Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog

Violent suppression in Oaxaca (Wilson)

Events in Oaxaca have taken a turn for the worse (see here and here).  A brief summary:

In a state in Mexico with little money, and not much of that going to public services, teachers hold their annual strike for better wages and against the imposition of fees on children who go to school.

The state government is less tractable this year, and has police attack the teacher's encampment on the zocalo in Oaxaca.  The teachers, without guns, repel this attack.

A huge, loose network of popular groups pledge solidarity with the teachers, and the central demand of the movement - a demand supported by the majority of people in the state - becomes the resignation or removal of the corrupt governor.

At the same time, they begin setting up new forms of self-government, many directly based on or inspired by indigenous forms of local self-government, and creating a democratic coalition called the APPO, to push for broad changes in state and local government to begin respecting, and meeting the needs, of the population, which is majority indigenous and where many have long been excluded from exercising power and left in poverty.

The state government, while ceasing to function in almost all normal respects, wages a low-intensity dirty war against the rebellious population through police officers in plain clothes and, well, thugs. They kill at least thirteen people over the course of the half-year since the people's uprising began, and the government ceased to function (while the governor who precipitated the rebellion refuses to leave).  Meanwhile, the protesters, who have put up barricades in the city of Oaxaca to fend off these attacks, kill no one.

A central part of the struggle, from the start, is control of and access to information. The police destroyed the teacher's small mobile radio station in the initial attack, and student allies soon began broadcasting from a public university.  Supporters of the movement took over a number of government and commercial radio stations, and while state and private security forces have struck back and knocked some stations off the air, the movement is giving voice to a people long excluded from public conversation.

The thirteenth person that the ruling PRI-affiliated attackers kill is an independent, activist journalist from the United States, Brad Will of Indymedia.  Days later, the Mexican federal government sends militarized police into the state.  They do not go after the murderers, but instead use tanks and force to try to dislodge the nonviolent social movements from the city of Oaxaca.  At least one boy is killed by a federal police tear-gas canister.

This disaster has been going on for months, but only recently have a couple of reports shown up in the U.S. media (no doubt because the violent invasion has caused Mexican stocks and the peso to drop); as per usual the reporting (see this article by Mark Stevenson) is misleading in the extreme.  You know the routine by now.  First, follow the "he said she said" blueprint---in particular, for God's sake, don't explicitly contrast the number (in the dozens) of (relatively) wealthy elite bemoaning the lack of tourist income with the number (in the thousands) of protesters willing to put their lives on the line today for a decent and unharrassed life in the future.  Second, leave out crucial information---in particular, don't say who was responsible for the killing of Brad Will, which killing is being cited as grounds for "stopping the violence" by sending in the riot troops.  Third, last but not least, paint the protesters (appropriate subtext intact, of course) as crazed wackos, silly kids, and Dark Others on a tear:

The protests began as a teachers strike but quickly spiraled into chaos as anarchists, students and Indian groups seized the plaza and barricaded streets to demand Ruiz's ouster.

This video of the invasion tells a more accurate story.  Cast your eye upon the row upon row of Darth Vaderian riot police, inexorably marching down upon the unarmed and unresisting protestors, beating their shields with their clubs in unison and backed up by a row of tank-like vehicles each as big as a two-story house.  We've seen those outfits before, of course, in Palestine, Seattle, Vancouver, Portland, and elsewhere where those in power have realized that when metal meets flesh, the laws of physics are typically on their side.

Among the more pathetic scenes are women pleading with the riot police ("No puedes massacre a su jente!"---"You can't massacre your people!").  These pleadings seemed to have little impact, perhaps because, following recent global trend, the "police" might well be mercenaries who could care less about the people they are violently oppressing.  Still, for the moment, the thugs at least are human. Imagine what protest will be like when their jobs get outsourced---in five, ten years?---to robots of war.

Elephant Crackup? (Edmundson)

Jessica Wilson's post, "I, Elephant," makes a poignant bookend to another recent story,"An Elephant Crackup?" about what the stresses of competition seem to be doing to human-pachyderm relations.

I, Elephant (Wilson)

Elephants pass the "mirror test" for self-awareness:

In a series of experiments, the elephants first explored the mirror -- reaching behind it with their trunks, kneeling before it and even trying to climb it -- gathering clues that the mirror image was just that, an image.  

That was followed by an eerie sequence in which the animals made slow, rhythmic movements while tracking their reflections. Then, like teenagers, they got hooked.

All three conducted oral self-exams. Maxine, a 35-year-old female, even used the tip of her trunk to get a better look inside her mouth. She also used her trunk to slowly pull her ear in front of the mirror so she could examine it -- "self-directed" behaviors the zookeepers had never seen before.

Moreover, one elephant, Happy, 34, passed the most difficult measure of self-recognition: the mark test. The researchers painted a white X on her left cheek, visible only in the mirror. Later, after moving in and out of view of the mirror, Happy stood directly before the reflective surface and touched the tip of her trunk to the mark repeatedly -- an act that, among other insights, requires an understanding that the mark is not on the mirror but on her body.

This is pretty extraordinary.  Besides bottle-nosed dolphins (who also use mirrors to perform self-examinations), elephants are the only non-apes to exhibit such behavior.

"There's too many philosophers in Washington" (Hellie)

So sez the Decider:

Max and I have a philosophy: We believe that you know how to spend your money far better than the federal government does.  (Applause.)  We believe that when you have more of your own money in your pocket to save, spend or invest, the economy benefits. (Applause.)  Democrats believe they can spend your money better than you can.  So over the past five years we have acted on our philosophy and passed the largest tax relief since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. (Applause.) In other words, we just didn't talk about philosophy -- there's too many philosophers in Washington -- we acted.  We got the job done.

Nice in a way to be a paradigm of the "reality-based".

 

PGR Preview: Philosophy of Law

Here are the results for the ratings in Philosophy of Law.  Faculties are grouped by their rounded mean score (5=distinguished, 4=strong, 3=good, 2=adequate), with the median and mode score listed afterwards in parentheses.

PHILOSOPHY OF LAW

Group 1 (1-2) (mean of 4.5) (median, mode)

New York University (5, 5)

Oxford University (4.5, 5)

Group 2 (3-11) (mean of 4.0) (median, mode)

Columbia University (4.5, 5)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick (4, 4)

University of California, Los Angeles (4, 4)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4, 4 & 4.5)

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (4, 4.5)

University of Pennsylvania (4, 4)

University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (4, 4)

University of Texas, Austin (4.5, 4.5)

University of Toronto (4, 4.5)

Group 3 (12-20) (mean of 3.5) (median, mode)

Arizona State University (3.5, 3.5 & 4)

Cambridge University (3, 4.5)

Georgetown University (3.5, 3.5 & 4.5)

University College London (3.5, 3.5 & 4)

University of California, Berkeley (4, 4 & 4.5)

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (3.75, 4)

University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (3, 2.5 & 4)

University of Southern California  (3.75, 4)

Yale University (4, 4)

Group 4 (21-32) (mean of 3.0) (median, mode)

Boston University (3, 3)

Duke University (3, 2 & 4)

Harvard University (3, 2.5 & 4)

Tri-University PhD Program (Canada) (3, 3.5)

University of Arizona (3, 3 & 3.5)

University of California, Davis (3.25, 3 & 4)

University of California, San Diego (3, 3)

University of Chicago (3, 3)

University of Notre Dame (3, 4)

University of Virginia (3.5, 3.5 & 4)

Washington University, St. Louis (3, 3.5)

York University, Toronto (3, 4)

Evaluators: Brian Bix (Minnesota), David Brink (UC San Diego), Ruth Chang (Rutgers/New Brunswick), Jules Coleman (Yale & Rutgers/New Brunswick), John Deigh (Texas), Gerald Dworkin (UC Davis), William Edmundson (Georgia State), John Gardner (Oxford), Alvin Goldman (Rutgers/New Brunswick), Leslie Green (York/Toronto & Texas), Mark Greenberg (UCLA), Richard Holton (MIT), Christopher Kutz (Berkeley), Brian Leiter (Texas), Liam Murphy (NYU), Dennis Patterson (Rutgers/Camden & New Brunswick), Gerald Postema (North Carolina), Arthur Ripstein (Toronto), A. John Simmons (Virginia), John Tasioulas (Oxford), W.J. Waluchow (McMaster).  (Note:  evaluators were not permitted to evaluate their own departments, or the department from which they earned their highest degree.)

Tricky Dick Redivivus (Edmundson)

Dick Cheney has long crusaded to restore the executive branch to its pre-Watergate glory.  He has overshot the mark so dramatically that it seemed that he might never be called to account (he is, after all, only the Vice-President), especially with henchmen like Scooter Libby ever-ready to take whatever heat that might threaten the endless winter of his steely resolve.  But the Vice President now finds himself in need of others to deny his having said and meant what he quite plainly said and meant about waterboarding.  (Don't count on hearing him say, "Your Vice-President is not a waterboarder"; his last word on the matter will likely remain: "I didn't say anything, he did.")  Keith DeRose offers a parable:

A town in the Old West had had some troubles with cattle rustlers.  Some of the townfolk wanted suspected rustlers to be hung or somehow executed – anything to keep them safe from the rustlers.  And it was widely known that Sheriff Gus’s men had hung one particularly notorious rustler, Dastardly Dan.  But some of the townfolk didn’t like the idea of executing rustlers....

Understandably, those who wanted rustlers to be executed if it could help make the town safer from rustling often avoided straightforward terms for what they thought should be done to rustlers.  So, for instance, one way of killing prisoners that had been used was by pushing them off of a very high cliff outside of town, so that they would die on the rocks below.  But some who thought it was fine to kill rustlers by pushing them off the cliff liked to talk about it in such euphemistic terms as this: “Well, if we have to make a few rustlers take a little fall to keep the town safe, we should do that.”  And, though some would say straightforward things like, “Hang rustlers, if it will help keep us safe,” others preferred to say things like: “If we have to make a few rustlers swing on a rope to keep the town safe, we should do that.” 

Which brings us to the interview.  A reporter from the town paper was allowed to interview the Deputy Sheriff, and this is how it went:

REPORTER: Deputy Dick, I've heard from a lot of readers -- that's what we do for a living, talk to good folks in the town every day -- and a lot of them have told me, “Please, let the Deputy Sheriff know that if takes making a few rustler swing from a rope, we’re all for it, if it makes the town safer from rustlers.”  And this debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

DEPUTY DICK: I do agree. And I think the rustler threat, for example, with respect to our ability to execute really bad rustlers like Dastardly Dan, that's been a very important tool that we've had to be able to secure the town. We need to be able to continue that.

REPORTER:  Would you agree a swing from a rope is a no-brainer if it can save the town from rustling?

DEPUTY DICK: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Deputy Sheriff "for execution." We don't execute. That's not what we're involved in. We live up to our promises to the town council and so forth. But the fact is, you can have a fairly robust punishment program without execution, and we need to be able to do that.

Well, of course, this only heightened the suspicion that Deputy Dick, at least, endorsed hanging prisoners, and was only saying things like “We don’t execute” because he meant to not be counting hanging as a form of execution.  When word got out about what Deputy Dick had said in his interview, some of Sheriff Gus’s men tried to claim that Deputy Dick hadn’t been talking about hanging at all.  But that was very hard to accept.  For one thing, they wouldn’t come out and say whether it was the Sheriff’s office now accepted that hanging is a form of execution.  But mostly, they had to contend with the words that were exchanged between the reporter and Deputy Dick.

Of course, there are ways of making someone swing on a rope that wouldn’t kill them.  In fact, many ways wouldn’t even harm them, and could even be rather pleasant.  But there had been a lot of discussion around town about the possibility of hanging rustlers, and in these debates many used “make them swing on a rope” as a euphemism for hanging them.  And nobody was talking about any other ways of making rustlers swing on a rope.  So it was quite clear that the readers who told the reporter to tell the Deputy to make some rustlers swing on a rope if it would help meant to be using “swing on a rope” as a euphemism for hanging them to death.  After all, what “debate” could the reporter be referring to, other than the debate over hanging rustlers, since no other ways of making them swing on a rope had been debated?  So when Deputy Dick responded positively to this suggestion, it was hard to believe he wasn’t talking about hanging rustlers.  And as if to remove any remaining reasonable doubt about the matter, Deputy Dick himself brought up Dastardly Dan in his response.  And Deputy Dick surely knew both that Dastardly Dan had been hung, and that also that it was widely known that Dan had been hung.  It was in the town’s papers, after all.  And he clearly seemed to be approving of what had been done to Dastardly Dan. 

So it was hard to understand how it could be that Deputy Dick wasn’t talking about hanging rustlers.  And, as I said, this only strengthened the suspicion that Deputy Dick, and perhaps others in the Sheriff’s office, meant to use “execute” in a very strange way that excluded hanging as a form of “execution.” 

And given that the very suspicion that had been strengthened by the interview was that the Sheriff’s office meant to use “execute” in a strange way that excluded many ways of putting prisoners to death, Sheriff Gus’s own response to the incident was particularly unhelpful.  Asked about Deputy Dick’s comments, Sheriff Gus simply said, "This town doesn't execute. We're not going to execute."

Meanwhile, the question of the hour in Washington, "What Was Cheney Thinking?" acknowledges that when it gets icy even the mighty can slip.

PGR Update

The draft of the entire PGR for 2006-08 has been delivered to Blackwell, and I hope it will be on-line some time during the week of November 6, or November 13 at the latest at the usual site.

Why I Am Not a Liberal... (Leiter)

...at least if this embarrassing moral waffling counts as liberalism.  I am sorry that people I rather like, and some of whom I know would have written a far better statement, signed on to this feeble statement of "principles" [sic] by Bruce Ackerman and Todd Gitlin.  How they got past the first substantive paragraph, I really do not know:

We have all opposed the Iraq war as illegal, unwise, and destructive of America's moral standing. This war fueled, and continues to fuel, jihadis whose commitment to horrific, unjustifiable violence was amply demonstrated by the September 11 attacks as well as the massacres in Spain, Indonesia, Tunisia, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Rather than making us safer, the Iraq war has endangered the common security of Americans and our allies.

So this is liberalism:  to oppose criminal wars of aggression against defenseless nations when they aren't in America's interests? 

That's a principle? 

How else, after all, to interpret Ackerman's and Gitlin's opposition to the war on the grounds that it is "unwise" and "destructive of America's moral standing" as anything other than saying it isn't in America's interests?  (And must liberals really be committed to silliness about America having "moral standing"?  Can't liberals be realistic enough to observe that America has pursued the strategic interests of ruling elites like every other nation in human history, with the more-or-less predictable consequences for peoples and countries that fell afoul of those interests?) 

About the closest these tepid "liberals" come to articulating a real, principled objection to the war of aggression against Iraq is to call it "illegal":  but even that is far too weak, given that lots of illegal actions are morally correct, and lots of legal actions morally reprehensible.  Why not "criminal"?  Why not "illegal and unjust"?  Why not "morally craven and indefensible"?  Those are words that evoke, in my mind at least, principled opposition to what will be recalled as one of the great international crimes at the dawn of the 21st century, as opposed to evoking opposition that is based on merely strategic and prudential considerations.

If the first waffling and unprincipled paragraph about the war of aggression against Iraq left any doubts about the actual point of this exercise--namely, like John Kerry's Presidential bid in 2004, to show that Democrats are tough guys too, capable of pandering to the self-interest of the middle classes and ruling elites--then we need only skip past the next (oddly placed) paragraph on Israel to come to the following declaration:

Make no mistake: We believe that the use of force can, at times, be justified. We supported the use of American force, together with our allies, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. But war must remain a last resort. The Bush administration's emphatic reliance on military intervention is illegitimate and counterproductive. It creates unnecessary enemies, degrades the national defense, distracts from actual dangers, and ignores the imperative necessity of building an international order that peacefully addresses the aspirations of rising powers in Asia and Latin America.

It is a pathetic "principled" objection to a war of aggression that, almost immediately, must be conjoined with an affirmation of the propriety of military force!  That qualification is all the more damning because, once again, the objection to slaughter and destruction is couched purely in prudential terms--it "creates unnecessary enemies, degrades the national defense, distracts from actual dangers" and so on.  That doesn't look at all like a rejection of military force except as a "last resort;" it looks like a rejection of military force whenever there might be imprudent consequences, otherwise not.  On this rendering of the debate, the dispute between "liberals" and Bush is not over principles at all, but simple strategic calculations. 

Ackerman and Gitlin then turn to a series of perfectly fine domestic policy talking points (they are well-summarized on the numbered list here), and even manage to articulate one actual principle ("every citizen is entitled by right to the elementary means to a good life," a principle to which I'm more confident Marxists, than liberals, are committed, but never mind), but they are soon back to revealing the moral bankruptcy of their liberalism:

We insist that America be defended vigorously against its real enemies -- the radical Islamists who organize to attack us. But security does not require torture or the rejection of basic guarantees of due process. To the contrary, this administration's lawless conduct and its violations of the Geneva Conventions only damage our moral standing and our ability to combat the appeals of violent ideologues.

In the first sentence, they immediately signal their acquiescence to the basic Bush fear-mongering central to the fake war on terror, only to offer, yet again, a series of tepid strategic objections to torture and adherence to the Geneva Conventions.   Why the hesitation to simply say that it is the height of moral depravity and craven villainy to defend torture and undermine the Geneva Conventions?  Why not say plainly that the U.S. is now run by war criminals, who, if there were an actual international legal system, would be facing an international tribunal at the Hague, like their soulmates in other nations who ran less powerful criminal enterprises and so could be brought to "justice"?  Why, in short, must any weight, at all, be given to "moral standing" and the "ability to combat the appeals of violent ideologues"? 

If this is liberalism, then it deserves to die.

Someone interested in liberalism and in principles, as opposed to political pandering, would do far better to look over this list of ten liberal principles by Geoffrey Stone from the University of Chicago Law School.  Among other things, Professor Stone actually states some principles which have something to do with the post-Enlightenment liberal tradition, rather than a series of policy wonk talking points that might have been put out by the Democratic National Committee. 

I hope some of my friends who signed Ackerman's and Gitlin's ironic confirmation of aspects of Tony Judt's critique (especially his observation that "America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end...[and] who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection") will rethink the value of signing on to such displays and have their names removed.

Friday Poem: "Poem of Rationalization"

Poem of Rationalization

Those who have not been murdered
by fascists
May yet get their turn

Time glides in its icy way
Toward a future much like the past
Until we find ourselves
Where others were 

Among those who murder

I rise in the morning
After an uncomfortable night
And tend to my needs

In the compartment of beginning
There is at first no room for others
So I do not know
The day’s body count
The unexpected news
The genuine surprises of October
Or of any day

Only after I have practiced
My ritual self-preservation
Do I revisit my guilt
More populous than loneliness
Less bearable
More shrill

How neatly we bifurcate our lives
Between our daily self-absorption
And our conscience

In children this is excusable
But we are not children
Though many among us
Are simple as children
But more fearful of light than dark

Truly I await in a powerless trance
The unfolding of horror
The touch of evil

I do my very small bit
As supplement to self-preservation

Secretly I deem it worthless

To feel without power
Is to be without power

The powerful have the confidence of money
Dark secrecy machines that kill
They practice the wizardry of fear
With laws that worship lawlessness
A swarm of lackeys garbed as acolytes
Form the vanguard of their fame
They know no shame

Had I nothing
I might risk everything
But I am too comfortable
To be reckless

I look to the dispossessed
To whom I paid no heed
To save me

To tear down the walls
To bring order out of disorder
Purpose out of despair

America
I seek a flag
That neither weeps nor bleeds

I await the uprising
My impotence prevents

You others whom I have ignored
Had I but made time for you
In the beginning
Ere day sank into dusk
And night began licking its lips

If only

10/20-10/26/06

Copyright 2006 by Maurice Leiter

Posted with permission

The Endless Winter (Edmundson)

In 1966, Bruce Brown released a movie titled The Endless Summer, which told the story of two guys scanning the globe to find the perfect spot to surfboard.  We don't know whether Dick Cheney has seen it, but forty years later, he's been scanning the globe to find the perfect spot to waterboard.  Bruce Brown has no regrets.  Nor Cheney:

Q [WDAY-Radio, Oct. 24]: I've had people call and say, please, let the Vice President know that if it takes dunking a terrorist in water, we're all for it, if it saves American lives....[T]his debate seems a little silly given the threat we face, would you agree?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: I do agree. And I think the terrorist threat, for example, with respect to our ability to interrogate high value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that's been a very important tool....

Q: Would you agree a dunk in water is a no-brainer if it can save lives?

THE VICE PRESIDENT: It's a no-brainer for me, but for a while there, I was criticized as being the Vice President 'for torture.' We don't torture....

But, as Walter Pincus of The Washington Post reported earlier this month, the US long ago acknowledged waterboarding to be just that: torture.  The US has also long known that torture by waterboarding yields information of dubious value:

A CIA interrogation training manual declassified 12 years ago, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963," outlined a procedure similar to waterboarding....The KUBARK manual was the product of more than a decade of research and testing, refining lessons learned from the Korean War, where U.S. airmen were subjected to a new type of "touchless torture" until they confessed to a bogus plan to use biological weapons against the North Koreans.

What's a little dunk in the water?  No brainer! (If you surf.)  Yes brainer! (If you waterboard.)

[Update, Oct. 27.]  White House spokesman Tony Snow was asked today about Cheney's admission that he had approved waterboarding:

"'You know as a matter of common sense that the vice president of the United States is not going to be talking about water boarding. Never would, never does, never will,'' Snow said. ''You think Dick Cheney's going to slip up on something like this?  No, come on.''

We don't torture, and we don't slip up.

[PS.  In the spirit of experimental moral philosophy, Keith DeRose, over at Generous Orthodoxy, reports on "An Hour--Plus a Few Minutes--of 'Little Ease'" (comments open)]

PGR Preview: Top Faculties in Selected Specialties

Here are the top-rated faculties in some of the specialties included in the 2006 surveys.  Schools are clustered based on their rouded mean score; the two numbers in parentheses that follow represent the faculty's median score and the mode.  Within the group, faculties are listed alphabetically.  I report below only those faculties in the top group ("Group 1" in each case, though the rounded mean for the top group varies with specialty).

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Group 1 (rounded mean of 4.5) (median, mode)

Massachussetts Institute of Technology (4.5, 5)

New York University (4.5, 5)

Oxford University (4.5, 5)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick (5, 5)

University of California, Los Angeles (4.5, 5)

University of Southern California (4.5, 5)

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Group 1 (1-3) (mean of 4.5) (median, mode)

Australian National University (4.5, 5)

New York University (4.5, 5)

Rutgers University, New Brunswick (5, 5)

PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION

Group 1 (1-2) (mean of 4.5) (median, mode)

Florida State University (4, 4)

University of California, Riverside (5, 5)

POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Group 1 (1-3) (mean of 4.5) (median, mode)

Harvard University (4, 4)

Oxford University (4.5, 5)

University of Arizona (4.5, 4)

MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY

Group 1 (1-3) (mean of 5.0) (median, mode)

Oxford University (5, 5)

Saint Louis University (4.75, 4.5 & 5)

University of Toronto (5, 5)

EARLY MODERN PHILOSOPHY:  18TH CENTURY (EXCLUDING KANT)

Group 1 (1-7) (mean of 4.0) (median, mode)

New York University (4.75, 5)

Oxford University (3.75, 3.5)

University of California, Berkeley (4, 4 & 4.5)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4, 4.5)

University of Pennsylvania (4, 4)

University of Southern California (4, 4)

University of Toronto (4, 3 & 4.5)

FEMINIST PHILOSOPHY

Group 1 (1-2) (mean of 4.5) (median, mode)

Birkbeck College, University of London (4.25, 4)

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4.5, 4.5 & 5)

PGR Preview: Top 15 U.S. Faculties Overall

Here are the 2006 survey results rating the top 15 faculties in the U.S.; the mean score follows in parentheses:

1.  New York University (4.8)

2.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (4.7)

3.  Princeton University (4.4)

3.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4.4)

5.  University of Pittsburgh (4.3)

6.  Stanford University (4.1)

7.  Harvard University (4.0)

7.  Massachussetts Institute of Technology (4.0)

7.  University of California, Los Angeles (4.0)

10. Columbia University (3.9)

10. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (3.9)

12. University of California, Berkeley (3.8)

13. University of Arizona (3.7)

13. University of Notre Dame (3.7)

13. University of Texas, Austin (3.7)

There is a drop-off of .2 in the raw score for the remainder of the top 20.

Texas Searching for Tenured (Full Prof or Assoc Prof) Political/Legal/Moral Philosopher This Year

This ad will appear in the November JFP, but we are happy to begin receiving applications now:

(Pending budgetary approval) The University of Texas at Austin seeks to make a tenured appointment (full or associate professor level) of a scholar of outstanding achievement in the areas of political, legal, or moral philosophy who can contribute to the University's interdisciplinary Program in Law & Philosophy. (More information on that program is here:  http://www.utexas.edu/law/academics/curriculum/philosophy/). Ph.D. required. Appointment to begin September 1, 2007. We have particular needs right now in political philosophy, though welcome applications from excellent candidates in any of the fields noted. Undergraduate and graduate teaching, typically two courses/semester, thesis supervision, usual advising and administrative responsibilities. Limited summer teaching available. EO/AAE. Appointment would be in the Department of Philosophy and possibly also the School of Law, depending on qualifications. Salary highly competitive.  Candidates should send a CV and the names of three referees to Professor Brian Leiter, Director of the Law & Philosophy Program, University of Texas, 727 East Dean Keeton Street, Austin, TX 78705. Applications must be postmarked by December 15, 2006. Candidates invited to campus for interviews will be contacted directly not later than January 26, 2007.

You may e-mail me if you have questions.

The Technology of Election Fraud (Leiter)

An informative essay here by a mathematician.  (Thanks to Ruchira Paul for the pointer.)

Strong Anti-War, Anti-Bush Statement by Pat Tillman's Brother (Leiter)

Pat Tillman was the American football player who, along with his brother, joined the army after 9/11, and was then killed (by "friendly" fire, as it turns out) in Afghanistan.  His brother survived his tour of duty.  He has a powerful statement against the Bush Administration's criminal war and behavior here; an excerpt:

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after.  It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military.  He spoke about the risks with signing the papers.  How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people.  How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition.  How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we got out. 

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is.  Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them.  Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military....

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes. 

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground. 

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.   

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense. 

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is....

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people.  So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Surprise! Is it October already? (Edmundson)

Feeling heat from Republican incumbents facing retirement from Congress in three weeks, the Bush administration has decided to present the nominal government in Baghdad with a "timetable"--of sorts.  "Stand up by this date or maybe we'll stand down."  All of the relevant dates, naturally, will not be finalized until after the second Tuesday in November but before the next Congress convenes in January.  With all the cynicism of Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam War, James Baker III gives the loyalists a last-minute talking point and in the same gesture hands the proverbially unwelcome punchbowl ornament to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker-apparent of the House of Representatives.  Robert Dreyfuss cautioned last month that

as with all things involving James Baker, there's a deeper political agenda at work.... "Baker is primarily motivated by his desire to avoid a war at home--that things will fall apart not on the battlefield but at home. So he wants a ceasefire in American politics," a member of one of the commission's working groups told me. Specifically, he said, if the Democrats win back one or both houses of Congress in November, they would unleash a series of investigative hearings on Iraq, the war on terrorism, and civil liberties that could fatally weaken the administration and remove the last props of political support for the war, setting the stage for a potential Republican electoral disaster in 2008....

If--and it's a very big if--Baker can forge a consensus plan on what to do about Iraq among the bigwigs on his commission, many of them leading foreign-policy figures in the Democratic Party, then the 2008 Democratic presidential nominee--whoever he (or she) is--will have a hard time dismissing the plan. And if the GOP nominee also embraces the plan, then the Iraq war would largely be off the table as a defining issue of the 2008 race--a potentially huge advantage for Republicans....

Baker said that to do something before the November 2006 elections would inevitably politicize the report, something that Baker desperately wants to avoid [sic].

A timetable for victory!  Stay the (corrected) course!  Not fast enough?  Make Mr. Baker's day, Speaker Pelosi: cut and run (faster)!

PGR Preview: Top 15 UK Faculties Based on Score by "Locals"

Here are the top 15 U.K. faculties based on the mean score as awarded only by other UK-based evaluators.

1.  Oxford University (4.7)

2.  Cambridge University (4.0)

2.  University of St. Andrews (4.0)

4.  University College London (3.9)

4.  University of Sheffield (3.9)

6.  Birkbeck College, University of London (3.7)

7.  King's College, London (3.6)

8.  London School of Economics (3.3)

8.  University of Leeds (3.3)

10. University of Bristol (3.2)

11. University of Nottingham (3.1)

11. University of Reading (3.1)

13. University of Edinburgh (3.0)

13. University of Warwick (3.0)

15. University of York (2.9)

In addition, the Joint Program between the University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling faculties received a mean score of 4.2 from other UK-based evaluators.

"The Beginning of the End of America" (Leiter)

Another strong television commentary by Keith Olbermann.

Friday Poem: "Tabula Rasa (The Raised Table)"

Tabula Rasa

       (The Raised Table)

An aspiring surrealist placed a table on a friendly cloud
It had a lemony aroma having received a coat of Pledge
    before elevation
It is a sign of the times he thought that the imagination
    must be polished to be appreciated
In earlier days he reminisced such a table would still have
    crumbs on it or drops of milk or saucy stains
But that is no longer thinkable in our cosmetic age

As he reflected the cloud began to drift with the breeze
    but the table retained its place
A small plane passed over it and an apple core discarded
    by the thoughtless pilot came to rest on the table
There goes the sheen fretted the surrealist more than ever
    convinced that life and art are incompatible

Were this reality virtual rather than actual such a mishap
    would have been avoided
Then and there he resolved to free himself from the unexpected
    by rejecting fantasy in favor of technology
Certainty has its own integrity he reasoned and purity has
    gained me nothing
Had he not recently been tenured this could not have happened

Coda

The table hangs above us yet
Some who see it point and comment suspecting some trick or
    crass promotion
But most who pass do not acknowledge it
Perhaps they truly do not see it but I think otherwise
They are simply too clever to believe in tables unsupported by
    clouds

12/6/95-12/6/96, 7/12/98
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission

Do the numbers count? (Edmundson)

Michael Thieren writes, for openDemocracy:

Two scientifically audited numbers today constitute the best available and most cited evidence quantifying Iraqi civilian deaths directly associated with the war in that country which began in March 2003. Each is generated by a credible and independent source...one gives a running total of 48,783 (as of 18 October 2006), the other gives 654,965 for the period March 2003 to July 2006.

What to think?  Therien observes:

These numbers differ in absolute terms largely because they are generated through two very different approaches, with their respective flaws. Methodologically, a passive compilation of fatal events sporadically communicated by the press has very little in common with a data-gathering method that is equivalent to the one used for public-opinion polls.

The larger tally is a snapshot estimate of casualties in the whole Iraqi population. It arrived as a flash in the dark, electrifying everyone. Immediately after its publication, 654,965 triggered both the dismissal chorus of the men in charge in Washington, London and Baghdad and the encouraging verdict of leading statistical experts (one of whom told ABC News: "I'll vouch for it 95%, which is as good as it gets in survey research").

By contrast, the 48,783 appears steadily but silently, making its no less tragic case more visibly each time it passes a rounded benchmark. The unfortunate element of the smaller tally is that its figures quickly pale when suddenly confronted with a figure thirteen times bigger.

The story these two numbers convey does not lie and should not be understood to lie in their respective size. Regardless of their absolute divergence and methodological approximations, each figure, when properly analysed and broken down, reveals the inhumane and intolerable story of approximately 27 million people trapped in escalating violence and revenge killings.

To get an idea of the significance of the lower figure, imagine the number of American civilians who would be dead now were they dying at the same rate.  (A: 500,000 over three years.)  The genocide going on in the Sudan spurred the same kind of arid dispute about the significance of numbers.  For the New York Times (May 11, 2005), Marc Lacey wrote:

Is the death toll between 60,000 and 160,000, as Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick said during a recent trip to the region? Or is it closer to the roughly 400,000 dead reported last week by the Coalition for International Justice, a Washington-based nongovernmental organization that was hired by the United States Agency for International Development to try to determine whether the killing amounts to genocide?

That was what Colin Powell, the former U.S. secretary of state, called the Darfur killings last year. But Zoellick avoided the issue this month and has recently accused advocacy groups of overstating the number of dead to force Washington to adopt much tougher policies against the Sudanese.

"Civil war" is a politer term than "genocide" but both can refer to the same reality--Kosovo, and Rwanda, for example.  While the occupying superpower in Iraq denies the reality of civil war, it forestalls the question: Is the occupation aggravating the genocide it has proven powerless to stop?  A superpower that doesn't "do body counts" cannot endlessly deny those who do. 

Meanwhile, the Bush Administration has broken with tabu and begun analogizing Iraq to Vietnam.  Eric Posner (Law, Chicago) suggests other analogies: Lebanon, Somalia.

Top 20 Faculties Across All "Theory of Value" Areas

The areas included here are:  Normative Ethics & Moral Psychology; Metaethics; Political Philosophy; Applied Ethics; Philosophy of Law; Philosophy of Art.  As with the other amalgamated rankings, remember that this measure favors large departments which can cover more areas, and that it also does not discriminate between the relative importance and prestige of the sub-fields.  The number in parentheses is the mean score across all the area included within theory of value.

1.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (4.2)
2.  Oxford University (4.0)
3.  Harvard University (3.8)
3.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.8)
5.  New York University (3.7)
6.  Princeton University (3.6)
6.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (3.6)
8.  University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (3.5)
8.  University of Toronto (3.5)
10. University of Arizona (3.3)
11. Cambridge University (3.2)

11.  University of California, Berkeley (3.2)

11. University of Chicago (3.2)

11. University of Texas, Austin (3.2)

15. Stanford University (3.1)

15. University of California, Los Angeles (3.1)

15. University of Maryland, College Park (3.1)

15. University of Pennsylvania (3.1)

19. Columbia University (3.0)

19. University College London (3.0)

19. Yale University (3.0)

Why has Bush bought 150 square miles in northern Paraguay? (Hellie)

Paraguay is a landlocked country in South America, with a population of 6 million. It's one of the least densely populated countries, and has a super-high Gini index. Back in the day, its economy was dominated by a small number of landlords, with big loads of the population squatting on the fringes of their huge estates. The Gini index (the standard measure of income inequality) is predictably high -- 56, by comparison the US is at 45, France at 32, Brazil at 59.

Sounds like a great place for disgraced dictators to hide out.

Apparently also the US has been planning to put up an air base near the Bolivian gas fields, near to Mariscal Estigarribia, close to the Brazilian and Bolivian borders.

Which of these facts best explains this intriguing news item?

An Argentine official regarded the intention of the George W. Bush family to settle on the Acuifero Guarani (Paraguay) as surprising, besides being a bad signal for the governments of the region.

Luis D Elia, undersecretary for the Social Habitat in the Argentine Federal Planning Ministry, issued a memo partially reproduced by digital INFOBAE.com, in which he spoke of the purchase by Bush of a 98,842-acre farm in northern Paraguay, between Brazil and Bolivia.

The news circulated Thursday in non-official sources in Asuncion, Paraguay.

D Elia considered this Bush step counterproductive for the regional power expressed by Presidents Nestor Kirchner, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez and Fidel Castro.

He said that "it is a bad signal that the Bush family is doing business with natural resources linked to the future of MERCOSUR."

The official pointed out that this situation could cause a hypothetical conflict of all the armies in the region, and called attention to the Bush family habit of associating business and politics.

New Philosophers' Carnival is...

...here.

PGR Preview: Overall Rankings for the UK

Here are the top 15 departments in the UK based on the "overall" score by all philosophers.  After the school name, in parentheses, is the mean score, and then the rank in 2004:

1.  Oxford University (4.7; 1)
2.  Cambridge University (3.7; 2)
3.  University of St. Andrews (3.6, 3)
4.  Birkbeck College, University of London (3.3, 6)
4.  University College London (3.3, 4)
6.  King's College, London (3.1, 5)
6.  University of Sheffield (3.1, 7)
8.  London School of Economics (2.8, 7)
9.  University of Bristol (2.6, 14)
9.  University of Edinburgh (2.6, 11)
9.  University of Leeds (2.6, 11)
9.  University of Nottingham (2.6, 13)
9.  University of Reading (2.6, 9)
14. University of Warwick (2.3, 10)
15. University of York (2.2, not in top 15)

One pleasing aspect of these results is that the changes all reflect actual events:  e.g., Susan Hurley's move from Warwick to Bristol; Birkbeck's hiring of Fraser MacBride and Ian Rumfitt; etc.

ADDENDUM:  I should note that the University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program faculty received a mean score of 3.8. 

PGR Preview: Mean Scores Across ALL "History of Philosophy" Areas

As with the other amalgmated ratings, this one favors large departments (which can cover more areas) and does not discriminate between the relative importance and prestige of sub-fields.  The areas amalgmated here are the mean scores in:  Ancient Philosophy; Medieval Philosophy; Early Modern Philosophy:  17th Century; Early Modern Philosophy:  18th Century (excluding Kant); Kant and German Idealism; 19th-Century Continental Philosophy After Hegel; History of Analytic Philosophy (including Wittgenstein); 20th-Century Continental Philosophy.

1.  Oxford Univeristy (3.9)

2.  University of Toronto (3.7)

3.  Cambridge University (3.5)

3.  Stanford University (3.5)

5.  University of Chicago (3.4)

5.  University of Notre Dame (3.4)

7.  University of California, Berkeley (3.1)

8.  Princeton University (3.0)

8.  University of Pennsylvania (3.0)

10. Columbia University (2.9)

10. New York University (2.9)

10. University of Pittsburgh (2.9)

10. University of Texas, Austin (2.9)

14. Brown University (2.8)

14. Georgetown University (2.8)

14. University of California, Irvine (2.8)

14. University of California, Los Angeles (2.8)

18. Boston University (2.6)

18. Emory University (2.6)

18. Harvard University (2.6)

18. McGill University (2.6)

18. University of California, Riverside (2.6)

18. University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (2.6)

18. Yale University (2.6)

Father (Philosopher)/Son (Economist) Discuss Happiness and the Market in New Book (Leiter)

The philosopher is Anthony Kenny; Ruchira Paul has the details.

SSHRC Grants to Philosophers in Canada

Richard Zach (Calgary) has the details.

Spread the word: doing it is good (Wilson)

Some women talk about their first time.

More memoirs here.

PGR Preview: Top Departments Across All Areas in the Philosophy of the Sciences and Mathematics

Here are the departments with the highest mean score across all the areas surveyed in the broad category of "Philosophy of the Sciences and Mathematics," meaning Philosophy of Science, Physics, Biology, Social Science, Cognitive Science, and Mathematics; as well as Mathematical Logic and Decision Theory/Rational Choice Theory/Game Theory.  This measure, again, favors large departments (which can cover more of these areas), and draws no distinctions between the relative prestige or importance of the sub-fields.

1.  University of California, Irvine (4.0)

2.  Columbia University (3.7)

2.  University of Pittsburgh (3.7)

4.  Oxford University (3.4)

4.  University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (3.4)

6.  Carnegie-Mellon University (3.1)

6.  Princeton University (3.1)

8.  Cambridge University (3.0)

8.  Harvard University (3.0)

8.  Indiana University, Bloomington (3.0)

8.  Stanford University (3.0)

8.  University of Toronto (3.0)

8.  University of Western Ontario (3.0)

14.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (2.9)

14.  University of Arizona (2.9)           

14.  University of Bristol (2.9)

14.  University of Notre Dame (2.9)

14.  University of Wisconsin, Madison (2.9)

19.  London School of Economics (2.8)

19.  University of California, San Diego (2.8)         

19.  University of Maryland, College Park (2.8)

19.  University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (2.8)

19.  Univeristy of Sydney (2.8)

       

Another PGR Preview: Top Departments Across M&E

This year, we set up the survey to calculate the mean for each faculty across all the areas of "metaphysics and epistemology" evaluated:  in other words, the mean score across philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophical logic, philosophy of action, and philosophy of religion. This measure obviously favors large departments (which can cover more areas) and does not discriminate between the relative importance and prestige of sub-fields within the metaphysics and epistemology category. Here are the top 20 departments across all these fields (with the mean score in parentheses):

1.  Oxford University (4.3)

2.  New York University (3.9)

2.  Rutgers University, New Brunswick (3.9)

4.  University of Notre Dame (3.8)

5.  University of Texas, Austin (3.5)

6.   Massachussetts Institute of Technology (3.4)

6.   Princeton University (3.4)

6.   University of St. Andrews/University of Stirling Joint Program (3.4)

9.  University of California, Los Angeles (3.3)

10. Stanford University (3.2)

10. University of Pittsburgh (3.2)

10. University of Southern California (3.2)

13. Cornell University (3.1)

13. University of California, Berkeley (3.1)

13. University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (3.1)

13. Yale University (3.1)

17. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (3.0)

18. City University of New York Graduate Center (2.9)

18. Columbia University (2.9)

18. Indiana University, Bloomington (2.9)

18. University of California, Riverside (2.9)

18. University of Massachussetts, Amherst (2.9)

Coming early next week:  the top 20 across all areas of History of Philosophy and Philosophy of the Sciences and Mathematics.

Friday Poem: "Rumors"

Rumors

That we love our children
That we abhor war
That the world ends at our borders
That  it is indeed flat
That we are surrounded by menaces
Which float beyond reach like butterflies
That we have weapons to destroy them
Beautiful as they may be
Beautiful as their offspring will be
Beautiful as the children we love
Even if they are not truly dangerous
As beauty may be dangerous As poetry
It is enough that we are dangerous
Our walls higher than the loft of butterflies
Swirling beyond our borders at the world's end

But we do we do do love our children
Who   strangely    resemble butterflies
Beautiful as these very butterflies
Who are beyond our reach
So beautiful we must shut out their cries

11/04, 12/3/04, 12/17/04, 1/4-1/5/05
Coypright 2004, 2005 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission

A Terror and a Hardness in This Creed (Edmundson)

E.M. Forster created a stir when, in Two Cheers for Democracy, he wrote, "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."  Forster's country was Great Britain, and the "Cambridge spies"--Burgess, MacLean, and Philby--were at the time much on the British mind.  It was easy to draw the inference that--given the relative attractiveness of friendship and Stalinism--it was misguided friendship that drew the traitors together.  The human, albeit fallen, thing to do was to cover for your chums, through thick and thin.

But Forster's point was subtler.  Here's what he wrote:

I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country. Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader.… It would not have shocked Dante, though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country, Rome. Probably one will not be asked to make such an agonizing choice. Still, there lies at the back of every creed something terrible and hard for which the worshipper may one day be required to suffer, and there is even a terror and a hardness in this creed of personal relationships, urbane and mild though it sounds.

Could the "terror and hardness in this creed of personal relationships" be any plainer than it is in stories like this, this and this?

600,000 war deaths in Iraq (Hellie)

Link

Blogging Hiatus...and Some PGR Highlights (Leiter)

You won't hear much from me over the next two weeks, as (in addition to everything else!) I'm now in the throes of processing the PGR data.  More than 260 philosophers completed the "overall" evaluations, and (though the numbers aren't tallied yet) it appears that perhaps 300 completed at least some portion of the surveys.  So there are a lot of numbers to crunch, transcribe, and put into the new PGR, as well as negotiations with the Advisory Board over how to place faculties that weren't in the survey but might otherwise be strong in various specialties.  I will try to post a couple of tidbits from the new PGR, as a prelude to the formal release of the new Report in early November.  Here, as a start, are the biggest upward movers in the "overall" survey from 2004:

U.S. Faculties Up at least 8 spots (many of these are ties with other departments)
University of Southern California from 24th to 16th
Yale University from 24th to 16th
University of Miami from 44th to 32nd
Johns Hopkins University from 44th to 35th

U.K. Faculties Up at least 2 spots (many of these are ties with other departments)
Birkbeck College, University of London from 6th to 4th
University of Bristol from 14th to 9th
University of Edinburgh from 11th to 9th
University of Leeds from 11th to 9th
University of Nottingham from 13th to 9th

There were less notable changes in Australasia and Canada, though there were some shifts there as well.

Some more PGR data later this week or early next week...

Texas Republican Party Accuses (!) Democrat of Being an Atheist (Leiter)

In case anyone had doubts about how benighted the United States is these days, the Texas Republican Party (the alleged President is a member, and a signatory to the Texas Party's platform by the way) wants to remind us:

Candidate for the Sixth Court of Appeals, Ben Franks, is reported to be a professed atheist and apparently believes the Bible is a “collection of myths.”

During debate over a plank in the State Democrat Platform, members of the Platform Committee debated dropping “God” from a sentence on the first page of the document. The plank stated: “we want a Texas where all people can fulfill their dreams and achieve their God-given potential.”

According to an article published in the El Paso Times, Ben Franks states: “I’m an atheist…”

All elected or appointed officials in Texas must take the oath prescribed by Art. XVI, Section 1(a) of the Texas Constitution:

"I,  _____   , do solemnly swear (or affirm), that I will faithfully execute the duties of the office of   _____  of the State of Texas, and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of this State, so help me God."

Should Franks be elected in November, one would have to conclude that he will hold true to his out of touch “atheist” belief system and ignore the laws and Constitution of Texas. Mr. Franks is a personal injury trial lawyer practicing in Texarkana, Texas and is the Democrat nominee for the 6th Court of Appeals.

I have heard many rather stupid things said about atheism, but "out of touch" is a first.    All of this, in any case, reminds me of a much earlier debate about the lunatic proposal by Justice Thomas to exempt the states from the Establishment Clause.

"Leiter Reports" Featured in THES (Leiter)

A London reader calls my attention to a recent article in the September 22 Times Higher Education Supplement (subscription access only, I'm afraid)

"If you want a quiet life, don't talk online about the Middle East," says Jon Pike [a philosopher at the Open University], chairman of the editorial board of Engage, a web-based journal set up in response to the Association of University Teachers' decision to institute an academic and cultural boycott of Israel but now a much broader political website and journal.

Pike, a lecturer in political philosophy at the Open University, has been repeatedly abused for his views published online in Engage and on the Guardian Unlimited website. He once received a letter calling him "a Zionist Nazi".

"In many ways, the web is an appalling forum for debate, particularly blogs, as they tend to foreground anonymous commentators. The anonymity means people are abusive, there are accusations of bad faith and a tendency for nasty rhetoric...."

[O]nline sites such as the Leiter Reports and Crooked Timber - run by professional American philosophers - get around the problem of "nasty rhetoric" by refusing to post anonymous comments....

I'm not sure who "runs" Crooked Timber, but it includes British as well as American philosophers, as well as an Australian economist, an Irish sociologist etc.

Texas Taliban Rebuffed (Again!) in Their Latest Effort to Destroy Public Education (Leiter)

The great folks at the National Center for Science Education have the details on the latest victory against the forces of backwardness.

Nuclear North Korea (Hellie)

The good folks at the National Security Network need to update their North Korea page:

Under President Bush significant ground has been lost. When he took office, North Korea was adhering to a negotiated freeze on plutonium and may have possessed enough plutonium for one nuclear device. Since then, North Korea may have more than quadrupled its stock of weapons-grade plutonium and breached all previous constraints on its program. Under the Bush administration, North Korea has expelled international nuclear inspectors, withdrawn from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and produced enough new weapons-grade plutonium for a number of nuclear weapons.

President Bush and Congress have largely neglected the issue of North Korea’s nuclear program, presiding over a significant increase in the threat to the United States and its allies. The administration has rejected any effort to negotiate a freeze and instead insisted upon immediate disarmament. The U.S. effort to create a multilateral negotiating group — known as the six party talks — has been a total failure. These nations have met only five times over four years and produced no significant results, and North Korea is now boycotting the discussions. The United States is seen by states in the region, including China and South Korea, as contributing to the standoff by having recently imposed increased measures to deter North Korean counterfeiting operations, a secondary but important concern.

. . . my jaw dropped when I read the NYTimes's language here:

But the explosion was also the product of more than two decades of diplomatic failure, spread over at least three presidencies. American spy satellites saw the North building a good-size nuclear reactor in the early 1980’s, and by the early 1990’s the C.I.A. estimated that the country could have one or two nuclear weapons. But a series of diplomatic efforts to “freeze” the nuclear program — including a 1994 accord signed with the Clinton administration — ultimately broke down, amid distrust and recriminations on both sides.

Three years ago, just as President Bush was sending American troops toward Iraq, the North threw out the few remaining weapons inspectors living at their nuclear complex in Yongbyon, and moved 8,000 nuclear fuel rods they had kept under lock and key.

Astounding that they're pre-emptively spreading blame to Clinton and being vague about the lines of causation. Clinton's "Agreed Framework" (in which Pyongyang pledged to "abandon all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs", and in return, Washington agreed that the United States and North Korea would "respect each other's sovereignty, exist peacefully together and take steps to normalize their relations") was as successful as might be hoped for -- NK's nuclear program was on hold during the reign of Clinton. If the Agreed Framework "ultimately broke down", the causation is clear. In August 2002, Bush proclaimed to Woodward "I loathe Kim Jong Il. I've got a visceral reaction to this guy", calling Kim a "pygmy" -- shades of "fuck Saddam, I'm taking him out" -- which could not have possibly been lost on Dear Leader. Bush bizarrely included NK in the "Axis of Evil", then "just as" he proceeded to invade one of the members of this "Axis" -- lo and behold!, no one could have anticipated that! -- NK decided bargaining is no longer in their interest.

Krugman was typically astute here, writing in early '03:

Moreover, there's every reason to take Mr. Bush's viscera seriously. Under his doctrine of pre-emption, the U.S. can attack countries it thinks might support terrorism, whether or not they have actually done so. And who decides whether we attack? Here's what Mr. Bush says: "You said we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you say that. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you." L'état, c'est moi.

So Mr. Bush thinks you're a bad guy — and that makes you a potential target, no matter what you do.

On the other hand, Mr. Bush hasn't gone after you yet, though you are much closer to developing weapons of mass destruction than Iraq. (You probably already have a couple.) And you ask yourself, why is Saddam Hussein first in line? He's no more a supporter of terrorism than you are: the Bush administration hasn't produced any evidence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection. Maybe the administration covets Iraq's oil reserves; but it's also notable that of the three members of the axis of evil, Iraq has by far the weakest military.

So you might be tempted to conclude that the Bush administration is big on denouncing evildoers, but that it can be deterred from actually attacking countries it denounces if it expects them to put up a serious fight. What was it Teddy Roosevelt said? Talk trash but carry a small stick?

Your own experience seems to confirm that conclusion. Last summer you were caught enriching uranium, which violates the spirit of your 1994 agreement with the Clinton administration. But the Bush administration, though ready to invade Iraq at the slightest hint of a nuclear weapons program, tried to play down the story, and its response — cutting off shipments of fuel oil — was no more than a rap on the knuckles. In fact, even now the Bush administration hasn't done what its predecessor did in 1994: send troops to the region and prepare for a military confrontation.

So here's how it probably looks from Pyongyang:

The Bush administration says you're evil. It won't offer you aid, even if you cancel your nuclear program, because that would be rewarding evil. It won't even promise not to attack you, because it believes it has a mission to destroy evil regimes, whether or not they actually pose any threat to the U.S. But for all its belligerence, the Bush administration seems willing to confront only regimes that are militarily weak.

The incentives for North Korea are clear. There's no point in playing nice — it will bring neither aid nor security. It needn't worry about American efforts to isolate it economically — North Korea hardly has any trade except with China, and China isn't cooperating. The best self-preservation strategy for Mr. Kim is to be dangerous. So while America is busy with Iraq, the North Koreans should cook up some plutonium and build themselves some bombs.

Again: What game does the Bush administration think it's playing?

What game does the NYTimes think it's playing? The first draft of this bit of history badly needs redrafting.

. . . Especially scary time for this considering these revelations about the Decider's current state of mind:

The President is mad, really, really mad according to the NY Daily News. He and Laura thought things were going well after they exploited "September the 11th" again. Now, between the Foley Republican child sex predator scandal and the Woodward book "State of Denial," W is having a melt-down:

Now, however, friends, aides and close political allies tell the Daily News Bush is furious with his own side for helping create a political downdraft that has blunted his momentum and endangered GOP prospects for keeping control of Congress next month.

Some of his anger is directed at former aides who helped Watergate journalist Bob Woodward paint a lurid portrait of a dysfunctional, chaotic administration in his new book, "State of Denial."

In the obsessively private Bush clan, talking out of school is the ultimate act of disloyalty, and Bush feels betrayed from within.

"He's ticked off big-time," said a well-informed source, "even if what they said was the truth."

The Daily News reports that "steam coming out of [Bush's] ears" over the Foley scandal.
Our president sounds like he is coming unglued.

Six-Month Moratorium on New Submissions to Nous and PPR (Leiter)

Ernest Sosa, who has recently moved from Brown to Rutgers and who is an editor of both Nous and Philosophy & Phenomenological Research, writes with the following important information:

This is to announce a six-month moratorium on submissions to Nous and to Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. During that period, each journal will move from paper to exclusively electronic operation. After the transition, all submissions accepted for consideration will be electronic, as will dealings with referees and later communications with submitting authors.

In combination, the consequent reduction in the now-long backlogs and the greater efficiency of online operation are expected to reduce greatly the deplorable time lags that philosophy journals presently suffer, both in disposition of submissions and also in span from acceptance to publication.

No submissions will be accepted after Wednesday, October 18. At the end of the six-month moratorium, both journals will accept only online submissions. When they are prepared to accept these, in mid-April, 2007, submission instructions will be announced at the journals' websites.

Reminder: PGR Surveys End Tomorrow (Monday) (Leiter)

The survey for the 2006-08 PGR will shut down on Monday, October 9 at 5 pm here in Texas--that would be 6 pm on the East Coast of the US, 3 pm on the West Coast, 11 pm (I think) in the UK, and some time Tuesday in Australia.  Please consider taking some time to complete the surveys, at least in your AOS between now and then.  My sincere thanks to the couple of hundred philosophers who have already submitted their evaluations.

Foley and the authoritarian mind (Hellie)

This post makes the case that the Foley revelations may mark a deep turning point for the GOP:

Red-state women are the ones who have to deal most intimately with overentitled authoritarian men who regard women as their property. They get to call cops who will decline to take reports or refer for prosecution; face down bosses who think that sexual access comes with the paycheck; and live their lives in the company of men -- even those in their own families who should know better -- who will do whatever it takes to convince themselves that "I know him -- he'd never do that" and besides, "she had it coming."

In this hostile environment, the only defense a woman has is bind herself to the contract that defines the conservative view of male-female relationships. She gives a man her devotion and submission. In return, he promises to provide for and protect her and her children -- even at the cost of his own life. That's the honor code "traditional families" live by, and the only safety women in authoritarian systems have.

These guys broke that contract. Conservative women put their trust in guys like Hastert. They gave him their devotion and support. According to the code, these guys were honor-bound to put themselves on the line for the women and children under their protective care. But when the bad guys came to town -- the very same bad guys they'd been specifically hollering about for decades as the number one reason that we all absolutely must submit to their protection -- our chicken-livered heroes were nowhere to be found.

"Simple Answers to Simple Questions" (Leiter)

Here.  If only the alleged President would read this kind of stuff...

Friday Poem: "Ecce Homo (again)"

Ecce Homo
    (again)

For a lark
I defend my life:
Explain away
Its blemishes
Blaming chance
And ignorance
Circumstance
Judgment

Greater fools than I
Listen solemnly
Believe my sham
And tsk and cluck
Faithfully in all
The right places

What a curse
Here among humans
With human feelings
Always eager
For rancid regret

They haven't a notion
Of what it all means
The absence of truth
Has left them bereft

Free today
Tomorrow in chains
Prodded like cattle
Doubly beset
By bubbly freedom
Dour fate

All of a piece
To their dizzy brains
One moment they did it
They didn't the next
No feeling of friction
Or of contradiction

1/28-3/17/97, 5/11/98
Copyright 1998 by Maurice Leiter
Posted with permission.

PGR Reminder: Only 4 days Left! (Leiter)

If you are one of the 450 lucky souls to have been nominated as an evaluator for this year's surveys, please take note that the survey is ending this coming Monday at 5 pm Central Standard Time in the U.S.  Over 200 philosophers have already completed portions of the survey, for which my sincere thanks!  I've heard from many more who are planning on doing it, and I hope they will by Monday.  If you are pressed for time, please consider at least scoring the faculties you know in your areas of specialization, as every "vote," as it were, counts for more there, given the more limited number of experts.  If you're encountering any technical difficulties with the survey, or have questions, please contact me.

The goal is still to get the full PGR for 2006-08 on-line by the first week of November.  I may preview some results here over the next couple of weeks.

Petittion Supporting Israeli Peace Talks with Syria (Leiter)

Philosopher Mark Sacks at the University of Essex writes:

I’ve never before sent out an invitation to sign an online petition, and I hope you will forgive what I know might be an unwelcome use of email.

Please read the letter below.  It is strongly worded, but if you agree with its content you can sign it online by following this link:  http://www.petitiononline.com/1l2a1r7r/ .  It was drafted by Larry Abramson, a leading Israeli artist, who is also a life-long friend whose political (and other) credentials are beyond doubt.  He asked me to send it to friends, and in response to the question I put to him has said that he would not want to limit signatures to Israeli citizens, given that conflict in the region is not merely a regional concern.

Do such petitions do any good?  It is hard to know.  One might hope that Israel, as a nation heir to the Enlightenment and cosmopolitan values, takes seriously educated opinion.  Please consider signing. 

UPDATE:  I'm adding another link to the petition, since some folks had trouble with the first one.

Philosophy Dissertations On-Line (Leiter)

My colleague Josh Dever is making them available here, where you can find information about how to submit yours.

More on the Military Dictatorship Act of 2006

"We are now officially living in a dictatorship."

"The New Enabling Act."

All of which reminds me, sadly, of this post from more than two years ago.

Our Nominal Democracy and Its End (Leiter)

It is obviously not news to honest observers that the United States has only had a nominal democracy for quite some time--through much of its history because of legal disenfranchisement of tens of millions, but in more recent decades in virtue of the system of legalized bribery that drives the electoral and legislative processes; unbridled gerrymandering by both parties which ensures that representatives choose their voters rather than voters choosing their representatives in one of the two branches of Congress; and a winner-take-all system which results in the two viable parties differing only on details, rarely on matters of substantive importance to the welfare of human beings here or abroad. 

Against the background of this sorry democratic farce, there were some of the trappings we associate with democratic and free societies--for example, a moderately independent judiciary and periodic legal protection--sometimes at the margins sometimes at the center--of dissent and disagreement.  More recently, the independence of the judiciary has been under attack, as we have had occasion to note before, but, to the best of our current knowledge, we have not yet had a resurgence of the "secret police" pursuing political dissidents, as we did during the J. Edgar Hoover era and, more recently, during the Kennedy Administration, when that great "liberal" Robert Kennedy used the Attorney General's office, and the FBI, for unrestrained political persecution. 

So the record had been mixed, even before Bush & his bestiary of madmen, but describing the U.S. as a nominally democratic society seemed to make some sense.  Yet even that status officially ended last week.  The legislation known as "the Military Commissions Act of 2006" (usefully described by Professor Balkin here)--approved by what might be called, euphemistically, "the supine Congress" and which is sure to be signed by the alleged President (on orders from the actual President, Dick Cheney)--is the stuff of totalitarian societies, pure and simple.  (As Stephen Griffin (Law, Tulane) observes, the law should really be called the "Military Dictatorship Act," because that is what it actually is, all the bullshit to one side.  Or as philosopher Matt Burstein wrote to me:  "these fuckers read Kafka and Orwell as a god-damned manual, not as a critique!")

The full fascist impact of this legislation won't be felt immediately, of course, but its contours are so clear as to admit of no whitewashing:  the Dear Leader, i.e., the executive, now has the right to disappear anyone, without having to answer to any other branch of government, except, perhaps, officials who serve at the pleasure of the executive.  Hitler and Stalin and Mao had versions of this power; so, too, now does George W. Bush.  If there is a pertinent difference, it is that the public culture in the U.S., at least currently, is still mildly resistant to capacious exercise of this power, at least against the proverbial "white folks" and other right-thinking and right-looking Americans.

Bill Edmundson has already touched on aspects of these developments, as has Jessica Wilson, but let us quote some other observers.  Bruce Ackerman (Law, Yale) sent me the following piece he wrote for the Los Angeles Times on September 28, 2006:

BURIED IN THE complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights.

This dangerous compromise not only authorizes the president to seize and hold terrorists who have fought against our troops "during an armed conflict," it also allows him to seize anybody who has "purposefully and materially supported hostilities against the United States." This grants the president enormous power over citizens and legal residents. They can be designated as enemy combatants if they have contributed money to a Middle Eastern charity, and they can be held indefinitely in a military prison.

Not to worry, say the bill's defenders. The president can't detain somebody who has given money innocently, just those who contributed to terrorists on purpose.

But other provisions of the bill call even this limitation into question. What is worse, if the federal courts support the president's initial detention decision, ordinary Americans would be required to defend themselves before a military tribunal without the constitutional guarantees provided in criminal trials.

Legal residents who aren't citizens are treated even more harshly. The bill entirely cuts off their access to federal habeas corpus, leaving them at the mercy of the president's suspicions.

(The respects in which the Military Dictatorship Act of 2006 does apply to citizens as well is usefully described, once again by Professor Balkin, here.)

Attorney Marty Lederman, one of our most experienced and knowledgeable practitioners in this area:

The most striking thing about the bill--perhaps more than all of its substantive provisions--is that in case after case (e.g., defining "unlawful enemy combatants"; deciding whether commissions must abide by statutory standards; defining less-than-"grave" breaches of Common Article 3; deciding what process detainees will receive in lieu of habeas; etc.) it would (i) delegate virtually unbridled discretion to the Executive; and (ii) then attempt to foreclose any meaningful judicial review of the President's decisions (no matter how far those decisions might stray from remaining legal limits, such as treaty obligations), and purport to eliminate any precedential effect of other legal authorities that might cabin the Executive's discretion (e.g., international interpretations of Geneva; prior court decisions concerning the courts-martial system).

In other words, the principal theme and effect of this legislation is to systematically abdicate and destroy existing legislative and judicial checks and balances.

Attorney Glenn Greenwald:

Issues of torture to the side (a grotesque qualification, I know), we are legalizing tyranny in the United States. Period. Primary responsibility for this fact lies with the authoritarian Bush administration and its sickeningly submissive loyalists in Congress. That is true enough. But there is no point in trying to obscure the fact that it's happening with the cowardly collusion of the Senate Democratic leadership, which quite likely could have stopped this travesty via filibuster if it chose to (it certainly could have tried).

And herewith Senator Feingold of Wisconsin, one of the minority who voted against fascism:

[T]his legislation would permit an individual to be convicted on the basis of coerced    testimony and hearsay, would not allow full judicial review of the conviction, and yet would allow someone convicted under these rules to be put to death.  That is simply unacceptable.  We would not stand for another country to try our citizens under those  rules, and we should not stand for our own government to do so, either.
      
Not only that, this legislation would deny detainees at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere-people who have been held for years but have not been tried or even charged with any crime-the ability to challenge their detention in court.  Among its many flaws, this is the most troubling-that the legislation seeks to suspend the Great Writ of habeas corpus....
      
Habeas corpus is a fundamental recognition that in America, the government does not have the power to detain people indefinitely and arbitrarily.  And that in America, the courts must have the power to review the legality of executive detention decisions....
      
As a group of retired judges wrote to Congress, habeas corpus "safeguards the most hallowed judicial role in our constitutional democracy--ensuring that no man is imprisoned unlawfully."
      
This bill would fundamentally alter that historical equation. Faced with an executive branch that has detained hundreds of people without trial for years now, it would eliminate the right of habeas corpus.
      
Under this legislation, some individuals, at the designation of the executive branch alone, could be picked up, even in the United States, and held indefinitely without trial and without any access whatsoever to the courts.  They would not be able to call upon the laws of our great nation to challenge their detention because they would have been put outside the reach of the law.         

That is unacceptable, and it almost surely violates our Constitution.  But that determination will take years of protracted litigation....
      
Some have suggested that terrorists who take up arms against this country should not be allowed to challenge their detention in court.  But that argument is circular--the writ of habeas allows those who might be mistakenly detained to challenge their detention in court, before a neutral decision-maker.  The alternative is to allow people to be detained indefinitely with no ability to argue that they are not, in fact, enemy combatants. Unless any of my colleagues can say with absolute certainty that everyone detained as an enemy combatant was correctly detained--and there is ample evidence to suggest that is not the case--then we should make sure that people can't simply be locked up forever, without court review, based on someone slapping a "terrorist" label on them.
      
There is another reason why we must not deprive detainees of habeas corpus, and that is the fact that the American system of government is supposed to set an example for the world, as a beacon of democracy.  And this provision will only serve to harm others' perception of our system of government.
      
A group of retired diplomats sent a very moving letter explaining their concerns about this habeas-stripping provision.  Here is what they said:  "To proclaim democratic government to the rest of the world as the supreme form of government at the very   moment we eliminate the most important avenue of relief from arbitrary governmental detention will not serve our interests in the larger world...."
      
They have reservations not because they sympathize with suspected terrorists.  Not because they are soft on national security.  Not because they don't understand the threat we face.  No.  They, and we in the Senate who support the Specter amendment, are concerned about this provision because we care about the      Constitution, because we care about the image that American presents to the world as we fight the terrorists.  Because we know that the writ of habeas corpus provides one of the most significant protections of human freedom against arbitrary government action ever created.  If we sacrifice it here, we will head down a road that history will judge harshly and our descendants will regret....      

I am also very concerned about the definition of unlawful enemy combatant that is included in this legislation, and about the corresponding issue of the jurisdiction of the military commissions.
      
This legislation has been justified as necessary to allow our government to prosecute Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other dangerous men recently transferred to Guantanamo Bay.  Yet if you look at the fine print of this legislation, it becomes clear that it is much, much broader than that.  It would permit trial by military commission not just for those accused of serious terrorist crimes, but also individuals, including legal permanent residents of this country, who are alleged to have "purposefully and materially supported hostilities" against the United States or its allies.
      
This is extremely broad, and key terms go undefined.  And by including hostilities not only against the United States but also against its allies, the bill allows the U.S. to hold and try by military commission individuals who have never engaged, directly or indirectly, in any action against the United States.
      
Not only that, but the bill would also define as an unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by military commission, anyone who "has been determined to be an unlawful enemy combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal or another competent tribunal established under the authority of the President or the Secretary of Defense."  This essentially grants a blank check to the executive branch to decide entirely on its own who can be tried by military commission.
      
If we are going to establish military commissions outside of our traditional military and civilian justice systems, at a minimum we should explicitly limit their application to the worst of the worst, those who pose a serious threat to our country.  We       shouldn't leave it up to just one branch of government to make these incredibly important decisions....
      
Even more disturbing is that the bill appears to permit individuals to be convicted, and even sentenced to death, on the basis of coerced testimony.  According to the legislation, statements obtained through cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as long as it was obtained prior to December 2005 when the McCain amendment       become law, would apparently be admissible in many instances in these military commissions.
      
Now, it is true that the bill would require the commission to find these statements have sufficient reliability and probative value.  But why would we go down this road of trying to convict people based on statements obtained through cruel, inhuman, or       degrading interrogation techniques?  Either we are a nation that stands against this type of cruelty and for the rule of law, or we are not.  We can't have it both ways.
      
The idea that coerced statements can be used as long as they were obtained long enough ago is appalling.  It seems to assume that there was a lack of clarity in the law prior to December 2005.  In fact, there was great clarity, until this Administration       decided to invent a narrow definition of torture that had never been used or accepted anywhere in the civilized world.  The McCain amendment was needed to get this Administration to return to the law.  It was a repudiation of the legal theories of the infamous Bybee memo, which the Administration even said it was withdrawing       once it was publicly revealed.  Its enactment should not now be used as a dividing point before which evidence obtained through cruel and inhuman treatment can be used in court.
      
At times of great adversity, the strength of a nation's convictions is tested and its true character revealed.  If we sacrifice or qualify our principles in the face of the tremendous challenge we face from terrorists who want to destroy America, we will be making a terrible mistake.  If we cloak cruel or degrading interrogations done in the name of American safety with euphemisms like "alternative techniques," if we create arbitrary dates for when differing degrees of morality will apply, we will have betrayed our principles and ourselves....
      
In closing let me do something I don't do very often--and that is quote John Ashcroft.  According to the New York Times, at a private meeting of high-level officials in 2003 about the military commission structure, then-Attorney General Ashcroft said:  "Timothy McVeigh was one of the worst killers in U.S. history.  But at least we had fair procedures for him."  How sad that this Congress would seek to pass legislation about which the same cannot be said.

Columnist Molly Ivins--right here in good 'ole Austin, Texas--cuts to the chase:

Fellow citizens, this bill throws out legal and moral restraints as the president deems it necessary—these are fundamental principles of basic decency, as well as law.

I’d like those supporting this evil bill to spare me one affliction: Do not, please, pretend to be shocked by the consequences of this legislation. And do not pretend to be shocked when the world begins comparing us to the Nazis.

Some hip-hoppers started comparing Bush's America to the Nazis and fascists some time ago; but what are we to say to them now?  That we only have one concentration camp in operation?  (At least one that we actually know about!)  That the dictatorial powers granted the executive are not race-specific?  All this seems to be true.  But it misses the actual point, as Molly Ivins, like everyone else who is awake, surely knows.  In free and democratic societies, my right and your right to remain outside the state's detention centers does not depend solely on the judgment of the state's executive.  It really is that simple. And the legislation passed last week eviscerates that right fully.  All that stands between us and the worst tyrannies in human history are the non-legal norms of the background public culture and the possibility that the courts may at some point strike down portions of this legislation.  How long these forces may provide protection from tyranny is hard to predict.  But in a genuinely democratic society, with robust commitment to the rule of law, we shouldn't have to engage in this guessing-game.

So the fake "war on terror" has now laid the foundation for a genuine totalitarian tyranny in the United States.   We are now fully on the path of what my colleague Kate Litvak aptly called "Stalinist creep-up": 

It's the return of 'troikas' -- detentions without court warrants, interrogations without assistance of counsel, trials by puppet courts, all the while the currently unincarcerated crowd believes that this could only happen to criminals.

The Democrats have largely been craven in their cowardice on these issues, but to the extent there is resistance, it is coming from them.  If they do not prevail decisively in the November elections, then I see little chance that democracy will be restored to the United States.

"Nietzsche Family Circus" (Leiter)

Here:  curious and mildly amusing.  (Thanks to Nicholas Daum for the pointer.)

In Memoriam: L. Jonathan Cohen (1923-2006)

The Guardian's informative obituary is here.