That was awesome. Whatever it was, I agree with it too.
I'm with you, Larry. I've got no problem with people on the terrorist watch list being denied guns. We should, however, fix the list first, and then after it's fixed start acting like it means anything.
#42 Zander: you'll count his administration a success if he just locks up the last guy and his friends?
The point isn't to lock up "the last guy." I'd have been just as happy had Bush's own justice department done the job, and in that case it wouldn't have been a case of locking up "the last guy" at all.
"before he prosecutes people for starting it"
Just to be clear: When I repeatedly and clearly said that I wanted to see "the torturers" prosecuted, what I meant was that I wanted to see torturers prosecuted for the crime of ordering and committing acts of torture. If you want to critique that point of view, it's more honest to do so without fundamentally altering it first.
And of course you're right that Bush did some worthwhile things. I'd be embarrassed if I had, as you appear to suggest, put forward the idea that any worthwhile accomplishment redeems an otherwise-entirely-evil presidency.
Instead, of course, I wrote that restoring the rule of law is so important that I'd forgive a lack of any other achievement if a president were to pull it off.
Have we met, sir? Usually I don't get this kind of dismissive and uncharitable treatment from people until they know me better.
Feh. I find myself making excuses for Obama. I speculate about why he'd do what he's doing and then slip from there to defending it. Must guard against that.
Prosecuting the torturers would be messy and divisive and maybe even a little bloody.
I think a Lincoln would do it.
I'm awed by the decision Lincoln faced. It's easy in hindsight to say he did the right thing, but how difficult must it have been at the time?
Why not just let the South secede? They go their way, we go ours. When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them and all that.
I'm supposed to raise an Army, send it to attack people who were our countrymen just the day before, setting cousin against cousin? There'll be riots and assassination attempts. Partisans on each side will murder the others. The war will most likely leave hundreds of thousands dead before the question is settled, and it's not at all certain that we'll win.
Or I could give a pretty speech and just let it slide. Nobody dies. The terrible injustice of slavery will continue in the CSA, but the blood won't be on our hands anymore.
No President ever faced a more terrible dilemma, and he made the right call.
This business with prosecuting the torturers seems, by contrast, to be pretty easy. Prosecute the bastards, haul every shabby detail into the light, and let the chips fall where they may. Lincoln would have done it, and if he's somewhere watching, he's wondering why we think this is such a difficult decision.
The rule of law is important. It's more important than rescuing the economy, fixing health care, getting us out of Iraq, and whatever else is on Obama's agenda. If Obama restores the principle that no man, not even the President and those operating at his whim, are above the law--if he drives a stake through the heart of Bush's Imperial Presidency, cuts off its' head, and buries it with garlic stuffed in it's mouth--and achieves absolutely nothing else, I'll count his administration a huge success.
"Suppose a sitting president were to rob a bank, the classic tommygun and bandanna way. Would he get a pass on it since any prosecution would be seen as politically motivated?"
Doesn't seem likely, when you put it like that.
But it wouldn't be like that, if it happened. Might he get a pass on it, however, if for six years of his Administration his supporters reshaped their self-conception around support for armed robbery? They'd be encouraged and aided in this act of mental self-mutilation by a friendly news network and a string of helpful radio broadcasters.
They'd spend years mocking their "weak" and "soft" political opponents--whom they all hated to begin with--for their opportunistic and politically-motivated opposition to bank robbery. "Dillinger Derangement Syndrome," they might call it.
There's no crime so awful that people can't bring themselves to support it if it's perpetrated by a figure they admire and deplored by people they hate.
How is this President Obama's decision to make anyway? I'd like to think that where the Justice Department finds crime, it prosecutes crime, and permission from the Oval Office is neither necessary nor welcome.
Is the President playing some kind of long game where he downplays the threat of prosecution while setting in motion a chain of events that'll inevitably lead to prosecution anyway?
I'm thinking here of the way FDR often crab-walked toward his objectives, not quite leading but creating space and nudging public opinion in the direction he wanted it to go, then "following" the herd once he'd set it in motion.
Are these memos the last and most shocking bit of the last administration's dirty laundry that the new administration is going to reveal?
I'm also disappointed that he's not moving immediately to prosecute the torturers and their masters.
I wonder if it's because he thinks doing so will do even more damage than not.
Suppose they're prosecuted. This would be a just result, but about 40% of the country would be outraged, and no matter how blood-curdling the testimony at the resulting trials, they'd see it as pure partisan hackery. And then the next time Republicans win an election, and while it may be some time coming, they surely will sooner or later, they'll prosecute the leading figures of the preceding administration themselves on some pretext or other.
"Give me six lines written by the most honorable of men, and I will find an excuse in them to hang him"
It's true, of course, that these were monstrous crimes not likely to be repeated by whatever Democratic administration is followed by the next crop of Republicans, but they and their multitude of supporters won't see it that way. Vengeance always leads to escalation because we perceive the injuries we suffer far more keenly than those we inflict.
And so it becomes routine that the incoming administration jails the last one. One key to making Democracy work is that the consequences of losing an election can be borne. You soak the hit and try again in a few years. I suspect that the first administration that thinks it's likely to be jailed upon leaving office will never leave office.
Is Obama perhaps thinking along those lines? Would Casear have led his army across the Rubicon if he hadn't good cause to fear prosecution at the hands of the Pompeians?
What Marna said.
If you ask Americans what price they'd pay for freedom, you'll usually get answers like "Anything."
And yet, I fear that while my countrymen feel that any price is worth paying, too many imagine that the bill is settled with lavish defense spending and sacrificing a few thousand soldiers here and there.
As for me, I'm well aware that in an open society we run certain risks that subjects of a police state don't. Like Marna, I'm fine with that.
This is a really great thread. I loved the whole thing, and it became really special right around #57. I don't surface here very often, but I just wanted to offer some applause.
I'm so ashamed that I once, long ago, voted for that man.
Last time I was near an accident scene, it got much worse, fast.
It was a snowed-in highway. A minivan had struck a guardrail head-on. I don't know how he hit head-on the south end of a guardrail on the right-hand side of a southbound lane, but anything can happen on a snow-covered highway in Missouri.
Fortunately one of the first people to stop was some kind of EMT or paramedic--I don't know exactly what she was, all I remember was that she sent me to her truck to ask her friend for some piece of equipment that she needed. The driver of the minivan was unconscious, and lying on the shoulder next to the van. The woman with the first aid kit and one or two bystanders were tending to him somehow. I'd given the woman whatever it was she'd sent me to get, and was standing nearby, mostly just being useless.
I'm still fuzzy on the details of exactly what happened next.
There was another collision in the left lane. Way I remember it, it was someone rear-ending a car that had stopped to help, but why would a car be stopped to help in the left lane when all the action was on the right? It must've just hit someone who'd slowed down. All I remember for sure is one car hit another. And then within seconds another car hit them.
Very soon after that, another car managed to head-on the minivan that had been nose-in to the guardrail. That hit spun the minivan around about 180 degrees. I'm pretty sure it came to a stop right about where I'd last seen its' driver.
I was pretty close, I guess, because it hit the guy who was standing next to me and knocked him off the road and into the ditch. I didn't see the crash or anything. I was just there, probably talking and not saying anything very important, and then there's a noise, and there's a new wrecked car, and one of the old wrecked cars isn't where it used to be, and I can't see lying-on-the-shoulder guy anymore, and a guy is climbing out of the ditch and wondering where his glasses landed.
Ditch guy was shaken, but not badly hurt. I don't know what became of the minivan's driver. Official-looking people started showing up, and I drifted away along with the other amateurs.
I'll never forget that feeling as I watched the chaos spread. It felt like...free fall, I guess. Helpless, small, vulnerable, and not even a tiny bit in control.
He's definitely the real thing.
These different elements--the theist who feels himself to be badly outnumbered and cruelly oppressed, the creationist who feels unfairly excluded from the scientific debate just because he admits scriptural evidence, and the self-styped "common man" who burns with resentment at the condescension of mostly-imagined elites--combine to produce an angry, defensive, and bitter mind.
That kind of mind rots fast, and you can't miss the stink of it, nor can you fake it. People who try to parody it never manage to pack enough sneering hate into their writing. It might be that to create really good parody you have to, in some real way, love and understand the thing you're parodying. (Did Christopher Guest say something like that?) That kind of empathy might allow you to imagine what it is to love what someone else loves, but can a person capable of that kind of empathy imagine what it is to hate what someone else hates?
Here's what convinced me he's for real:
"You DEMAND it of creationists. Be willing to provide it. Put your money (actually, MY stolen tax money) where your big mouth is."
Oh yeah. He's for real. There's two resentments dressed with a sneer.
"And don't even get me started on Mass(church service) in Latin when nobody but lawyers/doctors speak it."
This is new to me. Has anyone else ever seen this before? I've never seen anti-catholicism connected with resentment of educated professionals who are imagined to be speaking latin to one another. Is this a common theme in such circles, or is this a more or less original behavior from the subject in question? To my amateur eye, this looks like another convincing indicator of the genuine article. It's easy to parrot the other guy's usual talking points, but much harder to really get into their heads and invent new stuff that fits their worldview.
"I can't spare the AIDS research any more cash... it's all been stolen by the IRS to pay for abortions and evolution research."
Here, again, I detect the stink of the real thing. That's 100% authentic resentment-bitterness-hate.
If everybody died before puberty, you'd laugh at some idiot who proposed the changes we've observed. In Noah's day, before water and death covered the whole earth, shortening lifespans by a factor of ten, people routinely lived almost a thousand years. Funny how no evos ever jump on that, huh?
Oh hell yes. I've never met this guy, but I bet you I could pick him out of a police lineup nine times out of ten. He's so crazy I'll be able to see the demons in his eyes.
#342: I googled up a brief synopsis of Egan's Quarantine and that's not it.
Thanks very much, though, for taking time to think about my oddball question.
It was a short story. I might've found it while browsing the web. More likely it was anthologized in one of those "Year's Best Science Fiction" collections. I'm pretty sure I first read it at least 5 years ago.
What I remember of the story was that the nearest few stars had just...vanished. Someone noticed that the intervals between the disappearances corresponded directly to their distance from the Earth and predicted the disappearance of the next-nearest star on that basis.
If memory serves, the story begins with that person watching as this star vanishes right on schedule, and I think our POV character is a friend or child of that astronomer, observing from nearby.
There's a short story I'd like to find. I don't remember the title or the author.
All I remember are fragments of the story. Stars were vanishing. Had vanished, actually. Simultaneously. They appeared to vanish in order of their proximity to Earth, on account of the speed of light and all.
The point of view may have been an astronomer, or it may have been a friend (child?) of his.
It wasn't Clarke's "The Nine Billion Names of God."
The way I remember the opening scene, a kid who didn't understand what was going on was watching his dad. His dad had worked out what was going on and was watching for a particular star to blink out, which it did, right on schedule.
Anyone know what this was?
I'm missing something. If the count has flaws that the recount lacks, why do the count at all? How about we just begin with a recount?
hand on a jersey
a flag flies, a whistle blows
pass interference
"I think the Icelander's story may very well be bs"
Indeed. Also, I hear she has granite countertops.
I think I fumbled the point I was clumsily trying to make, which was:
The very same people who say "hey man, don't blame cops for treating all people with suspicion, there's some crazy ones out there" are baffled when people view all cops with suspicion because there are a few crazy ones out there.
It's not a mystery, and it's perfectly reasonable.
I hear ya, Bruce. As a citizen who occasionally deals with cops, I find the stories my friends in Law Enforcement tell to be otherworldly. People attacking officers? Shootouts at traffic stops? Maybe there's a few crazies out there, but the vast majority of us are just trying to get through our day without getting in a gunfight with anyone. Why does LE have to treat all of us with suspicion just because of a few bad apples?
#105 Keir: "I am saying that, contrary to the Patrick and Laertes position, not all schemes which reward people for doing the right thing are `clearly grotesque', or `authoritarian'."
That's a pretty dishonest rendering of my actual position, as clearly presented in this tread.
I assume that this was an accident, and that you didn't mean to erect such a shabby straw man. Perhaps I should more clearly explain my position.
It's annoying and patronizing to give such trivial rewards for such trivial reasons. An award for "not speeding" is a trophy for "particpation." There's no connection at all between honoring people for serious achievements and handing out trinkets to anyone who can fog a mirror.
To annoying and patronizing we add authoritarian when it's authority figures doing it. The ability to force people to drop whatever the hell they were doing and pull over isn't a toy. That's serious power, and it should be used only for serious reasons. To use it so frivolously implies that the actual purpose is the exercise of authority itself.
I return again to the analogy of the security guard at one's office building. Imagine if he were to leave his post and tour the office, stopping at each work station to praise the employees for showing up on time that morning. When challenged about it, he's surely protest that there's nothing wrong with praising people. No reasonable person would have any trouble discerning his actual motives. No doubt he's making the DeNiro "eyes on you" gesture at people behind their backs as they pass.
Short version: If you hold a banquet in my honor and award me the Medal of Freedom, I'll think your aim was to make me feel good. If you stop my car and hand me a cupcake because I wasn't speeding, I'll think your aim was to make you feel good.
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| 2009 | 9 |
| 2008 | 6 |
| 2007 | 26 |
| 2006 | 1 |
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