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August 31, 2005
Beats Me.
Posted by Eric at 9:21 PM | Comments (33)
Two Captions.
Posted by Eric at 10:34 AM | Comments (4)
It Worked In London, Didn't It?
Wow.
UPDATE: Responding to a comment I left to this effect at the Volokh Conspiracy, Ted Frank of the American Enterprise Institute responded thusly:
I think shooting looters is a compassionate way to protect the safety and well-being of law-abiding citizens. Time after time it has been shown that the way to prevent deadly anarchic riots is to take firm decisive action to prevent matters from getting to a tipping point.And of course, the way we know that we're shooting the "right" people is ...
Or is the point that even if the cops shoot the wrong people, others will change their behavior?
FURTHER UPDATE: The shoot-the-looters meme is catching. I am having a hard time believing that any serious person could be advocating a policy of shooting looters. Glenn Reynolds suggests that people should be shot only if they're looting something other than "bottled water, food, or diapers." Setting aside the enormous question about whether a shoot-the-looters policy is moral in the abstract, how on earth is anybody to know for sure whether a particular looter's booty includes items other than "bottled water, food, or diapers?" Perhaps there should be a selection point outside of every Wal-Mart, with a cop screening those exiting, allowing the diaper people to pass, and sending the others off to a waiting firing squad? This whole idea is utterly reprehensible.
STILL FURTHER UPDATE: With tongue at least a little in cheek, commenter Marietta says:
Hell, rather than round them up, particularly given the scarcity of dry land at this point, just shoot them all now. We'll get the looters for sure, and as an added bonus, we'll get the people who've committed crimes but haven't been caught. We'll also get people who would've committed crimes in the future.And if there's "collateral damage" -- such as the loss of innocent life -- well, that's just the cost of building a democracy in an anarchic region. Right?
Posted by Eric at 8:12 AM | Comments (56)
August 30, 2005
Joining Michelle Malkin's Photo-Caption Contest
Posted by Eric at 2:00 PM
Yes, Virginia, There Really Were Guard Towers
In summer 1942, shortly after ten thousand Japanese Americans arrived at Manzanar War Relocation Center, the U.S. Army constructed eight 37-foot-high guard towers around the perimeter of the mile-square camp. Each tower was equipped with a search light and machine gun and staffed by Military Police. Today, National Park Service employees are reconstructing one of the towers in its historic location on the east boundary of the site.
On Saturday, September 17, 2005, the National Park Service and friends of Manzanar will host a dedication event at 11:00 a.m, near the guard tower. Following the ceremony, Manzanar History Association (MHA) will provide light refreshments and members of the Grateful Crane Ensemble will perform 1940s songs from their recent Camp Dance CD.
At 1:30 p.m. and 3:30 p.m., MHA will host a talk, reading and booksigning by critically acclaimed poet Lawson Fusao Inada. A third-generation (Sansei) Japanese American who was interned with his family during World War II, Inada is currently a professor of English at Southern Oregon University. Considered by some to be the father of Asian-American literature, Inada's recent works include Legends From Camp, Drawing The Line, and Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience. Mr. Inada will be available to sign books between his readings.
From 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m., Jennifer Anderson, a studio artist employed by Hiromi Paper International in Santa Monica, will demonstrate traditional Japanese bookbinding techniques. The bindings known as yotsume toji and daifuku cho use only four and two holes respectively, are simple and elegant and have been used for a variety of purposes from novels to ledgers. These books can be made from a variety of papers with simple tools. Ms. Anderson has a Masters of Fine Arts in printmaking and bookarts from the University of Georgia and has taught art at Indiana State University and Clemson University.
Funding to reconstruct the guard tower was provided by the National Park Service, with a generous grant from Friends of Manzanar, a non-profit organization established in 2004 to support projects at Manzanar through financial and in-kind donations. In addition to assisting with the guard tower reconstruction, Friends of Manzanar is raising funds to rehabilitate a World War II era mess hall at Manzanar and to preserve and restore other site features.
The events are free and open to the public. Manzanar National Historic Site is located along U.S. Highway 395, six miles south of Independence, California and nine miles north of Lone Pine. For more information on the guard tower reconstruction and programs and projects at Manzanar, please visit our website at www.nps.gov/manz or call (760) 878-2194 or (760) 878-2932.
Posted by Eric at 11:16 AM
August 29, 2005
Blessed Are The Meek, For They Shall Be Flattened Like Pancakes.
"A church van ran over an injured motorcyclist and a man who had stopped to help him, killing both, police said Monday."
Posted by Eric at 9:31 PM | Comments (4)
IsThatLegal: Where Famous Authors Come to See and Be Seen
C'mon, Danielle Steele. The gig's up. I know you're out there.
Posted by Eric at 7:26 PM
Hamas Is Not Waging A "Freedom Struggle."
I continue to disagree with Tim about the merits of columnist D.G. Martin's analogy of an arson against a tobacco warehouse by blacks in North Carolina in 1970 to Palestinian terrorism.
Tim says they're usefully compared because they are both instances of "political violence." On the subject of the utility of comparison, Tim also says this: "A comparison of the role of violence in the African American freedom struggle and in the Middle East does not strike me as inappropriate." I read Tim as implying another important point of analogy here: African Americans in North Carolina in 1970 and Palestinians today are both engaged in forms of "freedom struggle." It is not entirely clear that Tim means this; he does not repeat the term "freedom struggle" in the part of the sentence that concerns the Middle East. But I think this implicit in the sentence, and more importantly, in Tim's (and D.G. Martin's) defense of the comparison of Palestinians to Southern blacks and Israelis to Southern whites.
This is precisely where I part company with Tim and D.G. Martin. The comparison reflects a basic mistake we Americans make over and over again: we "Americanize" the rest of the world's conflicts, seeing them through the lens of our own national experience. We look at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and see two groups of people divided by ethnicity, race, and religion. We see one of them as historically powerful and the other as historically powerless. We see one of them as oppressor and the other as victim. And, most crucially, we explain this dynamic by reasons that are familiar to us from our own experience: the powerful group oppresses because of a historical commitment to sustaining what it imagines to be its own superiority and to reinforcing what it imagines to be the inferiority of the victim group. The "freedom struggle" is the fight of the group labeled as inferior to establish its inherent human dignity and equality, and to secure the rights and advantages that belong to dignified and equal human beings.
This, I think, is how D.G. Martin intended to provoke us with the original analogy—to wake up us complacent whites to the controversy that Martin thinks ought to be (but is not) swirling around discussion of "Blood Done Sign My Name" at a Southern university. "Don't you see?" Martin seems to ask. "We have drained the intensity from our racial history, and we tell ourselves a happy story of slow-but-sure accommodation to a nonviolent freedom struggle. But think about it this way: We were the Israelis in a racial-political struggle—perhaps we still are—and African-Americans were (and perhaps still are) the Palestinians. Does that rouse you from your slumber? Now do you understand the intensity that lies beneath our seemingly tranquil surface?"
This is an effective strategy for stirring up feeling, but it just doesn't reach a minimum threshold of accuracy. The conflict between Palestinians and Israelis is a remarkably poor analogy to the conflict between American blacks and whites. There is no reasonably comparable history of racial/ethnic/religious oppression between Jews and Arab Muslims, in the Middle East or elsewhere, in either direction across the divide. Through much—indeed, most—of their history, Jews and Arab Muslims have lived together in peace. There was no pervasive and ongoing sense—among either Jews or Muslims—of racial, ethnic, or religious superiority or inferiority.
What has emerged over the last 60 years in and around Israel is not a "freedom struggle" in anything like the sense of the struggle of American blacks for freedom from slavery, from Jim Crow, and from their vicious and oppressive legacy. What has emerged instead is a struggle over the ownership of disputed land after the demise of Western colonialism in the region. The Palestinian terrorism whose efficacy D.G. Martin wants us to reflect on has been violence not to establish a principle of equality and dignity, but violence to extinguish the fact and idea of a Jewish state in the region, and to turn "every inch" of the current State of Israel into a Muslim theocracy. Any doubt about this is resolved by even a quick glance at the founding covenant of Hamas. (I recognize that many Palestinians do not deny Israel's right to exist, that some Palestinians are not Muslim, and that some Palestinians would not want a theocratic Palestinian state. These Palestinians, however, are by and large not the people practicing the terrorist methods that Martin invites us to consider.)
Of course, the intensity of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle has led some people on both sides of the divide to demonize those on the other, and to speak of them, and treat them, as less than fully human. This vocabulary and these actions can, at times, revive echoes and images of American white supremacy in our American ears and eyes.
But Gaza and the West Bank and Jerusalem of today are decidedly not the Oxford, North Carolina of 1970—or, for that matter, of 1770 or 1870.
So it's not just that torching an uninhabited tobacco warehouse in Oxford in 1970 is different from blowing up a Passover Seder in an Israeli hotel in Netanya in March of 2002 in the sense that one was property destruction and the other cold-blooded murder. That's true, but it misses the much more important point that the two incidents can only be grouped together as "political violence" in aid of a "freedom struggle" in the same way that (to use my earlier example) the sinking of the Titanic and the Lusitania can be grouped together as "unexpected incidents at sea" that led to "shipping disasters."
We Americans too often make the mistake of "Americanizing" the disputes, and the lives, of people in other countries and cultures. Historians will probably see this as the core mistake made by President Bush and his advisers in their "planning" (and I use that term loosely) for post-war Iraq. We would be greeted as liberators; "Iraqis" (as if there even really were such an identity, as opposed to Shi'a, Sunnis, and Kurds living there, and sub-groups within them) would revel in the overthrow of a dictator; democracy would take root among these "Iraqis"; "federalism" would solve any problems of managing rival regional powers. And on and on. All of it is lovely; all of it resonates with a history we can understand: our own. And none of it has a damn thing to do with the actual history of the place we invaded.
D.G. Martin and – I think – Tim Tyson, are making the same mistake in comparing American civil rights history to the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Except insofar as they generically involve "struggles" between one people and another, one conflict has essentially nothing to do with the other.
We will do best, I think, if we work hard to understand our own civil rights history by focusing our attention on our history's own horrors and complexities. They are all around us, even today, as Tim's book so powerfully shows us. We ought not confuse ourselves by imagining that the rest of the world's horrors and complexities mirror our own.
Posted by Eric at 12:30 PM | Comments (8)
August 28, 2005
Going Underground
Here are the girls, looking down on me from a little perch they'd found and climbed up to.
Here is a bat we found hanging from the wall. Contrary to what you may have heard, bats are actually very cute. They're like little mice with big ears, tiny little faces, and wings. (OK, maybe that doesn't sound so cute. But they are.)
And here I am, emerging from the cave through an opening that is pretty narrow. (Now that I think of it, I found it slightly narrower than it was when I came through three years ago. Especially around my mid-section. I guess the rocks have shifted or something.)
Posted by Eric at 9:46 PM | Comments (3)
A Question for Tim Tyson on the Eve of UNC's Summer Reading Program
Martin evidently thinks the suicide bombing of a Passover Seder in a hotel restaurant is sufficiently analogous to the burning of an uninhabited tobacco warehouse to make us stop and think--about something or other.
Tim Tyson, the book's author, left a comment to my post, in which he said this:
"I don't think that D.G. Martin's analogy of Oxford, North Carolina 1970 and the Middle East 2005 holds up that well. But it does push us to the far end of our logic, asking us what the roles of both violence and moral suasion might be in our politics and pointing toward the difficult and imprecise nature of these judgements."This strikes me as dangerously loose thinking. If the analogy doesn't "hold up that well," how does it "push us to the far end of our logic?" How does it engage our "logic" at all?
The sinking of the Titanic might be compared to the sinking of the Lusitania: both did involve ships that went to the bottom. But I don't think the analogy would "hold up very well" in a debate about the safety of ships, and it would hardly push a reasonable debater to the end of anything but his or her patience.
How, Tim, does a comparison of African American property damage in 1970 and the Palestinian terrorism of recent years "push us to the end of our logic" about the comparative roles of violence and moral suasion? Does it not instead push us well past the end of our logic?
Posted by Eric at 6:28 PM | Comments (3)
"The Arab Element"
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when it was obvious Japan had declared war on the United States, the government rounded up anyone that was even of Japanese descent and put them in "internment camps" to lessen the chance the enemy would act from within the country. This occurred without any sign that this was the case.Now, we are at war with Al Qaeda, and CNN states there are suspected terrorist cells in the country, but there has been no effort to contain the Arab element in the United States. It seems to me that in order to protect the American people, an act similar to that which was previously used for the Japanese should be in order.
I recently watched a recap of the 9/11 events and realized as long as there are persons of Arab descent unaccounted for in our country, we will be under the gun.
Posted by Eric at 5:44 PM | Comments (4)
August 24, 2005
We're On A Road to Nowhere....
Posted by Eric at 6:14 PM | Comments (1)
Watch That Space.
Posted by Eric at 4:16 PM | Comments (2)
Looking for Racial Progress in All the Wrong Places
Well here's some controversy--although perhaps not the kind Martin intended.
Martin summarizes the book accurately:
"Blood Done Sign My Name" is a careful and sensitive retelling of Oxford, North Carolina's encounters with some of the worst events in the struggle for civil rights in the 1960s and early 1970s. The story tells how the town and its people dealt with a brutal racial killing and downtown burnings that were a part of the accompanying racial unrest.Forty years ago, writes Martin, this book would have opened a "torrent of controversy" on the UNC campus.
But today, Martin observes,
it is 2005. Now everybody is "pro-civil rights and equal rights." The children and grandchildren of people who fought for continued segregation and white dominance now fill the Smith Center to give adoring cheers to black students who bring their team victories.This is the best that Martin can do to illustrate Southern racial progress? Point to crowds of white students cheering for black basketball players? Mr. Martin, black people have been serving as entertainment for white people for a long time--including, especially, the time of segregation and white dominance. A group of African-American athlete-entertainers and their adoring white audience do not prove racial progress. Black UNC students performing at the highest levels of achievement, tenured black faculty members, top black administrators, a strong network of black alumni across the state and the country, cross-racial friendships and academic collaborations: those are UNC's best symbols of racial progress.
Even worse, from my perspective, is Martin's callous invocation of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the story that "Blood Done Sign My Name" tells, some in the black community responded to the racial murder of a young black man by firebombing unoccupied tobacco warehouses at night, destroying $10 million worth of property. Here's what Martin does with this:
[Book author Timothy] Tyson challenges our thinking. His story shows, whether we like it or not, that it was violent activity, as much as the nonviolent, that led to changes in Oxford.This is how Martin dramatizes to his white readership that we have some serious reckoning with our past to do: he compares Southern whites to that all-purpose paradigm of the racial oppressor -- the Israeli.If we really "turn to face these hounds," this part of our history ought not to be so easy for us to confront. Like an Israeli who asks himself whether Palestinian terrorism was a major factor prompting Israel to withdraw from Gaza, we do not want to acknowledge that violence was effective in pushing us do the "right" thing.
Is this really the analogy Martin wanted? Does he really want us to reflect on how "effective" the murders of Israeli civilians in restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, and buses have been? Does he really want us to consider the nighttime torching of an unoccupied tobacco warehouse alongside the hijackings of airplanes and cruise ships, the kidnapping and murder of Olympic athletes, and dozens of suicide bombings? Does Palestinian terrorism really shed much light on the struggle for African-American equality? How?
We all have work to do on our racial pasts, but Martin should have invited us to do it without disparaging Israel and without justifying suicide bombings.
UPDATE: In her reaction to the same column, Sally Greene notes, among many other important things, the difference between D.G. Martin's take on Tim Tyson's view on the value of violence and Tim Tyson's take on Tim Tyson's view on the value of violence.
Posted by Eric at 11:53 AM | Comments (4)
Abraham S. Goldstein, Dead at Age 80
His article "The State and the Accused: Balance of Advantage in Criminal Procedure," 69 Yale L.J. 1149-1199 (1960), was one of the most important pieces in the field. His book on the insanity defense and his work on comparative criminal procedure were also very important.
He was an urbane and somewhat formal man, at least in his interactions with his students, but was also approachable and supportive.
I--and I would imagine many former students--will miss him.
Posted by Eric at 9:15 AM
August 23, 2005
A Grave Situation.
Why didn't they think of this sooner?
(My point, incidentally, is not to compare the war in Iraq to the Battle of the Little Big Horn. It's to show the Orwellian outrageousness of using a gravestone for propaganda.)
Posted by Eric at 10:45 PM | Comments (9)
THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS: "Iceberg Tears Only Two Titanic Bulkheads."
THIS SEEMS LIKE GOOD NEWS: "Iraqi Parliament Delays Constitution Vote."
Posted by Eric at 9:18 AM | Comments (1)
August 22, 2005
Barbed Wire: The Final Frontier
(Thanks to reader Steve J. for the link.)
Posted by Eric at 8:43 PM
Closeted History.
Posted by Eric at 2:37 PM | Comments (2)
Much Obliged.
Thanks very much.
Posted by Eric at 11:04 AM
Pomp and Circumstance ... 60 Years Later
Some of them in tears. Some of them on walkers. Some of them posthumously.
Very moving.
Posted by Eric at 10:17 AM
Technical Difficulties
I have the Comment Access Division of IsThatLegal's Movable Type technical support staff tasked to the problem, and I have told them that they will not be fed until they solve it. This, however, leaves the staff of my Comment Review Division (which screens my comments and makes recommendations to my outside blue-ribbon Comment Approval Panel) with nothing to do. So I have asked them to clean the bathrooms.
UPDATE, ll:00 a.m.: Full comment functionality restored. The Comment Access Division has been sacked.
Posted by Eric at 7:49 AM
August 21, 2005
"Like Most Bloggers?"
This is Michelle Malkin, in August of 2004, explaining why she's only occasionally going to allow comments on her blog:
Like most bloggers, I don't have interns or assistants to help out with the blog.This is Betsy Newmark, in August of 2005, subbing for Michelle Malkin on Malkin's blog:
We've had to turn the trackbacks feature off while Michelle is away. There was some nasty porno spam in the trackbacks and some other problems. I believe that Michelle's kind assistants are working on the problem and hope to turn it back on when she returns. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.So ... there are assistants.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
Posted by Eric at 3:19 PM | Comments (6)
Comment? (For full punning effect, read with French accent.)
Michelle has received some of the ugliest, most racist and sexist e-mails and comments that I've ever seen. Why should she have to spend time policing a comments section for the trash that some people think it entertaining to spew at her just because they can't stand the idea of having a woman expressing conservative ideas.Well, how about because she said she would?
When she turned off the comments, she said this:
So: For now, I'll have a regular open comments section every Wednesday when I post my new syndicated column and I'll be far more judicious in opening comments on other posts. I will aim for a few comment-enabled posts each week, and we'll go from there.She has never opened comments since. Not Wednesdays. Not never.
Oh, and one little amusing thing: in explaining her decision to reduce (but not eliminate) comments, she said this:
"Like most bloggers, I don't have interns or assistants to help out with the blog."Is that so?
Oh, one more little amusing thing: When Newmark first posted her defense of Malkin, it said this:
"Why should she have to spend time policing a comments section for the trash that some people think it entertaining to spew at her just because they can't stand the idea of having an attractive woman expressing conservative ideas."Notice that in the version now up on the site, Newmark has edited out the word "attractive."
Inquiring minds want to know: Does the correction indicate that Newmark finds Malkin unattractive? Or did she just get lots of complaints from unattractive conservatives?
Posted by Eric at 1:06 PM | Comments (6)
August 20, 2005
Probably on the Rare Side, Though.
Posted by Eric at 11:46 PM | Comments (1)
August 19, 2005
A Welcome Visit.
Posted by Eric at 8:00 AM | Comments (1)
In Defense of Ann Althouse
But this description of her--drawing lots of attention because of a link from Atrios--is vicious and wrong.
Althouse is a highly respected lawprof whose views are eclectic, interesting, and always provocative. She is one of the country's most influential scholars on federal courts and jurisdiction. And her views as a blogger are far more diverse and balanced than the Mithras nastiness suggests.
Posted by Eric at 7:33 AM | Comments (27)
August 18, 2005
Slaving for the Mouse
Posted by Eric at 5:21 PM | Comments (1)
My Doppelblögger
He does not look like me, except for the blue eyes, the funky hairdo, and the ear piercings.
(OK, OK. I was making that up about the funky 'do and the piercings. But I do have blue eyes.)
Posted by Eric at 4:56 PM | Comments (1)
The Book-of-the-Dunce Club
Now it's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades).
Before you go dashing out to pick up your copy, though, you might want to note that this is the author's view about his subject:
"Although there are undoubtedly millions of virtuous Muslims, Islam itself is an incomplete, misleading, and often downright false revelation which, in many ways, directly contradicts what God has revealed through the prophets of the Old Testament and through His Son Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh." Daniel Ali & Robert Spencer, Inside Islam (Westchester, Pa.: Ascension Press 2003), pages 15-16.So you can just be sure that the "Politically Incorrect Guide" will present an even-handed assessment of Islam!
We await with bated breath the release of Regnery's next title in this series, "The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Holocaust," by noted scholar David Irving.
Posted by Eric at 1:40 PM | Comments (5)
"Bob" Is John Alpaugh -- Bainbridge Islanders Take Note.
Mr. Alpaugh is the sort of cowardly man who will publicly attack and denigrate others only from behind what he imagines to be an impenetrable cloak of anonymity. (It turns out that he was wrong about the "impenetrable" part.)
But it's actually even uglier than that. Mr. Alpaugh is the sort of man who will publicly smear one of the pallbearers at his own father's funeral in order to "prove" that the Japanese American internment camps of World War II were big happy playgrounds. Read this lovely little comment of Mr. Alpaugh's from Dave Neiwert's site, where Mr. Alpaugh--posing, as usual, as "Bob"--maintains that an elderly internee who was one of his father's best friends spent his time at the Manzanar Relocation Center in 1943 "playing golf." ("Bob," incidentally, was Mr. Alpaugh's late father's first name, which makes Alpaugh's rantings sadder, and more vile.)
Dave Neiwert tells us a good deal more about "Bob"/John Alpaugh here, and includes the vicious "review" of Dave's wonderful book "Strawberry Days" that Alpaugh--posing, of course, as the anonymous "Bob"--left on Amazon. Dave's in good company, of course: Alpaugh/"Bob" also anonymously attacked me and my book on amazon, in a review of my book that he entitled "Julius Streicher and Joseph Goebbels would be proud!"
This is the true face of the efforts, on Bainbridge Island and elsewhere, to achieve what Michelle Malkin and her ilk call "truth" and "balance" in the story of the eviction and incarceration of Japanese Americans in World War II. (As one would expect, Michelle Malkin describes Alpaugh as "active in the fight for a fair and accurate assessment of WWII relocation and evacuation policies"--though I have no reason to suspect that she knows of Alpaugh's various "clandestine" activities around the internet.)
I've never been to Bainbridge Island, but I understand it is a small community. I know a good deal more about Mr. Alpaugh than I have chosen to disclose here, but I think that what I've written should suffice to let Islanders know what sort of a neighbor they're dealing with.
Posted by Eric at 7:01 AM | Comments (12)
August 17, 2005
Well Tie Me Wallabee Down, Sport!
Posted by Eric at 3:32 PM | Comments (2)
Peew! What Stinks? Is It The Caribbean-Blue Hellholes? Or the Writing?
If so, here's my nomination:
Yellowstone to Mars: Scientists help steer quest for lifeBy TODD NEFF
Scripps Howard News Service Wednesday, August 17, 2005YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK -- They are alive. The boiling, Caribbean-blue hellholes. The carpets of green, yellow, white, black and orange bathed in scalding runoff.
We are alive because untold trillions of microbes have lived. How the world's microbes -- the planet's richest trove of life -- survive and shape our world is the key to understanding the origins of life on Earth, scientists from the University of Colorado and elsewhere say. The $720 million Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that launched Friday is NASA's latest bet that the same holds true elsewhere.
Posted by Eric at 1:52 PM
August 16, 2005
Walking Through History
If summer travel plans ever take you to Yellowstone National Park, you should consider a visit to the town of Cody, about an hour's drive from Yellowstone's East Entrance. The Heart Mountain walking trail is about 15 minutes north of town, and right in town is the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, which is one of the finest museums of Western American life in the country.
Posted by Eric at 8:29 PM
What Turns Justice Thomas On.
Is she just making this up? Orin asks.
Yes, she is, because we know for sure when Justice Thomas is happiest: when he's vacationing in his RV.
Of course, that might provoke outrage in some circles ...
Posted by Eric at 7:40 PM
"What's That Weird Little Thingy With The Amazon Title On It Over There On The Right?"
It's a tip jar.
Posted by Eric at 3:25 PM | Comments (2)
The Damage A Book Can Do.
(Incidentally, I don't at all see the point of the ugly invective that Arthur Silber hurled at her yesterday. Yesterday's post did not reflect well on him. Today's does, except insofar as he stands by the personal invective of yesterday.)
Posted by Eric at 3:05 PM | Comments (7)
August 14, 2005
Be Vewwy Vewwy Quiet. They'we Hunting Witches.
First Eugene called for people to compile a handy-dandy little list of "Western commentators who defend the Iraqi insurgents, or at least justify their actions as being a supposed campaign for self-determination, allegedly justifiable rage at Western misbehavior, and so on."
Nobody could really name anyone other than Michael Moore.
Orin Kerr then suggested, ever so delicately, that Eugene's call for a list of insurgency supporters "might be generating more heat than light," and offered a template to explain why. (The template is helpful, but to my eye doesn't fully capture the most important point, which is that there's a big difference between saying you understand why some people in Iraq might be fighting to rid the country of an American occupying force and saying that you hope they succeed or that their tactics are justified. Eugene's post completely elides this crucial difference between perceiving or understanding something, on the one hand, and justifying it.)
But Orin's peacemaking efforts were in vain, because now David Kopel steps in, picks up the grenade Eugene tossed, and throws it a good bit further. Apparently frustrated that the search for "respectable" (that's David's word) Western insurgency-lovers was coming up dry, David does a search on Yahoo and adds several names: James Petras, an emeritus sociology professor from SUNY-Binghamton, the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, comedian and radio personality Janeane Garofalo, and Virginia Rodino, who was apparently a Green Party congressional candidate in the 2004 election.
And, says David, they're just the tip of the traitorous iceberg: "This is obviously not a comprehensive list," he says, "just what was easy to find in a few minutes."
(Just a sec ... I want to jump over to Yahoo to compile a list of ball players who have hit more than 700 home runs. Let's see ... Hank Aaron. Ummm, Babe Ruth. Uhh .... Barry Bonds. OK, I'll stop there in the interest of time, but obviously, that's not a comprehensive list. It's just what was easy to find in a few minutes.)
If you follow David's links, you discover that Arundhati Roy supports not the violent Iraqi insurgency, but "a pristine Iraqi resistance [that] must conduct [a] secular, feminist, democratic, nonviolent battle." But Eugene was looking for Western commentators (query: is an Indian novelist a "Western" commentator?) "who defend the Iraqi insurgents, or at least justify their actions as being a supposed campaign for self-determination, allegedly justifiable rage at Western misbehavior, and so on." Roy doesn't even come close to fitting Eugene's profile.
You also discover that David's evidence for Janeane Garofalo's supposedly treasonous defense of the Iraqi insurgency is the following hearsay recollection of a person whose name I can't even find:
"As Janeane Garofalo and I talked about on Air America last week, it’s a fairly simple thought experiment: It’s 2030. The Chinese and Russians team up and invade the U.S. after manufacturing a non-existant threat. Would you be a collaborator or would you fight back, Red Dawn style?"Notice that from this source we don't even know what Garofalo said; we know only that she "talked about" that "thought experiment."
This, folks, is turning into a witch hunt.
(For what it's worth, I'll give David this James Petras character and the Green Party candidate who scored a whopping two percent of the vote in her congressional race to represent the City of Baltimore, though it's hard for me to believe that a retired SUNY sociologist and a fringe congressional candidate are who OpinionJournal had in mind in the piece that Eugene quoted.)
UPDATE: Eugene Volokh defends his inquiry with some hypotheticals about abortion and Nazis. But let's stay on-topic. If I were to say that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq looks to some in the Arab world as the most recent episode in a thousand-year-old series of non-Muslim efforts to assert control over Muslim lands--much, incidentally, as the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did--would that make me a "bad guy?"
FINAL UPDATE: Eugene has replied a few more times, but I'll concern myself here only with one of them. He says--I'm not sure if it's directed at me--that he has been "criticized" and "insulted." I certainly have criticized his effort to generate a list of Western insurgency-supporters, but I never meant to insult him. If anything I wrote came off as insulting, Eugene, I'm very, very sorry about that.
Posted by Eric at 5:43 PM | Comments (40)
Mississippi Memories.
Beautiful writing. Blogging doesn't get much better than this.
Posted by Eric at 3:06 PM
August 13, 2005
Urgently To Reading This Blog-Item
Obviously, they're scams.
But here's the thing. This is the language of the most recent one I got:
In order to operate the PayPal service and to reduce the risk of fraud, PayPal Corp. will ask you monthly to provide us information about yourself and your credit card and/or bank account. The Privacy Policy describes the information we collect and how we use that information."Unable to do so may result to abnormal account behavior?"Unable to do so may result to abnormal account behavior during transactions and a suspended account.
Very convincing, that.
Posted by Eric at 1:05 PM | Comments (1)
Don't Halve A Cow, Man.
Not a whole cow, mind you. Just half.
Posted by Eric at 12:58 PM
August 12, 2005
An Inside Joke for Japanese American Internment Junkies
They meant "interned."
Posted by Eric at 3:31 PM | Comments (1)
And It Never Should Have Aired in the First Place.
Posted by Eric at 9:18 AM | Comments (3)
Eureka!
Posted by Eric at 9:16 AM | Comments (1)
August 11, 2005
Sgt. Kuroki's Tough Missions
Kuroki's toughest mission, incidentally, may have been the tour of duty that the Army sent him on in the spring of 1944, touring the Japanese American internment camps and making the case to the young internees that they should leave their families behind barbed wire to go fight for someone else's freedom.
Posted by Eric at 11:34 PM | Comments (4)
Catch a Shooting Star.
Clear skies are predicted here in central North Carolina! The quarter moon will hurt a little, but Mars will be in the field of view. Should be a nice night.
Posted by Eric at 2:56 PM
In My Defense, I Did See The Osmond Brothers and Andy Williams at the Latin Casino in around 1970
OK. Impressive, I admit.
But somebody needs to give Jim some crap for bragging that REO Speedwagon played his high school prom. So that's what I'm doing here.
Now, when somebody starts a thread about the greatest shows they missed, I'll kick some serious butt:
Bob Marley and the Wailers, September 1980. Just a couple of months before he died. I didn't go because I was just starting my freshman year in college and hadn't yet heard of the man.
Elvis Costello and the Attractions, with favorite-band-of-all-time Squeeze opening. Also sometime during my freshman year. My buddies were going but I stayed back at the dorm because I had a paper due later that week and felt I needed to work on it. Yes: later that week. It wasn't even the next day.
Truly pathetic, huh?
Posted by Eric at 6:52 AM | Comments (10)
August 10, 2005
Save The Iranian Seals!
U.N. removes final seals from Iranian nuclear facility
IsThatLegal has managed to obtain an exclusive photograph of the scene shortly before the dramatic removal:
Posted by Eric at 9:31 AM | Comments (9)
Triangulating Hate
What a lovely sentiment.
Posted by Eric at 8:59 AM | Comments (8)
August 9, 2005
Indeed.
Posted by Eric at 10:28 AM
Blondeness (and Maybe the NYTimes's Interest) Explained.
A number of readers pointed out to me that there are lots of Nordic expat communities in Central and South America. And lots of blonde people.
Fair enough.
But it turns out the Roberts kids were born in Ireland.
Why they would both have been adopted in Latin America after being born to two different Irish mothers is unclear in the reporting that's been done to date. (I say "two different Irish mothers" because the kids are less than 9 months apart.)
Perhaps somebody who, unlike me, actually knows something about international adoption practices can tell us how usual or unusual this scenario is. It could be that this is an entirely ordinary thing. On the other hand, maybe it's really unusual--and if it is, then that would help explain why the Times (and other media) might have been looking for information about the adoptions.
UPDATE: Welcome, Eschatonians! In the name of clarity, I want to repeat something I already said in this post: All that the facts about the Roberts kids do is help explain why the NY Times might have been interested in knowing more. I was among those who said, at the time, that the Times was nosing around where it shouldn't be. Now I can see why they might have been interested in investigating.
FURTHER UPDATE: A reader has left a comment, both here and at Atrios, that offers an explanation of why legal adoptions happen in this somewhat convoluted way.
Posted by Eric at 7:58 AM | Comments (42)
August 8, 2005
HNN Redesign
Posted by Eric at 8:03 PM | Comments (1)
August 7, 2005
On Michelle Malkin's Popularity.
"Attacking Malkin in this way comes with especially poor grace from the left blogger community, which--dare I note--includes, as far as I'm aware, no female, nonwhite blogger nearly as prominent as Malkin."Of course, when a female, nonwhite blogger condemns rather than defends the Japanese American internment, or argues for protecting rather than trashing immigrants' rights, or takes the opposite side of just about anything Malking writes, it's really not so attention-grabbing, is it?
Gee. Could that have anything to do with why Malkin gets so much attention on the right?
Posted by Eric at 6:19 PM | Comments (21)
August 6, 2005
You May Not Mail Horror Comics to Great Britain!
To Germany, you may not mail "playing cards, except in complete decks properly wrapped."
To friends or family in Albania, you can't mail "extravagant clothes and other articles contrary to Albanians' taste."
Guatemalans must sneeze easily; they've banned powder of all kinds.
If you're thinking of mailing a police whistle to someone in Nicaragua, you can forget it. (Communist literature is out, too. Take that, Daniel Ortega.)
Nothing in Arabic to Niger, please, and nothing with the Red Cross trademark, either.
If your great-uncle in Lima needs some shoe wax or a wooden spoon, he won't be getting them by mail. (No playing cards, either. Must be the German influence.)
Sierra Leone doesn't want your Japanese brushes, unless they're nylon toothbrushes. (Tanzania has had it with the Japanese shaving brushes, by the way. Uganda too.)
If it rains, it pours ... but not in a package to Syria.
Nearby, in Israel, they need no imported sand (they have plenty of their own, I guess), but so long as that beehive you've got is new and not used, you can send it along.
Coals to Newcastle are apparently rather like cloves to Nepal.
You can't send invisible ink to Vietnam, by the way, but that one's tough to enforce.
No honey to Trinidad and Tobago, please. (The bee lobby must be particularly strong there.)
If you're wooing a Malawian, you'll have to rely on your own charms. No aphrodisiacs.
Don't even think of sending an oboe to Iran, especially if it's wrapped in a fashion newspaper.
Latvia will have none of your live animals, thank you very much, unless they are leeches.
Leeches, on the other hand, are right out in Italy. In fact, just about everything is. Especially bells, mounted coral, and typewriter ribbon.
Got it?
Posted by Eric at 11:27 AM | Comments (3)
Just Call Me Conan. (Who Is Aston Kutscher?)
| the Prankster |
| CLEAN | COMPLEX | LIGHT Your humor has an intellectual, even conceptual slant to it. You're not pretentious, but you're not into what some would call 'low humor' either. You'll laugh at a good dirty joke, but you definitely prefer something clever to something moist. You probably like well-thought-out pranks and/or spoofs and it's highly likely you've tried one of these things yourself. In a lot of ways, yours is the most entertaining type of humor because it's smart without being mean-spirited. PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Conan O'Brian - Ashton Kutcher |
 |
My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
|
| Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on Ok Cupid |
Posted by Eric at 8:55 AM | Comments (2)
August 4, 2005
Leave the cute tow-headed kids out of it!
Drudge notes, by the way, that the two adorable kids were adopted "from Latin America."
Judging by the looks of them, it must have been from Bolivia's expatriate Norwegian community.
Posted by Eric at 9:24 PM | Comments (10)
Another Funny Obituary
Patrick Pakenham, who has died aged 68, was a talented barrister and the second son of the 7th Earl and Countess of Longford; highly intelligent, articulate and possessed of an attractive and powerful voice, Pakenham could have attained great professional heights, but his boisterous nature and bouts of mental illness rendered it impossible for him to adhere to the routine required to sustain his position at the Bar, and he retired after 10 years' practice.
but then actually gets a good bit better. To wit,
During his appearance before an irascible and unpopular judge in a drugs case, the evidence, a bag of cannabis, was produced. The judge, considering himself an expert on the subject, said to Pakenham, with whom he had clashed during the case: "Come on, hand the exhibit up to me quickly." Then he proceeded to open the package. Inserting the contents in his mouth, he chewed it and announced: "Yes, yes of course that is cannabis. Where was the substance found, Mr Pakenham?" The reply came swiftly, if inaccurately: "In the defendant's anus, my Lord."Read the whole thing. A colorful life indeed.
Posted by Eric at 4:04 PM | Comments (2)
"President Hirohito?"
"[A Japanese newspaper in America] carried an interesting article in September 1908. The article was devoted to the ignorance of Japan exhibited by [American-born] children [of Japanese parents]. When asked about what they would like to become, some children replied that they aspired to become the Emperor of Japan."
This, of course, troubled the parents--because it revealed the impact on their children of the American folk belief that anyone can grow up to be President.
(Quote and story from Yuji Ichioka, The Issei: The World of the First Generation Japanese Immigrants, 1885-1924 (New York: The Free Press, 1988), at 197.)
Posted by Eric at 2:31 PM
Grrrrr!
Posted by Eric at 8:07 AM | Comments (2)
August 3, 2005
The Religious Faith of Judges, vintage 1943
It's a list that somebody in the Solicitor General's Office prepared, apparently at the direction of the White House, listing the name and religion of every federal judge sitting when FDR was first elected, and of every judge appointed by FDR. It dates from 1943, the year when FDR was preparing to select Wiley Rutledge.
I had no need for it, and so didn't copy it, but it did strike me as a source of valuable data that might not be available anywhere else.
If you're interested in knowing where to find it, drop me a line and I'll send you the citation information that I have.
Posted by Eric at 8:41 PM
This Stuff Doesn't Happen in Chapel Hill
I mention this only because I just learned that this summer, a moose has taken up residence on Laramie's mini golf course.
I miss Laramie.
Posted by Eric at 5:32 PM | Comments (1)
Yes, Those Are My Eyes That Are Rolling.
"Modesty and humility:" these are precisely the human traits that I would imagine leading to the Managing Editorship of the Harvard Law Review, a clerkship with Henry Friendly, a clerkship with William Rehnquist, the positions of Special Assistant to the Attorney General, Associate White House Counsel, and Principal Deputy Solicitor General of the United States, appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and a nomination to be an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.
"Modesty and humility." Yup. Sounds right to me. Certainly everybody I've ever known with a résumé like that has been modest and humble.
Posted by Eric at 10:44 AM | Comments (7)
Greg Robinson on Nagasaki (and Hiroshima)
Greg's argument from inference is quite interesting, but before reaching any conclusions, I'd want to see primary evidence of what the main decisionmakers were actually saying to each other, and, if any were diarists, to themselves. (Such evidence might well be readily available; this is an historical episode I know absolutely nothing about.)
Posted by Eric at 7:00 AM | Comments (4)
August 2, 2005
Perfection, Again, From Fountains of Wayne
Posted by Eric at 8:16 PM | Comments (3)
But How Did They Get It Past Security?
I would have needed to run to Lowe's.
Posted by Eric at 10:09 AM | Comments (5)
August 1, 2005
"The Self-Made Man"
In my view, it's false advertising.
Here's the synopsis from the film's website:
Is it ever rational to choose death? Is it ever good? For 77-year-old Bob Stern there is little doubt. A successful businessman, husband, and father, an exemplar of the "greatest generation" that built post-war America, Bob Stern believes that taking his own life in the face of serious — possibly terminal — illness is what an all-American hero should do. So he sits down on Independence Day, 2001, and videotapes his shocking proposal — for both his wife and son who sit just off-camera, and for his two absent daughters. Bob Stern's family tries to stop him from taking his life. The intense family drama that ensues raises issues many families must face.I'd venture to say that this particular family drama raises issues that almost no other families face.
The filmmaker--one of Stern's two daughters--constructs the film as a portrait of her father, a man who made a mint in post-war Chicago, in steel and real estate, and then uprooted his family to move to the high desert of California so that he could innovate in the fledgling field of solar energy. The film makes a number of things vividly (although perhaps unintentionally) clear about Bob Stern: he was addicted to success, he was an intense narcissist, he emotionally dominated his wife and especially his children, and he submerged feelings--his own and others'--in a deep rationalizing defense mechanism of "cost-benefit analysis."
Facing surgery for an aortic aneurysm the next day, and the knowledge that his prostate cancer has returned, Stern sits his wife and son down with a videorecorder running and launches into a lengthy, rambling monologue about whether he should kill himself. He shows no signs of physical illness or discomfort. He is coherent, at times light-hearted, at times serious, at times funny. At no point does he reveal fear, or sadness. It's all a cost-benefit analysis, you see.
As the night progresses, wife and son realize that Stern's getting more and more serious about killing himself. But--and this is an important point--the video performance remains a monologue. Wife and son play the roles of occasional off-screen interlocutors, but Stern never asks them how they feel or what they prefer. Neither does wife or son call for medical or psychiatric help, or even the cops. They just watch him as he keeps on talking. At one point early in the morning, Stern's doctor calls to talk to him about the surgery, and Stern leaves the room to talk on the phone. Neither wife nor son takes the phone to share with the doctor that Stern is contemplating suicide.
As the sun is rising, son walks father to the front door of the house and father walks off into the morning fog. Between five and ten seconds later son sees a flash by the front fence and hears a bang. He walks out to see that Stern has shot himself. Successfully.
Son tells the filmmaker (his sister) that he sat down next to his dead father and told him that he'd shot himself successfully. Which was important, explains son. "Dad liked to know that he was successful at everything he did."
Only then, after the shooting, do mother and son call the two daughters and tell them what has happened. If there is internal family strife over how mother and son handled the situation, the film does not show it, or even suggest it. We know nothing at all about how one of the daughters reacts; the other makes a movie.
This is a film that is supposed to engender discussion about the end-of-life decisions that touch us all? I don't see it that way. I see it as a terribly sad story about a very, very unusual family, cowed into silent collaboration with a frightened and emotionally detached man's suicide.
UPDATE: Commenter anon-e-mouse says something worth quoting: "I've about had it with documentaries and reportage from people who have no idea what they have, in fact, revealed. Why should I waste my time on the 'insights' of people who are not genuinely thoughtful and reflective?"
Posted by Eric at 7:31 PM | Comments (5)
On the other hand, sir, you've been housed and fed for 19 years.
Posted by Eric at 7:28 PM | Comments (2)
Lavinthal on Ethics and Deep Throat
(Lavinthal did the job of a reporter and actually called Felt's lawyer to confirm that Woodward, Bernstein, and the Post never asked to be released from the vow of confidentiality.)
Posted by Eric at 2:34 PM | Comments (1)
Note: They Offered Refreshments.
The paper was accepted.
Click here to download their home movie documenting their efforts to present a randomly generated talk about the paper at the conference.
Posted by Eric at 12:27 PM | Comments (2)
Who Would Have Imagined?
In other news, a team of astrophysicists have announced that the sun will set this evening.
Posted by Eric at 8:31 AM
Are You Now, Or Have You Ever Been ...?
So there's a conservative legal organization that tries to advance its agenda and offers networking connections to its membership. So what?
Posted by Eric at 8:23 AM | Comments (6)