So what am I looking long into, then?

In the course of spending too much time with numbskulls at the VC re: Heidegger, I happened upon some more thoughtful commenters, one of whom observed:

[Heidegger] was at least smart enough to understand that the loss of God and the sacred is a big problem, which is better than the typical nitwit we have now running around practicing nihlism without the abyss.

Which led me to a thought I hadn't had before:

I do have some hope that Nietzsche pointed us towards post-abyssal philosophy, as it were. Perhaps the philosopher can dance on the edge of the abyss because he knows there is no abyss?

I will have to bear that in mind if I go back through Zarathustra.

(Excessively obscure blog title explained here.)

... At the same thread, Salamantis links to a series of 8 columns by Simon Critchley in the Guardian, a sort of mini-course on Being and Time. Mark Wilson also linked to a podcast of Hubert Dreyfus's B&T course at Berkeley (which it seems, like Dreyfus's commentary, confines itself to the first half of the book).

Does that make our nation a douche? I'm so confused!

I did not read Kathleen Parker's Save the Males because yuck, if you've read one "women's sluttiness and performances of The Vagina Monologues are destroying the fragile male ego" book you've read them all. But apparently not. It's apparently crazier than a Glenn Beck Rabbi Boteach mash up. Our nation is "awash in vaginaism", whatever the fuck that means.

-- Jessa Crispin.

... I doubt Parker is correct, but frankly, the more vaginaism the better, says TBA.

Richard Scruggs, history's greatest lawyer

Let's just steal an NMC post and comment thread, shall we?

Dickie Scruggs got into the judicial-bribery business (AFAWK, for the first time) trying to get the Jones Law Firm's suit against his group referred to arbitration.

After the bribery was exposed and Judge Lackey naturally recused himself, Judge Coleman took over, and sanctioned Scruggs's group by refusing to allow them to invoke the arbitration clause.

They appealed, and yesterday the Miss. Supreme Court held that (1) bribing judges was outside the scope of the partnership's business, hence Scruggs's partners weren't sanctionable for his trangressions, and thus (2) the case should go to arbitration.

Which brings us to: NMC's commenter Chesterfield:

So, do I have it right that the so-called brilliant, masterful, litigator extraordinaire Dickie Scruggs risked (and lost) his integrity, his right to practice law, his personal freedom, and potentially large sums of money by bribing a circuit court judge to grant a motion compelling arbitration in a matter that the MS Supreme Court would have ultimately granted anyway?

NMC:

Correct.

You CANNOT make this stuff up

The Republican National Committee’s health insurance plan covers elective abortion – a procedure the party’s own platform calls “a fundamental assault on innocent human life.”

Federal Election Commission Records show the RNC purchases its insurance from Cigna. Two sales agents for the company said that the RNC’s policy covers elective abortion.

Informed of the coverage, RNC spokeswoman Gail Gitcho told POLITICO that the policy pre-dates the tenure of current RNC Chairman Michael Steele.

“The current policy has been in effect since 1991, and we are taking steps to address the issue,” Gitcho said.

-- Politico (h/t Political Wire).

A task force we'd be happy to serve upon

I've forgotten where I found the link, but this blog post by Claire Berlinski on how she came to write an article for Penthouse is pretty great.

Parenthetically, I have never experienced more rigorous fact-checking in my entire career than I have when writing for Penthouse. You can believe every word of those letters. “But our reputation,” said my editor sadly whenever he called, “is lower than whale shit.” He seemed genuinely hurt.

He wanted, for example, proof that Sifu Emin was the most lethal man in the world. "Peter," I wrote back patiently, "who would you consider appropriately qualified to issue a verdict on that question? The Chairman of the International Lethalness Measurement Task Force? I mean, for all we really know, there's a still-more lethal man living in some remote tribal village in Equatorial Guinea, thoughtfully chewing on his enemies' entrails even as I type."

He saw the wisdom in what I was saying, but he stuck to his guns: I had to say that he might be the most lethal man in the world. I thought that sounded as if I lacked courage in my convictions, but I guess I have to respect Penthouse's commitment to accuracy over sensationalism.

She doesn't mention what issue the article's in, but apparently it's a newer one.

Not so fast, Mr. President?

Just when it seemed Obama was ready to send 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan, our ambassador in Kabul, Karl Eikenberry, has pushed back in a big way:

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the past week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, senior U.S. officials said. * * *

In addition to placing the Karzai problem prominently on the table, the cables from Eikenberry, a retired three-star general who in 2006-2007 commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan, have rankled his former colleagues in the Pentagon -- as well as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, defense officials said. McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, has stated that without the deployment of an additional tens of thousands of troops within the next year, the mission there "will likely result in failure."

Eikenberry retired from the military in April as a senior general in NATO and was sworn in as ambassador the next day. His position as a former commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan is likely to give added weight to his concerns about sending more troops and fan growing doubts about U.S. prospects in Afghanistan among an increasingly pessimistic public and polarized Congress.

Although Eikenberry's extensive military experience and previous command in Afghanistan were the key reasons Obama chose him for the top diplomatic job there, the former general had been reluctant as ambassador to weigh in on military issues. Some officials who favor an increase in troops said they were surprised by the last-minute nature of his strongly worded cables.

In these and other communications with Washington, Eikenberry has expressed deep reservations about Karzai's erratic behavior and corruption within his government, said U.S. officials familiar with the cables. Since Karzai was officially declared reelected last week, U.S. diplomats have seen little sign that the Afghan president plans to address the problems they have raised repeatedly with him. * * *

Eikenberry also has expressed frustration with the relative paucity of funds set aside for spending on development and reconstruction this year in Afghanistan, a country wrecked by three decades of war. Earlier this summer, he asked for $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending for 2010, a 60 percent increase over what Obama had requested from Congress, but the request has languished even as the administration has debated spending billions of dollars on new troops.

The ambassador also has worried that sending tens of thousands of additional American troops would increase the Afghan government's dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting. Before serving as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Eikenberry was in charge of the Afghan army training program.

This is consonant with David Sanger's brief mention of Eikenberry in The Inheritance, his roundup of the foreign-policy dilemmas facing us in 2009:

Eikenberry was among the few with the experience and the rank to argue the case that Washington was missing an opportunity to build a bulwark against the Taliban and to keep the country from backsliding into anarchy. Whenever visiting dignitaries arrived, he took them on a tour of Afghanistan's missing infrastructure -- the blown-up bridges, the nonexistent roads -- and explained how it was keeping the economy from coming back to life.

"I remember Karl saying to me, 'If you give me the choice between another division and another big road, I'll take the road,'" Rice recalled later.

"The key question is, 'Is the government of Afghanistan winning?'" Eikenberry asked during a congressional hearing in 2007. "In several critical areas -- corruption, justice and law enforcement, and counter-narcotics -- it is not."

I suppose there's a tension between road-building and keeping the road-builders alive, but at the very least we should combine "more troops" with "more infrastructure" and with some definable goals for Karzai's government, without which we will leave Karzai to his own devices.

It's the classic problem:

When one state is completely dependent on another, it is the weaker which can call the tune: it can threaten to collapse unless supported, and its protector has no answering threat in return.

-- A.J.P. Taylor, The Struggle for Mastery in Europe: 1848-1918.

The end of history, revisited

Kishore Mahubani, of the National University at Singapore, reflects that the "end of history" in the West (1989 and all that) is reciprocated by the rise into history of the East, and comments on one aspect of the West's decline:

Sadly, in all the recent discussions of “the end of history,” few Western commentators have addressed the biggest lapse in Western practice. The fundamental assumption of “the end of history” thesis was that the West would remain the beacon for the world in democracy and human rights. In 1989, if anyone had dared to predict that within 15 years, the foremost beacon would become the first Western state to reintroduce torture, everyone would have shouted “impossible.”

Few in the West understand how much shock Guantánamo has caused in non-Western minds. Hence many are puzzled that Western intellectuals continue to assume that they can portray themselves and their countries as models to follow when they speak to the rest of the world on human rights.

It becomes that much difficult to inspire liberty when the citizens of authoritarian countries can come to believe that America is just the same under its skin.

Even more juvenile than the Green Lantern theory

Ilya Somin notes the uncanny resemblance between Bush's theory of executive authority and He-Man's "I have the power!"

What Prof. Somin does not remark, however, is the bizarre circumstance of He-Man's selecting Skeletor to be his vice-president.




Wikipedia:

Despite his occasional bungling actions and personality, all versions portray Skeletor as being extremely cunning and intelligent but with a sense of hubris that invariably leads to his downfall.

Indeed, an eerie resemblance.

Don't say they didn't warn you

Daphne Eviatar reads the latest torture memo -- really, an FBI anti-torture memo -- so you don't have to:

The memo lays out clearly and simply what the interrogation experts at the FBI knew about interrogations of terror suspects, what would or would not work on them, and what sort of conduct was illegal. And it reads much like the sorts of arguments we’re now hearing from the America Civil Liberties Union and other civil and human rights organizations arguing that senior defense department officials and lawyers who approved abusive techniques ought to be criminally investigated.

“Central to the gathering of reliable, admissible evidence is the manner in which it is obtained,” the authors write to the General. “Interrogation techniques used by the DHS [Defense Human Intelligence Services, part of DoD] are designed specifically for short term use in combat environments where the immediate retrieval of tactical intelligence is critical. Many of DHS’s methods are considered coercive by Federal Law Enforcement and [Uniform Code of Military Justice] standards. Not only this, but reports from those knowledgeable about the use of these coercive techniques are highly skeptical as to their effectiveness and reliability.”

The memo went on to explain the need for interrogaton psychologically tailored to each captive, and to criticize as unconstitutional (and in violation of the Torture Act) many of the DOD methods.

That was in November 2002, 3 months after the Bybee-Yoo memos. I'm pretty confident the full record would disclose that no one up top let the FBI analysis bother their pretty little heads.

(You can read the memo here, it seems, if this ubiquitous-and-obnoxious "Scribd" software works in your browser -- it doesn't in mine.)

... In related news, an article on the solitary confinement of al-Marri. Relies rather heavily on his defense counsel, but the feds aren't talking.

Must we burn Heidegger? (updated)

That would seem to be the next logical step, if Emmanuel Faye's advice is heeded:

Drawing on new evidence, the author, Emmanuel Faye, argues fascist and racist ideas are so woven into the fabric of Heidegger’s theories that they no longer deserve to be called philosophy. As a result Mr. Faye declares, Heidegger’s works and the many fields built on them need to be re-examined lest they spread sinister ideas as dangerous to modern thought as “the Nazi movement was to the physical existence of the exterminated peoples.”

First published in France in 2005, the book, “Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy,” calls on philosophy professors to treat Heidegger’s writings like hate speech. Libraries, too, should stop classifying Heidegger’s collected works (which have been sanitized and abridged by his family) as philosophy and instead include them under the history of Nazism. These measures would function as a warning label, like a skull-and-crossbones on a bottle of poison, to prevent the careless spread of his most odious ideas, which Mr. Faye lists as the exaltation of the state over the individual, the impossibility of morality, anti-humanism and racial purity.

Leaving aside the question of whether all, or even most, of Heidegger's works have said qualities (and I don't believe they do), the notion that fascism and racism are somehow exclusive of "philosophy" leaves me wondering just how Mr. Faye defines "philosophy." Can there be no evil philosophy? What about a mistaken philosophy -- also impossible?

While I'm not well-read enough in Heidegger to pronounce with much authority, my impression from what I've read (primary & secondary) is that Heidegger's suspicion of rationalism and democracy left him a fairly easy mark for the Nazi emphasis on instinct and authoritarianism, but not that Heidegger's philosophy taught anything "Nazi" as such. Heidegger's shameful rectoral address, and his comment on the "inner truth of National Socialism" in Introduction to Metaphysics, are sheer opportunistic flattery. As Rorty wrote somewhere, Heidegger was basically a very smart Black Forest redneck.

Damon Linker's blog post excoriating the Heidegger-banners, mentioned in the NYT article, shows a much stronger grasp of what philosophy is:

I'm a liberal democrat and a humanist who considers totalitarianism in general, and Nazism in particular, to be moral and political abominations. I believe in the truth of science, and I like many things about technological modernity. I accept logic as a valid means of determining many forms of truth. And I happily accept the vision of Being that has prevailed in the Western world since the time of the ancient Greeks. In other words, I'm not inclined to follow Heidegger in its efforts to prepare the way for a more "primordial" encounter with Being by subverting these and other aspects of our world. But what a breathtakingly exciting experience it is to be forced to think about and make a case for, rather than lazily accept as self-evident, our most fundamental assumptions about the world and ourselves!

That is--or should be--what philosophy is all about. Which is why Heidegger was right at assert in an electrifying lecture course from 1929 that "philosophy is the opposite of all comfort and assurance." What Carlin Romano has advocated in his essay is something altogether different--something tamer, more congenial, more comforting. Fine: By all means, let's offer another seminar on Rawls and the foundations of liberal justice. But surely there should also be a place in the university for a close encounter with a dramatically different style of thinking--with the stunningly radical (and perhaps radically erroneous) thought of Martin Heidegger.

Some may disagree with Linker because they don't believe it's safe or desirable to question the fundamental assumptions of liberal thought, which always has its enemies. That would be to set political priorities and limits on what's philosophically acceptable ... which is not too far from the confusion of quotidian politics and fundamental philosophy that Heidegger apparently fell into. But in a good cause, right? Anything's justifiable in a good cause ....

... John Holbo comes at the NYT piece from the angle of Nazi typography. No, really. Must we burn Helvetica?

... Holbo's thread includes this great comment by Hidari, which Hidari follows up with:

Heidegger’s brother was called Fritz, was famous as the town (Messkirch) ‘card’, never went to University, and was famous for his antics and his anarchic sense of humour (he picked fights with the Nazis during the war). In Messkirch (you’ll like this, Alison), Martin was always known as ‘oh you know…..Fritz’s brother!’. This when Martin was one of the most famous philosophers on earth.

Wonderful.

... Finally I've been able to google the fellow whose lecture at the New School a few years back dwelled on two sentences from B&T that he said demonstrated Heidegger's fascism. That's Johannes Fritsche, who wrote a book. As I recall, his previous book had been on Aristotle, and the New School thought it was getting an Aristotle professor -- then he arrives, and it's all Heidegger all the time. He is now teaching in Istanbul.

I think you've got the wrong "wise ruler" there

Picked up Frank McLynn's biography of Marcus Aurelius at the library over lunch, and the introduction is not inspiring me with confidence. McLynn begins with the rather modest goal of persuading the reader that Marcus Aurelius is worth reading about, for instance as the author of the Meditations, citing

... the example of Cecil Rhodes, multimillionaire, politician and would-be empire builder. As his biographer writes: "He carried a well-thumbed, personally marked-up copy of this last book with him everywhere, favouring such aphorisms as 'Can any man think he lives for pleasure, and not for action or execution?' 'Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise.'"

Apparently neither Rhodes's biographer nor McLynn was familiar with Proverbs 6:6?

(McLynn's source, Rotberg, was chastised for the quoted error in a book review, one which McLynn evidently did not have the leisure to consult.)

Now that's a successful lede

From the NYT website, their teaser for "Justices Weigh Life in Prison for Youths Who Never Killed":

There are just over 100 people in the world serving sentences of life without parole for crimes they committed as juveniles in which no one was killed. Seventy-seven are in Florida.

Rather to my surprise, the rest are not in Texas:

Florida is one of eight states with juvenile offenders serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for nonhomicide crimes, according to a report prepared by Professor Annino and two colleagues at Florida State. Louisiana has 17 such prisoners; California, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, Nebraska and South Carolina have the rest.

And supposedly that's the world total, since no other country is said to allow such. Though I wonder what that rule is worth in China, for instance.

Uh-oh.

12 dead, 31 wounded at Fort Hood; of 2 or 3 gunmen, the dead one is a major, "Malik Nadal Hassan."

Cue the flying monkeys.

... Can't find the link now, but earlier Friday was reading about how the fellow had been speaking out in favor of suicide bombers, criticizing our deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc. Did NO ONE think this was out of line in a major? Sounds like another example of "Neighbors Remember Serial Killer As Serial Killer."

... Here's the NYT quoting Colonel Lee, who spoke to Fox News -- there were direct quotes earlier today but the Times has scrubbed them:

Fox News quoted a retired Army colonel, Terry Lee, as saying that Major Hasan, with whom he worked, had voiced hope that President Obama would pull American troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan, had argued with military colleagues who supported the wars and had tried to prevent his own deployment.

There's also evidence that he left internet posts re: suicide bombers and such. Fox has video up of Col. Lee but no quotes.

Hasan seems to've had the worst possible job for someone with qualms:

A cousin, Nader Hasan, told The New York Times that after counseling soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder, Hasan knew war firsthand.

"He was mortified by the idea of having to deploy," Nader Hasan said. "He had people telling him on a daily basis the horrors they saw over there."

Still not evident why he felt the need to shoot 40 people rather than just himself.

... Kevin Drum passes along what purports to be a firsthand account of the shootings.

I was walking into the medical SRP building when he started firing (he never made it to the main SRP building....the media accounts are understandably pretty off right now). He was calmly and methodically shooting everyone. Like every non-deployed military post, no one was armed. For the first time in my life I really wish I had a weapon. I don't know how to explain what it feels like to have someone shoot at you while you're unarmed. He missed me but didn't miss a lot of others. Just pure random luck. It's a very compressed area, thus the numbers.

More here.

... Ah, I saw Col. Lee's quoted comments at Sullyblog (via the UK press):

"He was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans," Col Lee told Fox News. "He said Muslims should stand up and fight the aggressor and that we should not be in the war in the first place." He said that Maj Hasan said he was "happy" when a US soldier was killed in an attack on a military recruitment centre in Arkansas in June.

An American convert to Islam was accused of the shootings. Col Lee alleged that other officers had told him that Maj Hasan had said "maybe people should strap bombs on themselves and go to Time Square" in New York. He claimed he was aware that the major had been subject to "name calling" during heated arguments with other officers.

Did Colonel Lee report any of this conduct? If yes, what was the result? If not, why the hell not?

... More along the Onion line:

The second thing the fellow psychiatrist at Walter Reed said was that he and co-workers were not at all worried that he was a devout Muslim but it was the way he talked about it. A couple of years ago he gave a Grand Rounds presentation. That's when all the doctors come into a big auditorium and you take turns giving a lecture on procedures, diagnosis and treatment and so forth --the best treatment for bipolar, or schizophrenia, etc.

Instead of giving an academic lecture, Hasan gave a lecture on the Koran, and it wasn't informational as much as it was his own interpretation of it --as the co-workers put it. He talked about how if you're a non-believer, the Koran says you should have your head cut off, you should have burning oil poured down your throat, you should be set on fire.

Another Muslim in the audience, another psychiatrist, raised his hand, quite disturbed and said, "Ya know, a lot of us [Muslims] do not believe these things you're saying."

People actually talked in the hallways afterward whether Hasan was one of these people so tightly wound that he might one day freak out and shoot people --sort of half kidding and half serious.

The writer's conclusion that "this couldn't have been prevented" does not seem terribly plausible. That's the case with someone who doesn't send off about a dozen warning signs.

If other countries enforce their own laws, they must be trying to game the system

Our evil twin, Kenneth Anderson at the Volokh blog, gets in a snit and closes comments on a post regarding Italy's conviction in absentia of 23 (presumed) CIA operatives who tried to kidnap an Egyptian terror suspect on Italian soil.

KA complains that his commenters are "annoying/uncivil." Evidently he lacks the self-awareness to grasp how he might draw such comments from his own post, which states:

... I’ll make again the side observation that I have made before that this is the next step in what I have described here and on the OJ blog as “gaming Spain.” It has been remarked by many observers how the effect of foreign prosecutions or the threat of foreign prosecutions is a backdoor way of punishing administration lawyers and others, such as these CIA agents, for various things that can’t be or are not pursued in American courts.

IOW, the Italian courts are said to be acting in a roundabout way to punish Americans for things better addressed by American courts?

KA is an expert on international law, who however can't seem even to admit the possibility that Italian justice was offended by foreign agents' kidnapping someone? That couldn't possibly be more than "gaming"?

Death of a structuralist

The last of the greats of the "theory generation" has passed away: Claude Levi-Strauss, aged 100. He outlived not only the eclipse of the theory he named "structuralism," but also the eclipse of post-structuralism as well.

... Perhaps it's ungenerous to imply that Umberto Eco is not of the same magnitude.

... Superior NYT obit. Nothing up at NYRB yet.

... I was wondering what anthropologists think of Levi-Strauss's work; here's one appreciation (from back in July). (Via 3QD.)