Certainty About the Uncertain

Speaking of torture, Jim Henley has a quite brilliant post noting that the most common justifications for the Iraq war collapse for the same reason that the”ticking time bomb” argument justifying torture is abjectly useless:

The features of the dorm bull session ethics symposium are perfect knowledge of the present and the default future and perfect certainty of the results of your actions. If you know A, and B will cause C, then musn’t you B?

This is the “ticking bomb” case for torture (as opposed to the esoteric case: payback). It is also, on a moment’s reflection, the case for launching the Iraq War – cases, really:

* If you know Iraq plans to use banned weapons against the United States and that toppling Saddam Hussein will prevent that, musn’t the United States topple Saddam Hussein?

* If you know that Muslims commit terrorism against the United States because they live in unfree societies and democratizing Iraq by force will lead to Ummah-wide freedom and end terrorism, musn’t the United States democratize Iraq by force?

* If you know that Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and that overthrowing his regime will lead to freedom and internal peace, musn’t you overthrow his regime?

Spot the assumed certainties in the trains of logic and you can see the bad institutional furniture and soiled carpets on which they were conceived.

The problem both arguments is that if you use the right assumptions about not only the underlying stakes but about the lengths to which one is willing goal to achieve the cited ends, you can justify anything. (And this was the second iteration of the salami-slicing in the pro-war argument: the threat wasn’t imminent, but we had to stop Saddam before it became imminent. Once you go there, there’s no war that can’t be justified.) But the second part is just as problematic as the first, because once the alleged ends are compelling enough, the careful restraints on the means are going to fade, particularly since in practice you don’t have control over the people acting:

As Kinsley hints, the real problem is just who gets to do the slicing. If you’re Charles Krauthammer presuming to posit official guidelines on torture or Andrew Sullivan hedging on the means to be employed in speculative war, you are gravely misunderstanding the central problem: you won’t be deciding. The ones with actual power to put your general principles into practice will be people who have gotten where they are by achieving a certain level of success in a ruthless business: politics. The fine grain of your own conscience is less likely to show in them – it’s not impossible, but circumstance tells against it.

The same hubris that says we can know the outcome of a large application of speculative force (prophylactic, humanitarian war) says we can know the outcome of a much smaller application (torture). Comfort with one will tend toward comfort with the other. If you are pro-war and anti-torture, it has not in your case, and that speaks well of you.

That’s right. There’s no necessary connection between the pro-war and pro-torture arguments, but it’s not surprising that they go together so often. Anyway, terrific, provocative stuff; make sure to click through.

Bad and Worse

Last week, my new NL team traded for Tony Womack. They didn’t give up anything of consequence, and the Yankees picked up part of Womack’s salary. The downside is that they now have Tony Womack.

This week, my AL team signed Carl Everett. There is no upside.

It’s going to be a long year.

UPDATE: Giving it some more thought, I think that the Everett signing is actually worse than the Womack trade. The Mariners have managed to acquire a DH who, next year, is likely to hit like a league average shortstop. Worse, they’ve pushed their previous DH back into left field, where he’s likely to be the worst defensive outfielder in the league. One year, three million would be a bad deal if Everett were paying to play. Add to that the fact that Carl Everett is a thug, and you’ve got a genuine disaster on your hands. Great work, Bill. At least it looks as if the Reds are only going to use Womack as a utility player.

Last Kaus this Week

I apologize in advance…

Mickey is trying to correct the impression that he just doesn’t like homosexuals:

If a gay man, say, goes to see “Wuthering Heights,” there is at least one romantic lead of the sex he’s interested in! In “Brokeback Mountain,” neither of the two romantic leads is of a sex I’m interested in. … My wild hypothesis is that more people will go see a movie if it features an actor or actress they find attractive! If heterosexual men in heartland America don’t flock to see Brokeback Mountain it’s not because they’re bigoted. It’s because they’re heterosexual. “Heterosexuals Attracted to Members of the Opposite Sex”–for those cultural critics wondering what a commerical disappointment for this much-heralded movie will Tell Us About America Today, there’s your headline. …

Fascinating.

If I’m reading this right, Mickey thinks that the box office of a film depends on the attractiveness of its stars to the opposite sex. The reason Mickey (and his hypothetical American movie going audience) doesn’t want to see Brokeback Mountain isn’t because gay sex makes him uncomfortable, but rather because there are no women involved. Mickey, you see, watches movies because he likes to think about having sex with attractive actresses. This explains why he was just as skeptical about the box office chances of, say, Master and Commander (no female characters) as he is about those of Brokeback Mountain. No women, and guys won’t want to see it. Or so I assume; I haven’t actually checked back into his archives to find out. Also, I invite you to examine the 2005 box office list, and tell me how much the success of these films depended on the attractiveness of their stars to the opposite sex, as opposed to story, setting, acting, writing, directing, and so forth.

I can see why Mickey feels resentful about all this. Damn dirty liberals like Frank Rich are trying to make him feel bad about not wanting to see Brokeback Mountain. Well, they’re not actually trying, but Mickey suspects that they might. Sexual preference, you see, is genetic, and Mickey is a confirmed, genetically determined heterosexual, meaning that he can’t enjoy a movie in which men have sex with one another. Worse, if Mickey did find the sex scenes…interesting… then he would be forced to ask awkward, uncomfortable questions about himself. Since we are all genetically determined to like either men or women, Mickey might be forced to wonder about which way his genes actually pointed. I can see how that would be difficult for him.

Have no sympathy for Mickey. If he had written that he was reluctant to see Brokeback Mountain because Ang Lee is a hit or miss director, I wouldn’t be harassing him. If he were reluctant to see it because films on such topics often take on an Afterschool Special quality, I wouldn’t harass him. If he were reluctant to see it because he doesn’t care for cowboy romance films, I wouldn’t harass him. Mickey has been quite specific, though; he doesn’t want to see it because it’s a gay film, and thinks it will fail commercially for the same reason. That he may be right about the second doesn’t excuse the first.

UPDATE (from Scott): Roger Ailes finds the only film of the last half-century that Kaus could like.

The Johnson Impeachment

There’s an interesting discussion taking place about the impeachment of Andrew Johnson on the lawcourts listerv. Sanford Levinson brings up an interesting argument, which is that the general sense that the impeachment was unjustified was heavily influenced by “JFK”‘s Profiles in Courage, which basically put forward the standard anti-Reconstruction account of apartheid’s apologists. (Another reason why LBJ should be far higher in the progressive pantheon than JFK.)

The close relationship of defenses of Johnson with anti-Reconstruction revisionism further convinces me that Congress was right to impeach him. It was certainly justifiable (if not required) by the Constitution, and the pragmatic considerations could hardly be more compelling, given that he was going beyond the understood role of the Presidency and nullifying the will of Congress in order to gut Reconstruction and protect the interests of the old Confederacy. Some people have argued that the non-conviction was defensible in that Johnson had begun to change after his impeachment, but I’m inclined to say that he should have been convicted. (And there can certainly be no question that this would have been far, far better for the country.) I’m by no means an expert on the subject, though, so I open the floor.

On the Futility of Arguing With Hacks

The Plank has an amusing account of Andrew Sullivan embarrassing Men in Black clown Mark Levin as the latter demands evidence and then goes on to describe the proffered evidence as “looney,” which seems to mean “contradicts the unsubstantiated claims of Mark Levin.” Having been thoroughly humiliated, Levin calls in the blogosphere’s most prominent Bush lickspittle, who repeats an old smear:

In the interest of some clarity, Andrew Sullivan invokes a legal definition of torture, which is progress. But does he think it includes things like fake menstrual blood, and being wrapped in the Israeli flag?

Because he’s made much of those things. If he thinks they fall within the legal definition, then he’s not very serious. If he doesn’t think they fall within the legal definition, then — given his repeated treatment of those subjects as “torture” — he’s not very serious.

Reynolds backs up his claim that Sullivan has “repeatedly” described being wrapped in the Israeli flag as torture by linking to a particularly odious past piece of Instahackery, which lied about Sullivan’s position while engaging in some vicious gay-baiting on the side. To get a reminder about Reynolds’ intellectual honesty, let’s consider what Sullivan actually wrote:

…after U.S. interrogators have tortured over two dozen detainees to death, after they have wrapped one in an Israeli flag, after they have smeared naked detainees with fake menstrual blood, after they have told one detainee to “Fuck Allah,” after they have ordered detainees to pray to Allah in order to kick them from behind in the head, is it completely beyond credibility that they would also have desecrated the Koran?

You’ll note that he discussed the menstrual blood and Israeli flag incidents separately from torture, and nowhere describes these incidents as torture. (As for the argument that this is a “repeated” claim, Reynolds provides his usual amount of evidence: none.) The lengths of dishonesty that people like Reynolds and Levin will go to in order to uncritically defend the Bush administration while pretending not to support torture are pathetic, and instructive.

…more on Reynolds’ torture apologia at Sadly, No!

Action

As a follow-up to my post about Maye and the blogosphere, Angelica suggests some courses of action. And according to Radley Balko the blog divisions of CBS and the National Journal have picked up the story, which is encouraging.

Counterinsurgency is Hard

Fine post on counter-insurgency from Kingdaddy.

Via AG.

Rhythmic Admirer of the Day

Joe Klein.

Which reminds me, Klein’s incomprehensible ramblings about how the fact people were becoming less secure in there jobs made it particularly important to make people even less secure by privatizing social security should have been once of the first nominees for the Lubriderm Awards. I regret the omission.

America Meets America

Duss has a nice post.

Impotent When Independent

Mark Kleiman makes an important, if depressing, point about the appalling case of Corey Maye: despite the widespread, cross-ideological outrage that the case has elicited throughout the blogosphere, he’s probably not any closer to being spared than he was a few weeks ago. I don’t mean to gainsay the truly terrific work that many bloggers, particularly Radley Balko, have done. But unless some major “mainstream” journalists or political figures pick the case up, I’m not sure what we can do. Dennis the Peasant had related thoughts about the founders of XFL (TM) media and Dan Rather recently:

And that, folks, is the reality of the dismissal of Dan Rather: It wasn’’t about The Power of the Blogosphere (TM). Nor was it about liberal bias in the nation’s newsrooms, sloppy reporting by a geriatric hack or a lack of fact checking by an obsessed and deranged producer. It was about corporate profits and corporate politics. It was about how corporate executives go about their business.

I think that’s right, and you can say the same thing about Trent Lott. Again, I think Atrios and Josh Marshall deserved all of the plaudits they got. But, on the other hand, it’s not as if Lott’s ongoing relations with white supremacy only came to light with his retrospective endorsement of the Dixiecrat ticket; anybody who didn’t know about them didn’t want to know. If Bush wanted Lott as majority leader, he’d still be there. What blogs did is to provide the necessary pretext, and they still needed other media outlets to pick up the story.

And that’s what scares me. We’re dealing here with perhaps the most reactionary state in the country; even if the case is picked up by some broadcast journalists, I’m not sure what leverage can be exercised over Barbour. Remember too that we’re in a country in which the President of the United States just nominated someone who believes that the Fourth Amendment presents no restrictions on the ability of policeman to shoot unarmed pretty thievery suspects in the back of the head (and to the enthusiastic plaudits of most of the conservertarian blogosphere.) It’s hard to see the Mississippi electorate rising up in outrage about an African-American shooting a police officer, even in a case this evidently unjust. But I certainly hope that this can get national attention; bloggers need to to whatever they can.

Unclear on the Concept

The battle never ends.

Here’s a test. Can you distinguish between these two events?

1. A prominent Congressman shuts down the government because the President makes him use the back door of Air Force One.

2. A prominent Congressman decries the President’s handling of the war in part because that President has failed to communicate even with the hawkish elements in the opposing party.

If you think that these are qualitatively different, congratulations. You’re smarter than Mickey Kaus. I would advise sending an e-mail to Jacob Weisberg and asking for prominent blog space on the homepage of Slate.com. God knows, we can only be the better for it.

Frivolous

It should be noted that my partial defense of governors who don’t grant clemency in cases like Tookie Williams’ doesn’t seem to apply to Schwarzenegger, who based the decision on a claim that Williams hadn’t really reformed. (Via Julia.) I can respect a governor who says “our state has decided that the death penalty will be used in some cases, and a sane adult who senselessly kills four people in cold blood should receive it even if they’ve changed in prison.” I can’t respect a governor who claims to see into a condemned prisoner’s soul and bases his decisions on that. I’ve you’re going to base your decision on such inherently arbitrary factors, then you really should err on the side of clemency. And I wonder if Williams had been a white accountant if his transformation might have been more convincing to the Predator.

Wolcott wrote yesterday that “No former movie action hero–or Yale cheerleader with enough psychological baggage to sink the African Queen–should be entrusted with the power of life and death over his fellow citizens. These are essentially frivolous, uninformed men playacting blue-suited roles of grave responsibility.” He has a point. I don’t feel as strongly about the death penalty in the abstract as some opponents do. The state is, after all, organized violence, and even the decision to have people with guns protect citizens and coerce people into jail will inevitably result some people being killed without due process, some of them innocent. The state makes all kinds of decisions that results in the loss of life. If you’re talking about the comparative flaws of the American and European legal systems, I think the long sentences for nonviolent drug offenses is a far greater indictment of the American system than maintaining the death penalty. But nothing gets my dudgeon up, and makes my abolitionism more steadfast, than people who don’t really take the death penalty seriously. Most applications of the death penalty in this country make it clear how pointless it really is, how arbitrary, how it accomplishes nothing.

See also the Mahablog and TalkLeft.