Monday, October 23, 2006
Bush not conservative enough? Ha!
Michael Domino, a law professor at Prawfsblawg, suggests that Republicans may lose because they are insufficiently conservative. My response follows:
"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who. without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." Walter Lippmann, 1932 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,743040,00.html
Democrats do have a program, but when the opposition is collapsing at the seams, you don't focus on your platform too much. So it was for FDR with Hoover, and so it is with the Democrats and the Rubber Stamp Republicans.
It also seems to me that your post is a soft version of a prevalent spin that has been emerging: that Bush and the Republican Congress do not represent a real conservativism. Of course nothing could be farther from the truth. The hallmarks of Bush's administration and his Congressional enablers have been contempt for the responsibilities of governance, blind faith in the powers of the market, efforts at erosion of the wall between church and state, muscular militarism, what if you're unkind you'd call bigotry, if you're a bit more gentle, a socially conservative outlook, nativism, and pillorying of ideological opponents as unpatriotic.
The "far Left" are not the ones who have come to loathe this administration's utterly failed policies. It's a supermajority of 63-67% who have turned on its incompetence and foolishness. Read the polls. There are not enough people in this country who subscribe to the conservativism that the Bush Administration allegedly should be upholding.
The failures of this Administration have not come from its betrayal of some hidden, inscrutable reservoir of conservative virtue. They have sprung from that very poisoned font. Conservatism is the ideology that failed. Go back to the drawing board, readapt, as conservatives did when they renounced their racist heritage, and perhaps after another time in the wilderness, conservatives will once again be viable.
"Franklin D. Roosevelt is no crusader. He is no tribune of the people. He is no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant man who. without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President." Walter Lippmann, 1932 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,743040,00.html
Democrats do have a program, but when the opposition is collapsing at the seams, you don't focus on your platform too much. So it was for FDR with Hoover, and so it is with the Democrats and the Rubber Stamp Republicans.
It also seems to me that your post is a soft version of a prevalent spin that has been emerging: that Bush and the Republican Congress do not represent a real conservativism. Of course nothing could be farther from the truth. The hallmarks of Bush's administration and his Congressional enablers have been contempt for the responsibilities of governance, blind faith in the powers of the market, efforts at erosion of the wall between church and state, muscular militarism, what if you're unkind you'd call bigotry, if you're a bit more gentle, a socially conservative outlook, nativism, and pillorying of ideological opponents as unpatriotic.
The "far Left" are not the ones who have come to loathe this administration's utterly failed policies. It's a supermajority of 63-67% who have turned on its incompetence and foolishness. Read the polls. There are not enough people in this country who subscribe to the conservativism that the Bush Administration allegedly should be upholding.
The failures of this Administration have not come from its betrayal of some hidden, inscrutable reservoir of conservative virtue. They have sprung from that very poisoned font. Conservatism is the ideology that failed. Go back to the drawing board, readapt, as conservatives did when they renounced their racist heritage, and perhaps after another time in the wilderness, conservatives will once again be viable.
Thursday, September 21, 2006
Why Blogs Suck, A reply.
Ethan Leib of Prawfsblawg posts an interesting response to Brian Leiter's recent piece in the Yale Pocket Part entitled Why Blogs Are Bad For Legal Scholarship. Like most of what Leiter writes, the piece is thoughtful and goes against popular enthusiasms. In my not so thoughtful reply, I explain why I agree and disagree with his analysis and conclusions. Posted below for your convenience.
It seems like Leiter's central objection to blogging is that it democratizes information in a bad way. I disagree but I see his point. Blogs do make it possible for anyone to publish their opinions. The democratic problem of blogs is not only that ease of access and multiplicity of opinions, but also that the evaluative measure that promotes blog popularity is the acceptance and promotion of non-specialists. Leiter is specific on this point:
begin quote:
The underlying speculative psychology here may or may not be accurate, but the phenomenon seems real enough: an opinion that appears to be informed gains credibility by virtue of being repeated and thus becoming current in discourse.
The relevance to the blogging phenomenon should be clear enough. Imagine that the author of the widely read Generic Law Blog runs a glowing post on Monday morning declaring his good friend’s new article to be “an excellent discussion, much worth reading.”
:end quote
Leiter observes that this results in the puffery of work that truly informed opinion finds laughable.
I think much of what Leiter observes is true and none of it can be dismissed without thought. However, I am surprised that he does not recognize that this phenomenon is not a new one. The trend has long been the incredible multiplication of information, resulting in fields of expertise being ever more narrowly defined, and, the antidote for the problem are "mediating institutions." If in the old good world, there were not the problems in the bad new world, there would not be the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and all the other filters, including, yes, journals and law reviews, all of these things that serve to filter the huge amount of information that there is to process. Parallel institutions are developing slowly on the internet. Most people read only a narrow section of the internet and rely on information provided by only a small number of sources. I read Leiter's piece as an argument for more "expert mediators." But I wonder if his argument isn't undercut by his example of Derrida. Isn't it the case that the same forces pre-internet resulted in the publication, puffery, and cult status of this figure, who Leiter contends deserves marginalia? Yes, the internet is capable of accelerating this process. However, it may well provide the antidote for it too. In the past, "intellectual frauds" were allowed to metastasize without receiving any corrective treatment. By the time that the scapel of critical judgement was brought to bear, it could not cut away all of the diseased flesh. Today, an alert Leiter or analogue can immediately make available a cure. Yes, poor information can explode faster than ever before. But it can also implode faster than ever before.
The problem that Leiter identifies is a real and significant one that demands attention. It is, however, not a new one. Blame the printing press, not the internet. And maybe the internet is the vaccine as well as the virus.
Cross-posted to my unpopular blog.
It seems like Leiter's central objection to blogging is that it democratizes information in a bad way. I disagree but I see his point. Blogs do make it possible for anyone to publish their opinions. The democratic problem of blogs is not only that ease of access and multiplicity of opinions, but also that the evaluative measure that promotes blog popularity is the acceptance and promotion of non-specialists. Leiter is specific on this point:
begin quote:
The underlying speculative psychology here may or may not be accurate, but the phenomenon seems real enough: an opinion that appears to be informed gains credibility by virtue of being repeated and thus becoming current in discourse.
The relevance to the blogging phenomenon should be clear enough. Imagine that the author of the widely read Generic Law Blog runs a glowing post on Monday morning declaring his good friend’s new article to be “an excellent discussion, much worth reading.”
:end quote
Leiter observes that this results in the puffery of work that truly informed opinion finds laughable.
I think much of what Leiter observes is true and none of it can be dismissed without thought. However, I am surprised that he does not recognize that this phenomenon is not a new one. The trend has long been the incredible multiplication of information, resulting in fields of expertise being ever more narrowly defined, and, the antidote for the problem are "mediating institutions." If in the old good world, there were not the problems in the bad new world, there would not be the New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, and all the other filters, including, yes, journals and law reviews, all of these things that serve to filter the huge amount of information that there is to process. Parallel institutions are developing slowly on the internet. Most people read only a narrow section of the internet and rely on information provided by only a small number of sources. I read Leiter's piece as an argument for more "expert mediators." But I wonder if his argument isn't undercut by his example of Derrida. Isn't it the case that the same forces pre-internet resulted in the publication, puffery, and cult status of this figure, who Leiter contends deserves marginalia? Yes, the internet is capable of accelerating this process. However, it may well provide the antidote for it too. In the past, "intellectual frauds" were allowed to metastasize without receiving any corrective treatment. By the time that the scapel of critical judgement was brought to bear, it could not cut away all of the diseased flesh. Today, an alert Leiter or analogue can immediately make available a cure. Yes, poor information can explode faster than ever before. But it can also implode faster than ever before.
The problem that Leiter identifies is a real and significant one that demands attention. It is, however, not a new one. Blame the printing press, not the internet. And maybe the internet is the vaccine as well as the virus.
Cross-posted to my unpopular blog.
Wednesday, September 13, 2006
Where were you on 9-11?
There have been a number of good reminisences about 9-11 in the old JFK assassination where were you? mold. Here's mine.
For me, the attacks took place at night. I was living in Taibei at the time. A friend had flown in from Tokyo on a business trip with a colleague. A mutual friend and I were meeting them for dinner. We met up in the Taipei Hilton for dinner. We had a pleasant dinner, marked by good humor and a bit of politics. Then we headed to Ziga-Zaga, a bar within the hotel, for some drinks. The visitors headed up to their rooms to take a conference call. My friend returned and we started chatting again. A few minutes later, his colleague came down. He quietly observed that a plane had flown into a building in New York. The scene was surreal. People were drinking and chatting. A live band was playing. There were tvs hung behind the bar. I asked the bartender to change the channel to the BBC or CNN. He changed it to BBC. The first image we saw was a split screen. Both sides were a mass of smoke and dust. One side was labeled New York, the other Washington, D.C. I pointed at it to the guy next to me. He glanced up and went back to his conversation. We decided to retreat to one of the hotel rooms so we could hear the commentary.
When we got up there and settled in, the magnitude of what was happening set in. In fact, it seemed even worse. The first scene when we turned on CNN on was a plane hitting one of the towers. It must have been the second plane. Death tolls were projected at 10, 20, even 50 thousand. Luckily, this did not come to pass. But there was plenty of horror nonetheless. The scenes from the World Trade Center played over and over as relentless speculation about who, why, what went on. CNN was a babbling group of idiots. The BBC coverage was so much more adult.
We drank all night and lamented the end of life as we knew it. The next day, I went to work. There the tremendous outpouring of affection and sympathy began. To be an American overseas in the first weeks after 9-11 was to be the recipient of an amazing outpouring of compassion. It ended quickly enough, but I will never forget being hugged spontaneously by an Iranian friend who told me of demonstrations in Tehran demanding that if the Iranian government had anything to do with the attack that they resign. Or my German friend writing me to tell me that he went to a massive demonstration of solidarity in Berlin. It was a wonderful time. We all know what came next, but for that shining moment it seemed like everything would be ok. That is my 9-11 memory.
For me, the attacks took place at night. I was living in Taibei at the time. A friend had flown in from Tokyo on a business trip with a colleague. A mutual friend and I were meeting them for dinner. We met up in the Taipei Hilton for dinner. We had a pleasant dinner, marked by good humor and a bit of politics. Then we headed to Ziga-Zaga, a bar within the hotel, for some drinks. The visitors headed up to their rooms to take a conference call. My friend returned and we started chatting again. A few minutes later, his colleague came down. He quietly observed that a plane had flown into a building in New York. The scene was surreal. People were drinking and chatting. A live band was playing. There were tvs hung behind the bar. I asked the bartender to change the channel to the BBC or CNN. He changed it to BBC. The first image we saw was a split screen. Both sides were a mass of smoke and dust. One side was labeled New York, the other Washington, D.C. I pointed at it to the guy next to me. He glanced up and went back to his conversation. We decided to retreat to one of the hotel rooms so we could hear the commentary.
When we got up there and settled in, the magnitude of what was happening set in. In fact, it seemed even worse. The first scene when we turned on CNN on was a plane hitting one of the towers. It must have been the second plane. Death tolls were projected at 10, 20, even 50 thousand. Luckily, this did not come to pass. But there was plenty of horror nonetheless. The scenes from the World Trade Center played over and over as relentless speculation about who, why, what went on. CNN was a babbling group of idiots. The BBC coverage was so much more adult.
We drank all night and lamented the end of life as we knew it. The next day, I went to work. There the tremendous outpouring of affection and sympathy began. To be an American overseas in the first weeks after 9-11 was to be the recipient of an amazing outpouring of compassion. It ended quickly enough, but I will never forget being hugged spontaneously by an Iranian friend who told me of demonstrations in Tehran demanding that if the Iranian government had anything to do with the attack that they resign. Or my German friend writing me to tell me that he went to a massive demonstration of solidarity in Berlin. It was a wonderful time. We all know what came next, but for that shining moment it seemed like everything would be ok. That is my 9-11 memory.
Thursday, September 07, 2006
Green? Green.
My friend Jim Green teased me about not posting anything new for a while. I blame moving, moving, and hell. But here's something that I wrote quite a while ago:
Hearing from the Florida Supreme Court about their heroes got me thinking about some of mine. Marc Bloch is one of my personal heroes. A Frenchman and fighter in the Resistance in World War II, Bloch was hardly an ordinary example of either. But, I believe that he would like to be described first and foremost that way. An academic, he was one of the most prominent members of the French Annales school of medieval history and a captain in the French Army. He was also a Jew and there is some evidence that he suffered discrimination in Dreyfus Affair era France. Yet Bloch never allowed this discrimination to diminish his patriotism for France. Part of the French Army during its disastrous defeat by the Nazis, Bloch observed first hand its failure to adapt to the challenges presented by the Nazi assault. When French positions were overrun, they followed a standard retreat and regroup protocol. But the protocol was not designed to take into account the then shocking speed of the Nazi blitzkrieg. So the French were never able to regroup. Instead of concentrating their efforts at one point against the Nazis, the French tried to defend every hamlet. Finally, the French were too slow to turn to unconventional warfare to defeat the Nazis. In his book Strange Defeat, written between 1941 and 1944, Bloch indicted all of these factors, but pointed to a more general problem. Problems in French society led to the defeat, principally a tendency to compartmentalize thought and avoid critical analysis. This failure of imagination, as much as any disparity in weapons and tactics, led to the French defeat. Modern America, if we are to take the notion seriously that we are in a bitter and intractable struggle against ruthless enemies, might take heed and pay a little more interest in knowing why they are our enemies. Bloch was apprehended and executed by the Nazis in 1944. His prescient warning lives on.
(The title is a play on the Fifth Element and the catchphrase by Chris Tucker's character.)
Hearing from the Florida Supreme Court about their heroes got me thinking about some of mine. Marc Bloch is one of my personal heroes. A Frenchman and fighter in the Resistance in World War II, Bloch was hardly an ordinary example of either. But, I believe that he would like to be described first and foremost that way. An academic, he was one of the most prominent members of the French Annales school of medieval history and a captain in the French Army. He was also a Jew and there is some evidence that he suffered discrimination in Dreyfus Affair era France. Yet Bloch never allowed this discrimination to diminish his patriotism for France. Part of the French Army during its disastrous defeat by the Nazis, Bloch observed first hand its failure to adapt to the challenges presented by the Nazi assault. When French positions were overrun, they followed a standard retreat and regroup protocol. But the protocol was not designed to take into account the then shocking speed of the Nazi blitzkrieg. So the French were never able to regroup. Instead of concentrating their efforts at one point against the Nazis, the French tried to defend every hamlet. Finally, the French were too slow to turn to unconventional warfare to defeat the Nazis. In his book Strange Defeat, written between 1941 and 1944, Bloch indicted all of these factors, but pointed to a more general problem. Problems in French society led to the defeat, principally a tendency to compartmentalize thought and avoid critical analysis. This failure of imagination, as much as any disparity in weapons and tactics, led to the French defeat. Modern America, if we are to take the notion seriously that we are in a bitter and intractable struggle against ruthless enemies, might take heed and pay a little more interest in knowing why they are our enemies. Bloch was apprehended and executed by the Nazis in 1944. His prescient warning lives on.
(The title is a play on the Fifth Element and the catchphrase by Chris Tucker's character.)
Sunday, August 13, 2006
Terror in perspective
Great post by Kung fu Monkey, pointing out the irony of all these right wing punks relentlessly pimping a tenuous connection between our current circumstances and WW2 and then, unlike the stiff upper lip of those days, letting themselves run around like pantywaists. They are really contemptible losers. All these oh so brave and dramatic guys. Er, but join the military? No thanks. My British Grandfather was 40 when World War 2 started and he joined the Home Guard. That's what you did. Miserable cowards like the modern 101st Fighting Keyboardists? Not so much.
Saturday, August 12, 2006
What a fascist moron
My standards for Republicans are generally low. If they can form coherent sentences and advance an intelligent argument, I usually swoon like a teenage girl in front of Elvis. For some reason, I used to think that Peter King, soon to be ex Congressman from New York, was in the fairly intelligent and reasonable Republican category. Well....we lost another one. Sigh. Via Crooks and Liars which tells us that King's replacement is going to be Dave Mejias, a Cuban-American Democrat (and therefore one of my favorite people ever). Check out King foam at the mouth:
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Blogspot addresses unblocked in China!
Very interesting! Until recently you couldn't see any .blogspot.com adddresses in China, but now, wa-la, they all appear to be viewable! Excitement. No more need for proxies. Liberalization? Result of Google's deal with China? (Google owns Blogger.)It's good times regardless.
