A Brief Rejoinder

After class on Tuesday:

Student:  Don’t you think we’re in a war of ideas?

Professor:  Then what’s with all the shooting?

Truth Claims…

  Taught my first quantitative methods course at MTSU Tuesday.  Tried to spend some time on the philosophy behind the scientific method and how the values we need to accept good scientific arguments look a lot like what delibeartive dmeocrats believe are democratic virtues.  Why is this such a big deal?  Well, I was on hour five of non-stop teaching so I didn’t do that great a job.  I talked about Popper and The Open Society and Its Enemies a little bit.  But, WaPo had an editorial today that make the case in a much more present and pressing situation.  What proof would those attacking Human Rigths Watch accept as proof that Human Rights Watch has made correct conclusions and they have made wrong ones?  It should be uncontroversial that "you’re biased" is indeed, as the editorialist notes, not a sufficient rebuttal. 

Investigating Crimes in Iraq

WaPo today is running a story on how infrequently American soldier’s who have allegedly committed criminal actions are being pursued with any seriousness.  I think it would be a bad idea to speculate on the guilt and innocence of any actions of any offense that is committed so far from our own view of things.  So I wish to make it clear that my concern (as is the concern of the article, I believe), is in regards to the system of justice we have set up in Iraq that is supposed to act as a way of determining the truth while protecting the innocent from false imprisonment and the stigma that comes with false accusation as much as possible.  This system, while insuring these protections as much as possible, is also supposed to do its job vigorously.

    If the criminal justice system we have set up to investigate and try potential crimes committed in Iraq does not do its job with its required diligence, then it is a grave error in the management of the war.  It is bad because it sends the institutional message that crime is permissible as long as the media does not get hold of it, and it sends this message to both our soldiers and to the Iraqi people the soldiers are supposed to be protecting.  If one is truly "for America", one wants her to be for justice.  Not always being just, but at least aspiring towards being just.  If some American soldiers commit crimes in Iraq, it can hardly be a surprise, our army is made up of people, the same as everyone else.  To send a large amount of people, thousands of people, anywhere in any capacity means that a few of them are likely to do something criminal.  It is difficult to see how that could be the fault of our government, as in such cases, the individuals in question are accountable for their own actions.  However, when the government does not pursue a course of action that fairly, but energetically, pursues the methods of investigation and prosecution that are supposed to hold such people accountable, then it has failed in one of its most important tasks. 

Pluto and Constitutional Interpretation

As Balkinzation slowly inches further and further from "Blog feed of the Week" towards "Blog Feed of the Century" (I’ll change it in a couple of days, I swear), I bring you today’s jewel.  A post written by Dr. Graber on what Pluto teaches us about Constitutional interpretation.  To steal a big nugget of nice writing:

The problem, in the case of Pluto, is that what
astronomers discovered was that the existing principles of astronomy
did not adequately describe astronomic phenomenon. Their discoveries
meant that they could determine whether Pluto was a planet only by
adjusting the broader principles determining what constituted a planet.
The same phenomenon is likely to occur in constitutional societies.
Constitutional developments do not simply create conditions under which
practices originally classified as constitutional must be reclassified
as unconstitutional (and vice versa), new conditions also challenge the
capacity of existing constitutional principles to provide adequate
criteria for classifying practices as constitutional or
unconstitutional. For example, constitutional principles that insist we
protect speech but not property do not resolve issues of campaign
finance, where the question is whether the regulation is of speech or
property.

I think that thinking of Constitutional design as "paradigm construction" is exactly right.  The framers created a system whereby they thought they’d created a near complete account of how to turn interests and impose boundaries for self-limitation.  It turned out, like with any description of a complex thing, there account was incomplete and problematic when real world challenges they did not know could exist managed to manifest themselves.  Ideally, such problems can be sorted out by legislatures, but I would guess that the problems are much more likely to make themselves manifest as legal disputes than political questions.  At which point, what else can we ask the Court to do but to take a stab at understanding these questions from a non-originalist position. 

I think that when Dr. Graber writes:

Constitutional theory, Pluto suggests, needs a
theory of political development which cannot simply be a theory that
relies on improved understandings of the general principles underlying
constitutional norms.

He is not saying that imporved understandings of general principles are never a good means to understand political development, but instead, that they are not an exclusive means of making things work, because some times these values run into "paradigm crises".    At least, I think that’s what he’s saying.  I will ask. 

The Biden Initiative

Senator Biden’s Op-Ed today in the Washington Post is one that has triggered many reactions as I have read it.  Today is supposed to be a long professional writing and course prep. day for me, so let me just write the following reactions in no particular order. 

• An electoral point:  Biden wants to be President, he’s a Democrat, and he’s not named Hillary.  He is apparently trying to spearhead a campaign based on "solving Iraq".  Frankly, as a citizen, I like it when politicians try to get my vote by using the strategy of trying to sovle big problems that concern me.
• Another electoral point: before the midterm elections, by putting out this plan, Biden has given the Democrats a chance to glom onto his proposal and reverse the accusations of "planlessness" (oh, how I wish it were a real word).  Biden in fact ends the essay with this very rhetorical tactic.   

• An Aspirational Point:  Federation?  Strcturing self-interest to maintain piece?  Trying to create a central institution that pays out more to all parties the more they are invested in it?  Sounds wonderful… and vaguely familiar… I’m not sure that it can actual fly the exact way Biden envisions it, but at least the aspirations are in the right place.
• An Aspirational Point:  Thank God finally someone finally seems to be acknowledging that money and self-interest might be harnessed in a region with resources that generate serious wealth to promote stability. 

• A Feasibility Point:  Does anyone know about projected depletion rates for Iraqi oil?  I wonder how long-term "making oil the glue that binds the country together" can actually work. 

• Another Feasibility Point:  Even if oil is not a long-term glue, if each region can agree to coexist and pursue their own prosperity, hopefully it is possible that we have taught all of the different regional factions a lesson: it is really costly to try to mees witht he political business of all of these different regional factions.  If you give the provinces autonomy and say to them:  "look, here’s your money, take it, and don’t attack your neighbors.  Trust us, it’s totally not worth it, I think that has a chance of working. 

• The plan needs international enforcement of free and fair elections in order to work, and also a free and independent media.  Making it in each regions interests to stay together is not enough because it just takes one charismatic leader to convince his people they are getting victimized in the deal to blow the whole thing up (I’m thinking Milosevic here).   

• There needs to be a substantial middle class that has property and material interests.  I would bet that people who cannot wait for "Halo3" to come out on Xbox360 are much less likely to become suicide bombers.  Ideally, these middle class interests can spread beyond the control of the Iraqi government, beyond the borders of the state, and, REALLY IDEALLY, into Israel.   If the new national motto of Iraq became, "War is hard, let’s go shopping", I’d call that major, and as of now, unimaginable progress. 

So yes, the Biden plan takes constructing and balancing interests very seriously.  The op-ed is not very detailed, so whether the plan takes into account all of the interests that need to be considered, well, we don’t know.  But the plan sets the right goals for us to achieve, and does so in ways that are conveyed in a more detailed manner and towards constitutional aspirations that have been historically more successful than any other plan that I have seen proposed.  I wouldn’t get out your "Biden for President" bumper stickers yet (I won’t ever because I don’t really like political parties or bumper stickers), but I think we can all hope that this moves the Iraq conversation towards demonstrable objectives that help Iraq actually have a stable, self-limiting govenrment.  While something like this might even succeed, before the neo-cons swoop in proclaim victory, we also need to remember the price tag in dollars and American lives. 

The Order of Things

A reminder to all who learn rigid classifcatory systems: 

While distinctions are of the utmost importance for advancing knowledge because they provide contrasts which aid in our perception of things, we should always remember that the distinctions are not the things themselves, but tools whose rigidity relates only to our perceptions of their effectiveness as tools. 

Thomas Kuhn’s The Copernican Revolution does a wonderful job of showing how these sorts of things are foten contested politically, and, if one needed a contemporary reminder, the almost comically absurd debate over Pluto’s "planetray status", which seemed as awkward for its self awareness as it continued as much as for its bizarrely drawn partisan lines, seems to illustrate this point. 

What we should remember from this is that there was disagreement, some people won and some people lost.  And this is a good thing.  Science needs to constantly rework its thoughts and descriptions and in so doing, come up with explanations that appear better than those that came before.  But the fact that some disagreed with this particular change, and this change is not unique for this, is that the dissent underscores uncertainty.  One might get away with saying that science is at its best when it recognizes that knowledge in description are always unceratin and continually in motion, and at its worst when it tries to claim an ironclad certainty it does not possess.  This is not to say that we should not proceed forward from what we have learned through legitimate processes of inquiry.  Instead, it is only to point out that while modern methods of accumulating knowledge is a car we should not hesitate to take out for a spin, it’s good to get out and kick the tires every once in a while. 

Photos of Nashville

As I foolishly decided to walk from the SATCO (San Antonio Taco Company for those out of the loop) on 21st to the Forthy Monkey on 12th the other day, I took some photographs along the way as a means of taking in being back in The Music City once again.  Here are some of the photos from around:

 

21st Avenue

Road off 21st Heading Home (By foot anyway, I live across Wedgewood from here)

Belmont

12th Avenue – Mirror on the right, Mafiaoza’s on the left. 

12th Avenue (Almost there!)

On Typepad’s Dictionary

I just spell-checked my last post (it’s make your own joke night here at C&G).  For "majoritarian", the dictionary suggested "Mauritanian".  Really?  Is it really more likely that someone would be writing on a blog about something "of or from the African nation Mauritania" than about things related to majorities? 

Should Hillary be Pilloried?

Wapo has an article on how Hillary Clinton is "holding up" the renewal of the Ryan White Act of 1990.  How so, well, the Congressional session is coming close to an end and the bill could quickly escape committee through acclamation if all are in favor.  Hillary is not.  The reason? 

But she said that the Ryan White measure as drafted "would have a
devastating impact on New York" and "unfairly shift millions of dollars
in funding away from New York and other states that have been hardest
hit by the epidemic, jeopardizing their ability to provide vital care
and treatment services."

Where will this money be going, according to WaPo? 

The current law’s formula is based on the number of patients with AIDS;
the new funding formula would, in effect, distribute funding based on
the number of patients with HIV or AIDS.

Voila!  The Downsian politician unmasked!  While Senator Clinton appears to have no problem redistributing income to cover public goods (and rightly so, in many cases), she is not inclined to redistribute goods away from her state to other states, even though a reasonable case could be made that it would better serve the public good. 

But Senator Clinton does not represent the whole public.  Nor should we expect her to.  She has stuck up for the interests of her own state’s welfare, and has in the process, probably pleased some important voting constituents in hers and other states with large urban centers in America.  Should, if the bill gets before both the Senate and the House, the bill be passed over Hillary’s objection?  Yes.  Does that imply that Hillary deserves to take some heat because her state’s interests do not coincide with fast-tracking a bill through committee (by the way, the bill is lagging further behind in the House)?  No. 

It might be wise to remember incidents like this if when Hillary runs for President.  She is no idealist committed to principles of justice.  She is also a cunning enough politician that we can probably expect her to avoid doing anything too upsetting to the majority of her constituents.  People talk about how "polarizing" Senator Clinton is, and as a brand name, poll data shows this description to be fitting.  But as a political operator, I wonder if she is too pragmatic for the idealists on the left and too majoritarian for the idealists on the right.  There’s probably enough left in the middle for her to still win, but the image of a politician who will do whatever to get and maintain office, while not necessarily such a bad democratic representative, does not play in campaigns with a whole lot of authenticity behind it. 

Saddam in Baghdad

I was actually reading through the first couple of chapters in Eichmann in Jerusalem last night and I had thought about how nice it would be to find one’s self in a position to cover a trial like that.  After reading about the Saddam Hussein trial in WaPo, I wonder if we are witnessing another major war crimes trial that might leave many clues about our times. 

Many have credited Saddam with being able to make a spectacle out of his trial and have chastised the US and Iraqi "government" for their inability to better control the situation.  But Saddam has a major unfair advantage:  it just might be that Saddam has not made his trial an absurdity as much as he has shed light on the obvious fact that it is an absurdity. 

The Saddam trial is the prosecution of a man by a government that barely counts as a state in any meaningful way and may not exist at all in any capacity in a few months time.  The backers of this new regime were of course the former backers of the regime led by Saddam himself.  They supplied him with money and weapons.  They looked the other way when bad things happened in Iraq and they were encouraging when chemical weapons started going off in Iranian positions during the Iran-Iraq War.  In some of the higher positions of power in the US government, the names and faces are the same in the new Anti-Saddam America as were part of the pro-Saddam America. 

If trials such as this one are meant to facilitate the brining out of the truth in any meaningful way, then one can only imagine the leverage Hussein might have in the forms of truths that the US government does not actually want exposed.  Saddam will likely play the "Milosevic defense", which turns the glare of the spotlight firmly on the accusers and points to why they themselves are no humanitarians either.  But the potential for high drama is much greater here because Saddam is holding a stronger hand than Milosevic did.  Milosevic was never on the inside wit ht he West the way Saddam was.  Serbia was never a military partner, never helped stabilize security in region of strategic importance to the United States, and never belonged to the mess of energy entanglements that come along with Oil and the Middle East. 

Between oil, universal human rights, the rule of law in failing puppet regime, problems of foreign policy transparency in democracies, war, and chemical weapons, this trial just might prove to be emblematic of a great many themes of interest for the observer looking for glimpses in what the history of things to come might look like and how the history of things past have managed to crystallize into our image of the world today.  It will be interesting to see if and if so, how, the trial actually fills in the details.