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Munich

I really quite liked Munich, but I was not entirely sure where the movie stood on the assassinations. Were they being condemned? Surely not completely and without qualification, but they weren’t exactly lauded as the most noble of things either. Eric Bana, surprisingly, did well conveying the ambiguity of the mission and his growing sense that he was doing something wrong. And it was a gutsy movie in that it portrayed the Palestinian cause sympathetically (while not pulling its punches on terrorism) and the Israelis as not beyond rebuke.    

    And I really do not know what to think about the assassinations done by the Israelis in response to Munich. On the one hand, there is obviously something worrisome about unilateral retributive actions done without trial or oversight. It is easy, and very tempting from my perspective, to simply find it unacceptable for those reasons. We might think it really necessary for Israel or USA to assassinate terrorist leaders, but what about somebody in Saudi  Arabia that thinks that George W. Bush a terrorist or some eco-nut who thinks something similar about Bill Gates? A part of me wants to say that anti-terrorism is more or less an organized crime issue at the tactical level and a political issue in the long-term.       

    But this strikes me as pretty unworkable. These individuals are immune from criminal prosecution and engage in actions and organization dedicated to the destruction of another state. With the development of WMD’s, terrorism is now an existential threat, and this is particularly true for small countries like Israel.  And in wartime we have no problems killing people engaged in that kind of activity by the truckload without trial. And, in fact, it seems that objecting to assassination during wartime is an odd bit of squeamishness that is pretty objectionable. It is okay to drop napalm on teenagers but not attack the fuckers that start the war? A part of me wants to say that the relationship that terrorists have with the state they terrorize is that of soldiers in an opposing army during a war.     

    The tempting answer, that dealing with terrorism is some amalgam of law enforcement and war, certainly has some kind of truth to it. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to help when dealing with assassination since it is kind of a black or white situation. In wartime, assassination seems permissible. In law enforcement, assassination is impermissible. And when we are dealing with a hybrid scenario, assassination is both permissible and impermissible?      Of course, arguments concerning “being on the safe side” cut both ways. To avoid injustice, we gotta have oversight and due process “to be on the safe side.” Then again, when it comes to cities going up in smoke, maybe we should assassinate quickly and secretly “to be on the safe side.”

    

I think the point of all of this rambling is that a discussion of what is domestically just can’t answer the question of responding to terrorism for the very simple reason that these terrorists are often immune from criminal prosecution because they are not in under the jurisdiction of that system. I am becoming more and more convinced that international justice can be neither entirely cosmopolitan nor entirely oriented towards nations. More on this later…

Classes, classes, classes

  I shall endeavor to post more regularly now, but I make no promises as I will be at the House of Really Slow Satellite Internet Connection until January 10th. After that, regular posting shall commence. So, it has been a pretty slow news day and I haven’t quite finished Smith’s The Moral Problem so my philosophical posting will have to hold off until I am done with that. What to do….I know, I’ll evaluate my classes.

     Semantics: An interesting class as I had no real experience with philosophy of language. It struck me as more as a kind of intellectual puzzle: a fascinating puzzle to spend one’s time on but not really all that important. Part of this feeling is, I think, an artifact of the class’s structure where we basically go through a bunch of deflationist accounts of the truth predicates. And since deflationists find the truth predicate comparatively unimportant, I can’t help but sometimes think “what’s the point?” Still, I really enjoyed the class, but I would have liked to have seen greater diversity of opinion. We were constantly hearing “Well most philosophers believe or do something else…” but we weren’t really taught what that meant in any great detail. Basically, we were told that Quine and Davidson rejected substantive theories of meaning as being hopelessly confused and unclear. We were then told that many, if not most, of the philosophers working on this stuff today worked on theories of meaning, but we weren't really introduced to anyone's work on the subject.    

    19th Century Philosophy: This class was pretty uneven. I enjoyed Kierkegaard for his craziness, and Mill and Marx are always worth reading. Still, I found most of the class frustrating. Professor Schacht’s "Hegel" is weird because what he says often plausible but it doesn’t sound like Hegel. Professor Schacht wants to remove the metaphysical element from Hegel entirely and turn him into a naturalist that is less skeptical about human beings than Nietzsche. While this is undoubtedly closer to a true account of reality, it isn’t Hegel and it makes Feuerbach’s and Marx’s criticisms seem really strange and overdrawn. The other discovery in the class was the sheer delight of reading Nietzsche. I just wish he was right, then he’d have the whole package. Ultimately, I did not find continental 19th century philosophy particularly useful, especially when compared to early modern philosophers like Kant and Hume though I would like to study more Nietzsche.    

    Ethics Seminar: This class was closest to my area of interest, but I found it oddly unsatisfying. Part of it is that Professor Moore’s unapologetically realist/intuitionist/naturalistic approach to ethics is very different from my own. On the one hand, Professor Moore is very sharp and knowledgeable, so listening to him is instructive and it is probably helpful for when I do interviews far down the road. On the other hand, you get the feeling that the responses are automatic, like the opening moves in a chess game between grandmasters. He has gone over this territory so often, and his positions are his positions, that he likes to reduce your objection to a previous one has heard and dealt with. Which is good if that was your objection but bad if it isn't.     

    All in all, I found that my classes suffered from a common ailment. They all focused overmuch on the specific research interests of the professor teaching them. This is, I suppose, to be expected and it isn’t too serious a criticism, but all the professors who taught the courses might have benefited from a wider discussion of opposing viewpoints. Something to keep in mind when I design my own course.    

    Intro to Ethics: TAing for this course was fun. And it was good to read some of the canonical ethics texts that I hadn’t before. My students were reasonably well engaged and we had some good discussions, but I think I could have improved when it came to commenting on papers. Further, the class may have benefited by switching practical issues and theory (with theory coming second instead of first) because then the students would see why we engage in theoretical discussions in the first place. One of the things they always emphasized in teacher school was you had to properly motivate what you were teaching for those who were being taught. I think that college is often light on that as people tend to say, "Well, you are in this class, of course you see why what I put on the syllabus is important." It doesn't work like that.    

    My Schedule for next semester (Spring 2006):        
        - Recent Developments in Ethics
        - Philosophy of Law and the State (Also grader)
        - Seminar: Plato’s Metaphysics     

    Auditing or sitting in:        
        - Philosophy of Art
         - Seminar: Semantics

Looks good. Classes only on Tuesday and Thursday. Looks even better.

Who really stole Christmas?

    The giggle-inducing efforts of Bill O'Reilly to blame secular Jews (the elders of Zion perhaps?) for the war on Christmas is ridiculous for several reasons. First of all, who the fuck cares?

     Second of all, the war was lost a long time ago...the secularists won. Bill O'Reilly reminds me of those Japanese soldiers in Iwo Jima that didn't surrender until the 1970s. Christmas hasn't been about Jesus for quite some time. If you did a poll concerning who was the more significant cultural figure during Christmas, Jesus or Santa Claus, who would win? Which is more important to Christmas, buying and receiving gifts or going to church to contemplate the birth of the "Saviour?" The holiday is already secular in all but name.

   The final irony is the identity of the perpetrators of this "war."  It wasn't the liberals, the progressives, or the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. It was business; capitalism at its finest. The murderer of Christmas religiousity was the Almighty Dollar, long live the new deity of America.

   Yet, who are these radical Christian conservatives allied with? The pro-business party! Should somebody tell them that they are sleeping with the enemy?

Intuition-mining on Munich (and a good link)

    So, I hope to see Spielberg's (spelling? I never get it right) Munich in the next few days. I have always been fascinated by the Mossad response to the terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team. Essentially, they hunted down every significant person involved in the planning or execution of the attack and assassinated them.

    So, my dear readers, what do you think about the policy of engaging in assassination of purported terrorist leaders if legal recourse isn't available? I am of several minds about it, and I wonder if my intuitions match others'.

    On a not very related topic (slow internet connection blarg), Patrick Coburn has a good analysis of the Iraqi elections. The country is going to hell in a handbasket, and the big winners of the election are not very nice people while others cry election fraud. American style democracy indeed...

Tinfoil hat time!

   

Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.

    Kevin Drum makes a very important point in that post: the British spy programs are "out in the open" and accountable in a sense that is not true of our own. Rad Geek asked me if I would be okay with warrantless surveillance if FISA didn't make such surveillance illegal.

    And the answer, which I hope was clear in my next post on the subject, is "No, I wouldn't be cool with it." I think this continuing use of the GWOT to justify increasing encroachments on our privacy is both unjust and unproductive. The PATRIOT Act is an abomination, and Russ Feingold has won a lot of points in my book for his opposition, to the point where I am considering a retraction of my decision not to vote for him on his wuss-out on the Roberts nomiation (luckily, Bush saved us by picking a stealth candidate who the Right torpedoed, and then he didn't pick a stealth candidate at all).

    But ultimately, the PATRIOT Act and the various other ways that the Bush Administration fudges on our privacy rights is small potatoes next to the issues that have been raised by these recent revelations about the NSA. Ultimately, a transparent but excessive spy program can be rolled back and public oversight can prevent its worst abuses. It's bad, but not utterly intolerable.  An all-encompassing secret spy program operating without oversight by an executive who has the right to break the law during "wartime" defined by that very executive is an easy recipe for dictatorship. That, as I said, is simply unacceptable in any kind of free state.

Intelligent Design not lookin so smart...

           Dover, PA judge has ruled ID an unconstitutional religious intrusion into the classroom and not a science. Doh! This looks like an unmitigated victory. Might even put it to rest so we can get angry at other things...

         P.S. The money shot:

"Those who disagree with our holding will likely mark it as the product of an activist judge. If so, they will have erred as this is manifestly not an activist Court.  Rather, this case came to us as the result of the activism of an ill-informed faction on a school board, aided by a national public interest law firm eager to find a constitutional test case on ID, who in combination drove the Board to adopt an imprudent and ultimately unconstitutional policy. The breathtaking inanity of the Board's decision is evident when considered against the factual backdrop which has now been fully revealed through this trial. The students, parents, and teachers of the Dover Area School District deserved better than to be dragged into this legal maelstrom, with its resulting utter waste of monetary and personal resources."

Did I just read that right?

            Kevin Drum has just granted the central premise of the Bush Administration: that a wartime President can violate US law and perform warrantless searches on American citizens:

"Consider a different war, for example. It's safe to say that whatever Bush's NSA program actually involves, no one would have batted an eyelash if FDR had approved a similar program during World War II. In other words, during a period of genuine, all-out war, it's a dead certainty that nearly everyone agrees that the president does have the power to order warrantless domestic wiretaps for purposes of gathering foreign intelligence. But aside from World War II, what else counts as wartime?"

           This, and the level of unchecked executive power that implies, has NOT been universally accepted. It is not accepted in Ex parte Milligan or Quirin.  Count me as part of the almost no one who would object to this. I see no reason why FDR couldn't go through some kind of FISA like court in order to obtain wiretaps. That's just absurd. Remember, it is the not the wire-tapping that I object to necessarily, it is the idea that the President cannot be checked by either the legislative or judicial branches during "wartime."

            And it makes the politics dicey. Imagine what Joe Sixpack is going to think, "The War on Terrorism isn't a real war? Typical liberal, not caring about America's security." Ugh...The debate should not be "This is not a 'real war' that could justify abuse of power," but rather, "This is an abuse of power...period." Now, I might even be willing to accept that searches could be down without warrants under emergency circumstances where there exists independent ex post facto oversight with serious consequences for abuse. But no such regime is in place. The point is that we should never had to simply accept the President's "word" when it comes to violating the rights of American citizens.

          I think that principle applies to foreigners in American custody too, but there ain't no Santa Claus and Elvis isn't cutting records anymore.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall joins the madness. Look, wartime presidents have broader powers, this is true, but it is not the case that there are no legal checks on that power. Stop granting what you don't need to grant...geez.

UPDATE II: One of the spy court judges resigns in protest. Good for him. I also heard that articles of censure that may become impeachment charges are already in the House of Representatives. Awesome, if true.

UPDATE III: Great post by Armando on the legal ins and outs of the Bush position.

Two links on the legality of warrantless wiretaps...

1. Hilzoy discusses the legal and constitutional dangers of the Bush Administration's interpretation of executive during wartime as infallible and essentially without check.
2. Glenn discusses the actually legal content of FISA and under what conditions could it be interpreted as justifying warrantless surveillance.

    The gist? Warrantless surveillance of American citizens is expressly forbidden by FISA and the Bush Administration is a threat to democracy.

Sounds about right to me. This is simply unacceptable behavior. It is beyond the ordinary outrage that normallly accompanies any semi-intelligent examination of the corruption and stupidity that are the defining characteristics of the current Administration. The President is arguing, essentially, that the Constitution is optional during wartime. And that "wartime" rules are under effect whenever the President says they are. This is no less subtle than any banana republic general who declares himself president for life.

    I just finished reading Farber's Lincoln's Constitution. It requires a remarkable personality and strength of character to maintain democracy in the face of threats to national security. And even Lincoln went overboard or was responsible for subordinates going overboard. Bush has neither the intelligence, the will, or even the desire to maintain democracy and protect the Constitution. They simply are not values he respects.

    He was proud when he announced that he authorized those wiretaps in violation of US law. Impeach him.

And you thought that the Super Bowl Shuffle is good...

I present to you the 1987 Calgary Flames in all their musical glory...