Sick Transit

Prince Bandar, the Saudi Ambassador to the United States doesn’t always speak diplomatese:

William F Schulz, executive director of Amnesty International USA, has a well-written, thoughtful, and very overdue article in NYT Magazine. The key passage:

Amnesty International and other human rights groups have been heavily criticized for their myopic focus on American violations. Hopefully, this article is indicative of a broad change in the movement.

Via Intel Dump, here’s an excerpt from Bob Woodward’s upcoming book on politics behind the Iraq war, Plan of Attack.

The part that struck me the most:

Definitely very different from the story we’ve heard so far, of Bush pressuring the CIA to cherry-pick intelligence.

It will be interesting to see this one fought out.

There’s one thing about assassination as tactic of control: if you’re going to use it, you have to be willing to use it thoroughly. Israel seems to understand that. Only a few weeks after killing the founder of Hamas, Israel has assassinated his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

The warning to the next person who dares take up the reins of Hamas is pretty clear.

Presumably the leadership of Hamas will go into hiding. And undoubtedly, they will be plotting revenge.

I’m sure that there will be cries of moral outrage from the left. Frankly, I feel that the Israelis had as much right to kill Rantisi as we do to kill Bin Laden. Whether it will actually prove productive in the long-run struggle for peace, however, is a tougher question.

It’s both funny and sad to watch Catholic Hospitals try to dance around the Pope’s proclamation that withdrawing nutrition and hydration from patients in a persistent vegetative state is euthanasia. From the AP article:

Of course, the hospitals are between a rock and a hard place; failing to honor living wills would not only violate medical ethics, but probably also current US law as well.

At least this was only a semi-official pronouncement. If the pope speaks ex catedra on this matter, they’re really screwed.

David Bernstein writes:

Personally, I don’t see how this is any different from the secularization of Christmas. Despite its religious origins, Christmas became a secular holiday because Christianity was the mainstream religion of the United States.

So this bar mitzvah phenomenon–I don’t know if it can even be called a trend–is a welcome sign. It’s evidence that Jews are no longer–culturally speaking–a “minority” in the United States. Their traditions are mainstream enough to have become secularized.

I look forward to the day when Muslims can say the same.

A pot within a pot gives Andrew Sullivan hope for Africa?

If Sullivan keeps this up, he’ll be impossible to parody.

I wrote last week about Ashcroft’s campaign against porn. There are pretty obvious liberty-based arguments for keeping porn legal, of course; but there are also pragmatic arguments, as this story demonstrates.

For the first time since ‘99, a porn actor has tested positive for HIV. Here’s the important part: all 1200 of the LA industry’s regular actors are screened for HIV every three weeks. And the industry’s reponse to the positive test has been to suspend production for 60 days to ensure that the infection is isolated.

Does anyone think that the industry would be this responsible if it weren’t operating legally and above-ground? I doubt it.

This Slate dispatch entry is a must-read: first-hand accounts from refugees of Fallujah.

There’s a must-read essay in today’s NYT magazine about the emptiness of race-based affirmative action:

Affirmative action is, quite simply, fighting the last war. Thirty years ago, our country arguably needed shock treatment to overcome the institutional effects of racism.

But three decades and a world of social change later, liberalism is still fighting the same battle. There’s something wrong with that picture.

Just had to share this groaner by David Adesnik:

Strained political cross-language puns. It just doesn’t get any nerdier than that.

Phil Carter has troubling news from Iraq. From a Washington Post article:

We started this campaign as a law-enforcement action against a small, trouble-making factionalist group. The group did its best to paint our actions as an assualt on Iraqis as a whole. The problem is that, if their propaganda is successful enough, then it can actually become correct. If enough Iraqis begin to support Sadr’s rebellion (and its twin Sunni uprising), then our law-enforcement action will have turned into what we never wanted it to be: a military overriding of the will of the Iraqi people.

I’m not saying that’s happened yet. But it’s a real danger at this point.

Phil also has a thought-provoking analogy:

I need some time to think through the implications of this analogy before I write anything about it. So for now, I’ll just end with that thought. Things always seem different when you put yourself in the other guy’s shoes.

Well, I know I’m late to the story, but I just can’t help ranting about the fact that Ashcroft is waging a federal campaign against porn. I know a lot of liberals who were worried about Ashcroft’s strong religious beliefs when he was first appointed; but in the three years since then, the strongest criticism against him has been on the civil rights front, an issue of political rather than moral ideology.

So when we finally thought we needn’t worry about having a religious nutjob running the DoJ, there comes this:

The scary part, of course, is that constitutional law is extremely vague on protections for porn. Given that some material is primarily sexual in nature, and does not have any scientific, literary, artistic or political value, the test of its legality is “whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law.” So it all comes down, in a nutshell, to what a jury finds “patently offensive.” (Miller v California, 1973)

Justice Douglas’s dissent in Miller is well worth a read. He says:

Unfortunately, Douglas’ only supporter in his absolutist position, Hugo Black, resigned from the court in 1971. Today, I doubt whether anyone on the Court would even try to make a similarargument. It would certainly be a sight to see.

Recently, I’ve been finding Juan Cole’s blog on Iraq more interesting for its facts than its analysis. In his latest turn towards justifying terrorism, Cole alleges that Sadr was targetted by the CPA, and that “it is not even clear that [his response] was an over-reaction.” It’s ironic that Cole, a self-proclaimed Gandhist and very critical of the US occupation, should be so ready to defend one of the most violent, destabilizing forces in Iraq.

Anyway, one fact that Juan mentions incidentally in a post today is this:

If I’m reading Cole correctly, he’s saying that Sadr’s forces attacked Sistani’s. Wouldn’t this completely ruin any ability by Sadr to claim that he represents the mainstream of Shi’ite sentiment? Not that it wasn’t obvious already, of course; but I can’t imagine that attacking Sistani’s forces–the defenders of a shrine, no less–will make him any more popular in Iraq.

And here’s what Juan had to say on a domestic note:

One of the main arguments in favor of Bush is supposed to be that he is a strong and decisive leader. But the lead-up to the the war was seriously hampered by the State-Defense rivalry. And now the same story seems to be playing out again. How strong a leader is the President if he can’t even control his own cabinet?

Excellent article at TNR about how supporters of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance are actually undermining religion:

There’s a lot more to the article; all I can say is, give it a read.

I’ll never complain about paying for parking again, after reading this excellent (albeit long) article by the Cato Institute. In a nutshell, the article points out that:

a) Parking costs money, whether we pay for it or not.

b) By creating the illusion that parking is free, we induce a ‘run on the commons’ in areas where parking is scarce.

The article agues that the ideal price for parking is that which leads to 85% occupancy of spaces, just enough to ensure that you can find a space whenever you need one.

I hate paying for commercial parking in downtown Boise, but the reason is that the prices are set well above this threshold. 85% occupancy is rare, even on a weekend evening. (And for the amusement of you people who live in real cities, I’ll mention that this exorbitant rate is $3-$5 for unlimited time on a weekend evening.)

In suburban areas, where parking scarcity is not usually an issue, I think that free parking is still more economically efficient, since it lowers transaction costs over all. In urban areas where vehicle density is a real issue, however, I think that the Cato Institute’s proposals make sense.

Andrew Sullivan takes a long-winded detour into the land of the vague, with such beauties as:

But I guess I should be glad… if Sullivan is now working hard to leave himself two ways out of every sentence, maybe that means that he’s turning his support to the master practitioner of that art, John Kerry.

David Adesnik at OxBlog draws interesting parallels between anti-semitism in the gospels and genocide in the Torah:

The only answer is found in the fundamental paradox at the heart of modern religions:

The other option, of course, is the liberal wing of religion that chooses to recognize the humanness of sacred texts. Intellectually, however, this is little different from agnosticism.

The ironic thing, of course, is that if Adesnik’s point were made by anyone who was not Jewish, it would probably be condemned as anti-semitic.

In response to the Daliy Kos scandal, Publius hits dead-on the reason why I often find myself disagreeing with many progressives and liberals whose ideals I strongly share:

He explains how this applies to Iraq (e.g. the people who feel that since we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq, anything we do there now is wrong), and then adds a few other examples:

Strong stuff, and right on point. Liberals are often ready to condemn how conservatives–especially conservative Christians–rely on the crutch of moral rules instead of truly thinking things through. But we need to look at the rafter in our own eye first.

Stereotypically speaking, when it comes to crime, liberals are more concerned with solving the root causes; conservatives prefer punitive measures. But ironically, when it comes to international labor standards, liberals lose their heads, and start thinking only in terms of prohibition.

Nicholas Kristof shows that clearly in an NYT op-ed published yesterday:

Most of us feel, however, that we can’t simply sit back and do nothing. But Kristof suggests that the best way to approach the problem is laterally:

The UN World Food Program already has an on-going school feedings program. Kristof suggests that child-labor activists devote some of their time to fund-raising for the WFP.

The carrot still needs the stick to back it up, of course. International labor standards are still necessary. But they cannot be equivalent to Western standards. If the village school only goes to grade 4, there’s no point in forbidding 12-year-olds from working. It does make sense, however, to try to limit the hours that they work, and regulate the conditions under which they work.

But trying to create an ideal world through legislation is a doomed and myopic endeavor.

(link via Marginal Revolution)