Inactive Theory & Practice
Irfan Khawaja is Instructor of Philosophy at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Carrie-Ann Biondi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and of Humanities & Justice Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. The views they express here are their own.
Friday, September 30, 2005
Who's Your Daddy?
Evidently, if your name is Elian Gonzalez, the answer is Fidel Castro. Unfortunately, to borrow a line from Ayn Rand (cf. her essay "Of Living Death" in The Voice of Reason), this story is simply too evil to discuss any further.
Karen Hughes in Saudi Arabia: A Follow-Up
Three letters in this morning's Times offer an interesting glimpse into the strengths and weaknesses of liberal opinion on Karen Hughes's public diplomacy visit to the Middle East. Heading up the "weaknesses" column, Kathy Seal of Santa Monica, California has this to say:
I treasure the vote and the other rights and privileges that American women and the men supporting them have fought for and won. Yet I'm appalled that Karen P. Hughes, the American under secretary of state for public diplomacy, is telling Saudi women that they should want these same rights and privileges.I couldn't ask for a more facile exemplification of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of cultural relativism.
People wonder why some people in other countries "hate America." Isn't such arrogance an irritant? Why can't we let the women in other countries fight for their own democratic rights just as we did, rather than telling them what's good for them?
Has it ever occurred to the administration that unless we're invited to do so, we shouldn't be going around telling people what they should want?
Wednesday, September 28, 2005
Ms. Hughes Goes to Jidda
The farcical quality of American public diplomacy in the Middle East is nicely captured by this article describing Karen Hughes's recent efforts in Saudi Arabia. The sheer dishonesty of the Saudi government (and its collaborators) provides a nice foil for the sheer ineptitude of our own. This exchange tells the tale:
Ms. Hughes, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, is on her first trip to the Middle East. She seemed clearly taken aback as the women told her that just because they were not allowed to vote or drive that did not mean they were treated unfairly or imprisoned in their own homes.Talk about defining things down. So it's the great achievement of Saudi life that men and women are allowed to chit-chat. Alhamdulillah. But surely the question to be asked of Dr. Jambi is: when you're done "talking" to the other sex, are you free to have sex with the other sex? For that matter, can you talk to the same sex and have sex with them? Talk to me, doctor, about those "walls."
"We're not in any way barred from talking to the other sex," said Dr. Nada Jambi, a public health professor. "It's not an absolute wall."
An exponent of "American values" who can't put the relevant questions that "crudely" (i.e., straightforwardly) to a bunch of Saudi propaganda hacks is not worth having on the federal payroll, however angelically "mom-like" her demeanor. Moral of the story: play hard or stay home.
Tuesday, September 27, 2005
Epstein and Welch on Eminent Domain
Here are two libertarian criticisms of the Supreme Court's Kelo eminent domain decision, each of which scores some useful points, but each of which involves some instructive mistakes. Both the scored points and the mistakes go some way toward explaining how we've gotten to the current predicament.
This succinct piece by Richard Epstein admirably summarizes the case against Kelo-style eminent domain. But it raises a problematic question that Epstein neither acknowledges nor answers. Epstein is a utilitarian in ethics and perforce (whether he admits or not) committed to the principle that rights have to be violated on those occasions when their violation would better promote social utility. How can he defend strict property rights against what is essentially a textbook utilitarian argument for violating them? Like it or not, I don't think he can.
This essay by Matt Welch in Reason magazine makes a devastating case against the special pleading engaged in by Kelo's defenders--most prominently including The New York Times, a brazenly greedy beneficiary of eminent domain abuse.
Global Warming: Pro and Con
I don't happen to have a settled view on global warming, but there's an instructive contrast to be observed in the following three discussions of the topic.
Here is Nicholas Kristof in this morning's New York Times, arguing that global warming is an imminent threat that demands immediate action. [Sorry, I just noticed that The Times now requires a paying subscription for this material.]
Here is a book review by astrophysicist Sallie Baliunas in Reason magazine contesting that claim.
And here is a piece on the BBC News website pouring cold water (sorry) on the supposed causal connection between global warming and the (supposed) increased frequency of intense hurricanes.
Two observations worth making on this:
Sunday, September 25, 2005
Kofi Annan's 'Moral Innocence' vs. George Bush's 'Hard Bigotry'
I sometimes wonder whether I should rename this blog "Double-Standards Watch": I seem to spend more time on discussing them than anything else.
Consider in this light a Sept. 8 editorial in The New York Times discussing Paul Volcker's findings with respect to Kofi Annan's handling of the oil-for-food scandal:
The secretary general's failures were not ethical lapses, but they were significant. Neither Mr. Annan nor his top aides exercised meaningful oversight, for example, over the oil-for-food program. Nor did they formally report what they knew about kickbacks to the Security Council. They made only minimal efforts to discuss sanctions violations with Iraqi officials.
A gem of understatement, isn't it? Dereliction of duty, we are told, is not an "ethical lapse." It is but a morally-neutral failure--even when the official in question is being paid a hefty salary precisely "to exercise meaningful oversight" over a sanctions/inspections policy, and even when the policy in question involved matters of life, death, and liberty. Such magnanimity of language! Would that all of us might have such forgiving critics.
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Sex and the Madrasa
I'm gratified to see that this story has developed legs, thanks to Brian Murphy, a reporter at the Associated Press. I'm quoted (in intimidatingly august company) about three-quarters of the way down the page. The story was also covered in a short piece by Charles P. Freund in Reason magazine in April, picking up on my piece at the ISIS site the December before that.
P.S., Sept. 24: The madrasa story has made CNN.
To complete the quota of material on sexual violation in Pakistan, here's a related story in this morning's New York Times on President Musharraf's recent comments on some well-known rape cases--along with the well-deserved response to them.
More Galloway-Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens's latest riposte to George Galloway. To Hitchens's rhetorical question at the end ("we shall see..."), the most appropriate response would seem to be: but we already have.
This mealy-mouthed companion piece from The Telegraph is typical (and typically British) in its policy of splitting the difference between Hitchens and Galloway where there's no difference to be split. As for Oona King, the erstwhile MP for Bethnal Green (replaced by Galloway) whose views structure the article, I have yet to grasp the basis on which she claims that Galloway won the Baruch College debate against Hitchens "on points." But it may be over-generosity to suppose that she has one.
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
C. Ray Nagin: A Flood of Excuses for an Incompetent
Consider the following by-now standard issue liberal criticism of George Bush’s performance with respect to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. This is an early one, dated September 1, from the Village Voice.
Look back at Bush as the crisis gathered: He sits on his ranch. Over and over, his government issues dire warnings of the hurricane that is coming. The mayor of New Orleans starts the evacuation. Bush sits there, still on vacation. The storm strikes. Still he sits there. Then he acts. What does he do? He extends a helping hand to the oil industry, releasing some oil from the reserves and cutting pollution control. But the price of gas rises to even higher levels. The industry need more profits. Only in America can an industrial giant get away with saying there's a shortage when they're swimming in surplus. And Bush? For him, it's one more payoff to his campaign contributors.
And the people of New Orleans? They sit on the baking rooftops and sidewalks. No water. No food. No help.
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
C. Ray Nagin, Incompetent
It’s rare in the annals of public affairs to encounter anyone with the unique combination of bravado, arrogance, stupidity and incompetence that all effortlessly seem to cohere in the person of Mayor C. Ray Nagin of New Orleans. I don’t need to make this case at any length. He’s done the work for me.
The lead story in today’s New York Times reads: “Mayor Suspends Flow of People to New Orleans, Reversal After Pressure.” In short, the story tells us about how Nagin invited the citizens of New Orleans back into the deathtrap he made a significant contribution to creating, then reversed his view after the hated racist authorities in the federal government informed him of the likely consequences of his actions.
Let’s take this sequentially. First, as this unheralded article makes clear, Nagin failed his constituents in myriad ways that led to their deaths.
Then, as you may remember, he blamed everyone else for it.
Then, as today's lead story indicates, he invited the same constituents back to New Orleans.
Then,
Live from Firestone Library, Princeton University, I blog...
...more self-congratulatory rhetoric from Princeton University administrators about how they're conquering "grade inflation" despite the fact that no one at Princeton, at least in the humanities, has ever defined an objective cross-departmental grading rubric in the first place!
Behold the administrative bluff:
Nancy Malkiel, dean of the college and one of the architects of the plan to cut grade inflation, said that reducing the number of A's was important to give students a more accurate picture of how they were doing and to inspire them to work harder.
"If we're giving them the same grades for their very best work as for their good work," she said yesterday, "we're not giving them well-calibrated guidance about the difference between very good and best, and we're not challenging them to do their very best work."
Sunday, September 18, 2005
Robert George vs. the Right to Privacy
Princeton professor Robert George produces the following lame argument against the right to privacy on the Op-Ed page of today's New York Times:
The Supreme Court's "privacy jurisprudence" began in 1965, in Griswold v. Connecticut. By a vote of 7 to 2, the justices invalidated a state law forbidding the use of contraceptives by married couples....Lacking a textual or historical warrant for invalidating the law, Justice William O. Douglas, writing for the majority, claimed to find a "right of marital privacy" in "penumbras, formed by emanations" from a range of constitutional guarantees, none of which had anything to do with sexual conduct.Embarrassment? What's embarrassing is George's argument.
Douglas's quasi-metaphysical language elicited derision, and to this day remains an embarrassment to liberal constitutional jurisprudence. The justices would have done better to take the dissenting advice of Hugo Black, the court's leading civil libertarian. Black said that although he didn't like the law, the court was usurping the constitutional authority of legislatures by simply inventing a right that the nation's founders had not seen fit to enshrine.
Saturday, September 17, 2005
Katrina and Iraqi WMD: High Stakes, Low Certainty (continued)
One of the mantras of the anti-war position is that
"Iraq never threatened us." This oft-repeated claim involves an equivocation between "Iraq never made threats against us" and "Iraq never posed a threat to us." As it happens, it's false however you take it.
In one sense, the testimony I cited in the previous post should be
sufficient to convey the nature of the threat. Iraq was a rogue nation
twelve years in default of a binding obligation to demonstrate verified
disarmament. Its failure to do so put it, for twelve years, in a state
of war with the entire coalition that had fought the 1991 Gulf War.
Since we were at the head of that coalition, its failure to abide by
the terms of UN Resolution 687 was primarily an act of aggression
against us.
No amount of arguing about procedure--i.e., whether a second resolution
was required to go to war--can change this reality. The failure, and
certainly the deliberate failure, of a belligerent party to adhere to
the terms of a post-war treaty is ipso facto an act of
aggression, even if a second resolution had been required for a
military response. Aggression is evidence of a threat if anything is. Add the testimony of Kelly, Ekeus and
Butler to that--bearing in mind their stature as experts on Iraqi WMD--and the
case for an Iraqi threat is made, QED.
Katrina and Iraqi WMD: The High Stakes of an Uncertain Event (WMD Iceberg Post #3)
It’s become fashionable of late to blame the aftermath of Katrina on the use of National Guard troops in the Iraq war, and by implication the war itself. To do so, of course, one has to discredit the rationale for the war, and that means setting up and knocking down the usual strawmen. Paradoxical as it may seem to some, the strongest justification for the war was the disarmament rationale involving WMD. As a matter of course, that rationale has neither adequately been defended nor satisfactorily been rebutted.
Two basic mantras here are that “No WMD were found,” and “Iraq was never a threat to us,” both now so axiomatic that they furnish the grounds for the sort of casual throwaway sarcasm one sees in this post by Gene Healy at Liberty & Power. That makes it time to revisit Iraq WMD for the nth time squared. Doing so, oddly enough, allows us to achieve some clarity about the aftermath of Katrina, something I'll get to at the end. (This will take several posts.)
The Hitchens-Galloway Debate (part 2 of 2)
I finally got a chance to watch the Hitchens-Galloway debate on CSPAN. A few comments:
To say that Hitchens won the debate is a laughable understatement. For all forensic intents and purposes, Galloway never managed to show up at the debate at all: he neither managed to answer a single one of Hitchens’s challenges, nor managed to make a coherent, non-fallacious argument of his own. What he did instead was to leave yet another paper trail exposing his moral character and political agenda: a pathetic mélange of delusion, deceit, ignorance and unintended humor at his own expense. I felt sorry for him.
Wednesday, September 14, 2005
Explaining Katrina: Part 1 of a Multi-Part Series
Who is to blame for the aftermath of Katrina? One way of responding to that question is to evade it, as many Republicans have, by mumbling excuses about the "blame game." Another is to evade it, as President Bush has, by offering a Richard Clarke-like apology: i.e., a faux apology that involves no real admission of guilt, regret, error, or wrongdoing but is intended to sound as though it did. But the right way of responding to the question is to offer a causal explanation for what happened that identifies the role of moral agents in bringing the relevant events about.
Over the next few weeks, I'll be offering a multiple-part series on Katrina devoted to that task with this post serving as a sort of preface. Feel free to ask questions in the Comments section about any part of the overview; you needn't wait until I get to the detailed discussion of a given point. My aim here is to produce something relatively comprehensive in the way of explanation. Comment/criticism is integral to the process, so bring it on.
Monday, September 12, 2005
Hitchens vs. Galloway: The Rumble in the City (part 1 of 2)
I can't improve on Christopher Hitchens's advertisement for his forthcoming debate against George Galloway in New York. I merely record my support for Hitchens and contempt for Galloway.
P.S., Sept. 13. Hitchens identifies many of the hypocrisies indulged in by Galloway and his supporters, but he misses perhaps the biggest one: On September 24, Galloway is appearing alongside Cindy Sheehan in Washington, D.C. to protest the war. (Go to Galloway's website and scroll down to September 24.) So: the man who openly praises the Iraqi insurgency will make common cause with the woman whose son was killed by it. A tour de force of moral credibility.
Pardon me, but I've now lost whatever sympathy or respect I ever had for Cindy Sheehan by virtue of the loss of her son. If she can appear next to a person who openly takes the side of her son's killers, she is in effect publicly defecating on his grave. Enough with hiding behind the memory of the son she's dishonored and waving his bloody shirt in our faces. That pathetic gambit has simply run its course, and it's time for us to become immune to it, if we weren't before.
Hat-tip to Jesper Eklow, who first alerted me to the Hitchens-Galloway debate.
Cause, Consequence, Constraint and Katrina
"Theory and Practice" readers (all three of you) may be interested to read some challenges I've offered to libertarian-anarchist perspectives on the Katrina disaster. This one challenges Roderick Long's take on things, and this one challenges Common Sense's take. Both are on the "Liberty & Power" website here at HNN. (See the comments sections.)
Summary of my critique for philosophers: as I see it, libertarianism presupposes (whether covertly or overtly) a deontological conception of moral norms at odds with what I take to be defensibly teleological meta-ethics. Translation for non-philosophers: the libertarian hostility to government is overstated and ultimately incompatible with the requirements of human survival and flourishing.
In the case of Katrina, my challenge is this. Libertarian anarchists complain that the Katrina disaster was "caused by" the existence of the State (principally the federal government, but really the State as such). This criticism, however, is radically incomplete in the absence of a worked-out account of how things would have been better in the absence of the State. I so far have not seen an adequate libertarian-anarchist discussion of that topic.
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Of Cronies and Cupcakes
"I understand that politicians are wont to put cronies and cupcakes on the payroll," writes Maureen Dowd , apropos of FEMA.
"In just the way that editors are wont to put them on the Op-Ed pages of major newspapers?" I ask, apropos of Maureen Dowd.
Terrorism, Fiction and Islam
The New York Times seems to have overdosed recently on discussions of the relationship between terrorism and fiction. There are two major essays on the subject in the Book Review, a long Op-Ed on the subject by the novelist Chris Cleave in today's Week in Review, and a critical review (last week) of Salman Rushdie's new novel, Shalimar the Clown (on terrorism in Kashmir). It's all interesting and thoughtful material, and (contra V.S. Naipaul ) I generally applaud the idea of accessing the moral psychology of terrorism via fiction. (Though the Times panned Rushdie's novel, there is a highly favorable review of it by Christopher Hitchens in the September issue of The Atlantic. Unfortunately, it's not on line.)
As I've argued elsewhere , a major obstacle to understanding terrorism is the tendency to explain it third-personally by reference to "forces" (e.g., grievances, globalization, etc.) that deterministically "make" the terrorist do what he does. What's missing from such accounts is an appreciation of the first-person perspective by which the terrorist becomes a terrorist by the free exercise of his or her own will.
Friday, September 9, 2005
David Rieff on Muslim Hearts and Minds
In a previous entry , I drew attention to an insightful column about Muslim double-standards by the Pakistani journalist Irfan Husain. Husain's column, as I see it, is evidence that at a certain basic level, moderate Muslim intellectuals really do "get it" when it comes to the ideological (as opposed to military) component of the war on terrorism. A remarkably clueless essay by David Rieff in the Sept. 4 issue of the New York Times Magazine offers evidence that liberal American intellectuals really don't.
Tuesday, September 6, 2005
Law and Order: Baghdad and New Orleans
People out there seem to be coming up with Iraq-Katrina comparisons in force. I have a few of my own.
For about a year now, I’ve been reading news coverage full of contempt for the performance of the Iraqi police and military forces in the face of the Iraqi insurgency. This piece from The Washington Post is a case in point:
Frustrated U.S. soldiers question the Iraqis' courage, discipline and dedication and wonder whether they will ever be able to fight on their own, much less reach the U.S. military's goal of operating independently by the fall.Then there are the countless articles recounting what they describe as the abject “failures" of the Iraqi police. I presume that the term “spectacular failure” (used in the preceding article) is perfectly compatible with the requirements of journalistic objectivity--at least if we're talking about Iraq.
Saturday, September 3, 2005
The Double-Standards of the Muslim Ummah
Just about every day, I manage to read something somewhere about how American foreign policy is “inflaming” the Muslim world, and for that reason ought to be re-thought, revamped, or reversed to appease Muslim sentiment. It’s a relief in this context to read an essay by a distinguished Muslim journalist that suggests that the problem may lie with the incoherence and hypocrisy of Muslim sentiment itself:
Thousands demonstrated against the alleged desecration of the Holy Book at Guantanamo a few months ago. Several people were killed in the accompanying violence. Where are those zealots now? Why aren’t preachers at mosques demanding that the Saudi government halt their destructive plans?
Alas, these double standards are what now define the ummah. We have become completely neutered when it comes to criticizing other Muslims. I have often received e-mails from readers, accusing me of washing our dirty linen in public when I have written of the many problems afflicting the Islamic world. But these things need to be said out loud and often.
Double standards define the Muslim ummah. If so, what exactly is “Muslim sentiment” worth? What would count as appeasing its double-standards? And why would we feel obliged to?
Friday, September 2, 2005
The New Orleans Disaster: Our Leadership in Action
Excuse my tone (or don’t), but I can’t forbear from sharing some of my favorite soundbites from our political leadership on the New Orleans disaster. Here is our commander in chief sharing his thoughts , or as many thoughts as he can manage to muster and put into prepositional speech, about the cause of the disaster:
In an interview Thursday on "Good Morning America," President Bush said, "I don't think anyone anticipated the breach of the levees." He added, "Now we're having to deal with it, and will."As for the next obvious question—why didn’t anyone anticipate the breach of the levees?—don’t expect George W. Bush either to ask or to answer it. And don’t expect the posing or answering of such questions to be any part of what the president means by “dealing” with the disaster. A wager: the one respect in which Bush is obliged to “deal” with the disaster is the one respect in which he won’t. Neither thought nor leadership are in the man's repertoire--or vocabulary.
Some lapses may have occurred because of budget cuts. For example, Mr. Tolbert, the former FEMA official, said that "funding dried up" for follow-up to the 2004 Hurricane Pam exercise, cutting off work on plans to shelter thousands of survivors.
Shouldn't We All Be Getting Our Asses to New Orleans?
I’ve kept a discreet silence so far about events in New Orleans, in part because they’re too unstable to discuss right now, in part because they’re too horrible to contemplate. But in biting my tongue in silence, I find myself reverting repeatedly to the same angry set of thoughts. And I no longer find a point in holding back.
For the last two years, critics of the Iraq war have been suggesting that anyone in favor of the war is obliged to fight there. And if those in favor aren’t doing the fighting—comes the jeering question—has not the rationale for the war itself been falsified? A particularly eloquent example of this “argument” comes from my blog neighbor Mark LeVine, who finds it very clever to suggest that “we should all have gotten our asses to Iraq” --whence I derive my own clever title for the present post.
Let me borrow a page from LeVine's method of argumentation and now ask: should we, in compliance with LeVine’s “Principle,” all get our asses to New Orleans?
Recent Entries
- Angelo Codevilla's No Victory, No Peace: Introduction to a Symposium
- Saddam's Delusions--and the Delusions of "Realism"
- Sadiq al Azm on Islamism and Islam
- From Koenigsburg to The Hague: The Strange Case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Saudi Lingerie: Not Just for Men Anymore
- Christopher Hitchens on Ayaan Hirsi Ali; FGM Revisited
- For the Record: I Am Not an African-American
- Minimum Age Laws for Marriage: The Continuing Clausewitzian Assault on Sex Offenders
- Musab al Zarqawi: Holy Warrior, Terrorist, Loser
- Why Johnny Can't Navigate
Recent Comments
- Tonja Christine Fleischer on Why Johnny Can't Navigate
- Carrie-Ann Biondi on War Propaganda in the Public Schools
- Carrie-Ann Biondi on War Propaganda in the Public Schools
- Jeff Beam on War Propaganda in the Public Schools
- Nick Cullather on Saddam's Delusions--and the Delusions of "Realism"
- Jason Pappas on Angelo Codevilla's No Victory, No Peace: Introduction to a Symposium
- Kirill Rivkin on Looking for Anti-Semitism in All the Wrong Places
- Kirill Rivkin on From Koenigsburg to The Hague: The Strange Case of Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- Michael Edward Piston on Musab al Zarqawi: Holy Warrior, Terrorist, Loser
- Darren Michael Peterson on Sadiq al Azm on Islamism and Islam
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