agenda). To be a conservative is to believe that good government rests on the personal character and godliness of an unshackled executive, not on the time-tested processes and institutions of democracy. To be a conservative is to let your worst enemies dictate your moral values. To be a conservative is to believe that insufficiently conservative judges are enemies of America and should be eliminated or marginalized as illegitimate.

Above all, to be a conservative is to use the power of the government to Christianize Americans and the US government to the greatest extent possible.

Andrew, today liberals are the better defenders of the enlightenment. Conservatives are the enemies of the enlightenment. So you want to cut entitlements? Pardon my French, but big fucking deal. You want to cut entitlements because you have weighed the evidence of their effectiveness and found it lacking. You’re still part of the democratic machine and you still respect democratic reasoning.

Conservatives aren’t as quaintly obsessed with evidence and balancing costs and benefits as you are. They want to cut benefits on principle, no matter what. They want to slash taxes as a first principle, expensive wars and basic human decency be damned. They are not rational decision makers in the sense that they distinguish between effective and ineffective programs. The slash taxes, period – no thinking required.

And – this isn’t a minor point – they don’t actually cut entitlements. They expand them. So there goes that argument.

My choice – and yours – is to join up with a reality-based community that trusts expertise, democratic processes, and established institutions and makes fact-based decisions (these days called liberals), or to join up with a community of relativistic mystics who are not open to reason or persuasion, distrust democracy, reject standards of behavior because they believe themselves to be inherently godly, and have no use for traditional democratic institutions. These tradition-despising relativistic mystics we call conservatives.

Andrew, you and I have much more in common with the liberals. Because they’re more conservative."

Waterboarding isn’t torture, but the Supreme Court’s Hamdan ruling is. Money quote:

The court tortures the reading of Common Article 3 to confer upon Hamdan – and by extension the man for whom he rode shotgun, bin Laden – the kind of elaborate legal protections that one expects from "civilized peoples." [My italics].

The word is deliberate and the logic for an unaccountable, unchecked executive power inescapable. Yes, there is such a thing as emergency power. But when the emergency is permanent, when the war is defined as indefinite, when it ends only when the executive says so, then we are talking about something different: a reordering of the constitutional system to create a neo-monarchy, licensed indefinitely to torture, capture, wire-tap and imprison, regardless of the rule of law, or the guilt or innocence of its victims. But, hey, that’s now the conservative mainstream, as I have been forced to recognize. I might as well get used to it.

Front yard, Duluth, Georgia, 10 am.

Jonathan Rauch has an idea to reinvigorate the Bush presidency: a gas pact. Money quote:

Here is the idea: Propose an international treaty whose signatories would agree to eliminate gasoline from their transportation systems by a date certain — say, in 30 years. Seek initial support from Europe and Japan, but open the treaty to any country that cares to join. Specify only that the treaty should allow signatories to reach the goal in any fashion they please and that it should allow for tradable credits against whatever interim targets it sets. That way, countries can act at different speeds and in different styles. Then let the negotiations begin.

Sane, market-oriented, empirically sound policy. What will today’s conservatives say?

From the Lamont-Lieberman debate:

LAMONT: Look, you want to boast about how many earmarks you bring to the state of Connecticut? Alaska gets 10 times what we do. We’re not doing very well on that front. But more importantly, I think we should outlaw these earmarks.

(CROSSTALK)

LAMONT: Hear me out, sir. I think we should outlaw these earmarks. I think they corrupt the political process. I think they are written by lobbyists and they’re wrong.

LIEBERMAN: Try to explain that to the (inaudible).

LAMONT: I think these things should go through the congressional process. Sir, you have been there for 18 years. You support the earmarks, you work with the lobbyists, and that’s what needs to be changed.

LIEBERMAN: The earmarks are great for Connecticut.

The food in this restaurant is so awful. And such small portions!

A reader writes:

I just read Hitch’s piece talking about that "cabal of cockroach capitalists and ex-KGB men who now hold power in Moscow" (what formulations – love it!) and had a chuckle.  Fact is that Putin is up to far more mischief that either Hitch or Applebaum suspect.  They’re focused on the domestic scene in Russia. True, it’s pretty grim, but most Russians aren’t complaining because the place is awash with petrodollars. But Putin’s dealings with the Iranians are far more menacing to the West than has been explored in the media up to this point. 

Putin did his dissertation for his kandidat nauk at the St Petersburg Mining Academy (Gornii Institut) on a curious topic – use of Russia’s natural resources strength as a tool of foreign policy‚Ķ His grand design involves using European dependency on Russian oil and gas as the basis for a new Russian economic hegemony in Europe. And he aims to form a new non-Arab oil cartel which would have at its core Russia, Iran and Venezuela. (Do the numbers – it’s a very impressive per centage of the global total). This stuff is all over the trade press, and gets an occasional piece in FT, but for whatever reason there’s very little about it in the mainstream press, which is, as usual, too obsessed with Rovian kickball to cover things that really matter.

For more information on Putin’s malign intentions at home, check this site out.

Norm Geras, a founding member of the anti-Islamist Euston Manifesto, writes:

Here is part of [Alan Dershowitz’s] description of those captured by the US and its allies:

"[T]here were admitted members of al-Qa’ida… Some of the detainees are believed to have valuable real-time information that could save lives. Others are simply terrorist pawns willing to do whatever they are told, even if it entails suicide. Inevitably, some, probably, are completely innocent and not dangerous."

How does an eminent liberal lawyer come to be discussing whether it might be OK to effect near-drowning experiences for people, and some of these innocent of any offence? Then there’s also ‘alternating heat and cold’ and ‘uncomfortable and/or painful seating’. Notice the precision of that and/or. Revolting.

Another hysteric? Your call.

I have to say that this "news analysis" in the NYT of the court decisions in New York and Georgia is one of the dumbest pieces of journalism I have read in a very long time. "For Gay Rights Movement, A Key Setback"? In some ways, I think the New York Court of Appeals decision will help, rather than hurt, the cause of marriage equality in the long run. Why? Because it will force the issue into legislatures, where it is best tackled, and where we will eventually win, and in one case, California, have already won. The courts have already done their job – in forcing this issue into the national consciousness, highlighting the grave injustice, correcting it in one state out of fifty, and allowing us to make such great headway in persuading people of our cause.

The basic argument made by the New York court is also not inherently damaging to the gay case. It’s simply saying that the law is not on its face irrational (although it’s deeply unpersuasive), and so the issue is for the legislature, not the court. What the New York court is essentially saying is: you have a case. You just made it to the wrong guys. Talk to the legislature.

The court surely has a point. And this is how these decisions can actually be a boon to the marriage cause. They may help galvanize a broader gay and straight effort to make the case democratically, rather than legally and constitutionally. Since our arguments are so strong, why would we leery of this? We have already made huge strides. We’ve seen dramatic polling drops in opposition to marriage for gay people in the last couple of years. The FMA has withered on the vine. We have civil marriage in one state, Massachusetts. That’s a Big Deal. If someone had asked me seventeen years ago, when I helped pioneer this argument, if I thought that by 2006 I’d be engaged and planning a legal wedding in America, I would have wondered what they were smoking. But next year, I’ll tie the knot – as thousands already have, in America and across the globe. In California, the legislature has already voted for civil marriage, and shows no sign of going back. These state court decisions, moroever, undermine even further the case for a federal amendment and reveal the extremism and un-conservatism of its backers.

I’ve long believed that as long as we can stop the FMA, we need only make our case as best we can, person by person, state by state, and wait for the younger, mellower generation to gain power. That’s happening faster than I ever imagined – and the impatience of some gay activists is morally defensible but pragmatically excessive. Chill. We now have a chance to make our case where it is best made: in the legislatures and in the court of public opinion. In my view, the court strategy, defensible in theory, noble in intent, was fast becoming over-reach in practice. The New York case may have done gay people a favor in that respect. We have the better arguments. Let’s make them – to the people and their elected representatives, and we’ll win in the end.