Mitt Romney dropped out of the US presidential race today. That pretty much guarantees that the next president will be one of John McCain, Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama.
This pretty much guarantees that my country’s leadership will cease accepting torture on 20 January, 2009!
That realization made me very, very happy.
Now we just have to get my fellow citizens to cease accpting torture…
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I recommend this interesting New York Times article on morality by Steven Pinker.
The first highlight is that there are about five main components to morality: don’t harm others, be fair, support your in-group, respect authority, and be clean/pure.
The second highlight, for me, is that liberals and conservatives place different weights on the values:
The ranking and placement of moral spheres also divides the cultures of liberals and conservatives in the United States. Many bones of contention, like homosexuality, atheism and one-parent families from the right, or racial imbalances, sweatshops and executive pay from the left, reflect different weightings of the spheres. In a large Web survey, Haidt found that liberals put a lopsided moral weight on harm and fairness while playing down group loyalty, authority and purity. Conservatives instead place a moderately high weight on all five. It’s not surprising that each side thinks it is driven by lofty ethical values and that the other side is base and unprincipled.
This passage reminds me of both George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant, which discusses different value weightings by liberals and conservatives, and The Seven Cultures of Capitalism, which posits that people have generally the same values but different value priorities. Those are also good books and worth a read.
Recently, there was a large judgment against the Westboro Baptist Church for protesting at the funeral of a Marine. Their protest was typical for them: linking homosexuality to everything that could possibly be wrong in the world.
WBC is completely, totally, completely repugnant to me, but I cannot support the judgment. If we start putting limits on who can say what where, that is a very scary slippery slope. Even if free speech by The Bad Guys is only limited a little, it means that The Good Guys will also have to face limits.
Suppose, for a second, that Robert Mugabe died and the US government put on a state funeral for him. Mugabe is just about as close as you can get to pure evil in my book, and it would be completely, totally inappropriate for the US government to celebrate his life. I would absolutely travel thousands of miles to protest at such a funeral. I would be incensed if I were not allowed to protest at his funeral.
Rights are so annoying. For them to work for you, you have to also let them work for the people who revolt you. 🙁
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There’s an interesting paper by Daniel J. Solove about security that refutes the “I’ve got nothing to hide” argument in defence of (or sometimes in downright favor of) the recent extra-legal government invasions of privacy. Early on, Solove distills the fundamental belief underlying the quips that people might make about privacy. I think this is a really great summary, so I want to repeat it:
Although there may be some cases in which the information might be sensitive or embarrassing to law-abiding citizens, the limited disclosure lessens the threat to privacy. Moreover, the security interest in detecting, investigating, and preventing terrorist attacks is very high and outweighs whatever minimal or moderate privacy interests law-abiding citizens may have in these particular pieces of information.
Solove makes various points about what privacy fundamentally is (a related group of things, not just disclosure of information). I’m not going to go into all of them. The strongest argument he makes is that invading privacy is, in my words, fundamentally abusive — that it sets up a grossly asymmetrical relationship between the government and its citizenry, with the government holding all the power.
He also notes that one bad part of the warrantless wiretapping is that by going outside the law, it broke a social contract with the citizenry. Basically, when the government writes law, it is sort of promising to its citizens that it is going to follow those laws.
He alluded to a slippery-slope argument, although IMHO he didn’t take it far enough. Therefore, I will: if the government doesn’t bother to follow wiretapping laws, what’s to stop it from ignoring laws against torturing its own citizens? There need to be laws about what the executive branch can and cannot do; there are a number of African countries that can demonstrate very keenly both what happens when the executive disregards laws and why we don’t want that.
One argument that he didn’t really make, and that I think should be shouted from the rooftops is the innocent do have something to fear from data gathering, specifically from data mining. Data mining is all about looking at statistical patterns and trends. Those can only give you correlations that lead to probabilities; they can tell you that people who rent Die Hard 3, read the Chicago Tribune regularly, and whose cars are white are more likely to be terrorists than the average. Thus the government might start rounding up people who match that profile. (Hey, anything in the name of security, right?)
Even if you believe that the US government would never never lock up people just for fitting a profile — this isn’t the Soviet Union, after all — it’s not hard to imagine that they might do more intensive surveillance. They might start following you around. Even if you have nothing to hide, it would probably freak you out to see big men in sunglasses following you around; that could cause great psychological harm. (And if you think you’d be fine with them following you around: how would you feel if your daughter told you she was scared because big men were following her around?)
Furthermore, innocence is in the eyes of the beholder. I have done a lot of gay-rights activism. There are some people who think that makes me spawn of Satan; what if they get to be in charge in a system where there are very loose controls on what a government is allowed to do “in the name of security”? I’m not sure my life would be entirely peaceful.
Maybe you aren’t worried because you aren’t in favor of gay rights. But no matter who you are or what you believe, there is something that you believe or do that other people think is really really wrong. Maybe you are Catholic. Maybe you are Protestant. Maybe you are atheist. Maybe you are into S&M. Maybe you have a hobby that burns fossil fuel. Maybe you believe in firm corporal discipline for your children. Maybe you are polygamous or polyamorous. Maybe you are a nudist. Something that you do or believe is going to be objectionable to others. Nobody is innocent in the eyes of all governments, so it’s worth your effort to make sure that your government respects the rights of its citizens. Of all its citizens.
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I am appalled that Bush commuted Libby’s sentence.
Some comments I’ve read from Republican supporters have said, essentially, “Teddy Kennedy got away with negligent homicide and Sandy Berger got away with stealing documents from the National Archive, so this is fair. Clinton also committed perjury.”
Teddy Kennedy’s case happened in another time, when drunk driving was nowhere near as criminalized as it is now. Note that Laura Bush also killed someone with a car, and no charges were filed. Note that George Bush appears to have had a number of issues with drunk driving. Times were different.
Sandy Berger did a bad thing, for which he was rightly convicted. He did not “get away with it”, and he did not get pardoned.
Clinton was spanked for lying about an affair with an intern, not about undermining national security. However, it is my understanding that his guilt hinges upon the meaning of the word “sex”. Do blowjobs count as “sex” or does “sex” only mean penis-inserted-into-vagina? I believe that there are a lot of people who would say the latter, especially in a formal context (like a court proceeding).
Finally, I thought Bush won the last election on “character”. Where is the character in saying “yeah, it’s wrong, but they did it too”?
I long for a President who holds him or her underlings to higher standards than his or her opponents did.
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I don’t have a TV, so am not current with a lot of popular North American culture.
I knew that “24” was a very popular series, but was shocked to hear that torture is shown in almost every episode and that it is portrayed as being effective. If I were more of a conspiracy-theorist, I would suspect the U.S. military-industrial complex of being behind “24”. Maybe this would explain why Americans seem distressingly comfortable with torture. The Republican candidates (absent the one who was actually tortured) endorse “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
Some say that in the “ticking time bomb” scenario, torture is a good idea. I can maybe agree with my government torturing in the following circumstances:
Point 1: The only way that you might be able to hide the torture is if you kill them after you are done torturing them. You then have to figure out where to dispose of the body so that nobody finds it. And, if you kill too many, people will figure it out anyway (witness the disappeared).
Point 1 is not possible. You cannot have a systemic policy that encourages torture — or even one that only weakly punishes subordinates who torture — and expect people to not find out about it.
Point 2: Oh come on. You can’t tell me that my government bureaucracy would never make a mistake?
Besides, they have demonstrated pretty convincingly that they can make mistakes — see the Maher Arer case. So Point 2 is not possible.
Point 3: I am weak, I admit it. It wouldn’t take that much beating to get me to talk. However, I also believe that sadists gravitate to the job of torturer. (If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t do a very good job.) I figure that it wouldn’t really matter what I said — that if they are going to hurt me they will either hurt me or stop with little regard for what I say. And if I believe that I will give bogus information, why should I believe that people with stronger convictions than I wouldn’t do an even better job of it?
So Point 3 is not possible.
Let’s review: I’m only willing for my government to use torture only if all three points hold, and I believe that none of the points can ever hold.
No torture. Ever. It’s a supremely bad idea.
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Yay!! Wired Magazine tells me that the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Ohio has overturned the Stored Communications Act!
Basically, the Stored Communications Act made it possible for the government to seize your email records directly from your ISP, without a warrant, and without ever telling you. While I understand that many people are all in favor of violating civil rights of guilty people, I am really really against violating the rights of innocent people, and any time you make it easy to violate the civil rights of guilty people, you pretty much guarantee that some innocent people’s rights will be violated as well.
I thus see this verdict as a Good Thing. Go EFF! Go ACLU!
I thought Ashcroft was completely without positive features, but there are reports that he not only refused to certify a domestic spying program, but that he refused again in intensive care and told off the people trying to take advantage of him in his weakened state.
Now, some changes were made to the domestic spying program, and he signed off on that one, so he’s still way up on my list of disfavored people, but I have to give him some credit for refusing something. I guess he’s only 98% bad.
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I saw Brokeback Mountain today with my beloved husband. It was a very well-done movie, certainly heart-wrenching, but I didn’t like its message.
I have met a number of people who think that being gay is all about the sex, and this movie could certainly reinforce that stereotype. I never saw the protagonists being emotionally intimate with each other, just physically intimate. I never saw them talk, I never saw them make any sort of commitment to each other. They seemed about as emotionally intimate with each other as they were with their wives, maybe less so.
My beloved husband disagrees with me. He thinks that the lack of emotional intimacy or commitment was just a reflection of how badly messed up they were as a result of society’s horribly ill treatment of gay people.
Regardless, the movie made me feel very lucky to be married to my beloved husband: lucky that society approves of our relationship and lucky that he communicates more and better than the protagonists in the film.
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I was talking with someone about our Governer, Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Recently, he was in a motorcycle accident, and it was discovered that he didn’t have a motorcycle license. I see a disturbing pattern. He seems to think that rules are for other people.
A “to hell with authority” attitude might play well in Hollywood, but I get really nervous about political leaders who don’t think the rules apply to them.
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Considering retirement.