Apropos of Arendt:

The ridiculous is not a joke--and vice versa.

More later, once me and Jason discuss, but I can say that what I've gotten into so far of this next section of The Origins of Totalitarianism is real, real good.

Briefly, though, let me talk about unintended consequences for a bit. I would make the claim that there is no such thing as a public policy without unintended negative consequences, and it behooves (!) all public servants to keep this in mind when governing. Arendt makes some fucking mind-blowing connections between colonialism and its unintended consequences, like this one:

Race was the Boers' answer to the overwhelming monstrosity of Africa--a whole continent populated and overpopulated by savages--an explanation of the madness which grasped and illuminated them like "a flash of lightning in a serene sky: 'Exterminate all the brutes.'" [From Heart of Darkness, which she calls "the most illuminating book on actual race experience in Africa."] This answer resulted in the most terrible massacres in recent history[1], the Boers' extermination of Hottentot tribes, the wild murdering by Carl Peters in German Southeast Africa, the decimation of the peaceful Congo population--from 20 to 40 million to 8 million people; and finally, perhaps worst of all, it resulted in the triumphant introduction of such means of pacification into ordinary, respectable foreign policies.

I'm sure you can see where she's going with this: massacres-as-foreign-policy becomes massacres-as-domestic-policy and becomes the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges; all this as the result of some foreign adventures. Serious stuff. But these kind of historical examples tend to blind us a bit to the smaller-scale tragedies that can ensue from mismanagement of government. So let's instead use one of my favorite metaphors: public policy as computer programming.

Now, this may seem counterintuitive at first, since programming is such a precise and self-contained activity, whereas policy making is much more freeform, indeterminate, and sprawling. But certainly policy is the process of inserting new programming into the political system that will then change its operation, and in an ideal state will then change the behavior of its users/actors ("citizens"), either by encouraging positive behavior ("Register for the draft and we'll give you college tuition on loan") or avoid negative behavior ("If you're out of work, don't beat your wife and rob coffee shops, just take some money so you can get by without breaking down"). So it is, in a sense, an effort at programming the body politic.

As for the preciseness part, far from the perfect coding envisioned in the early days of the discipline, it becomes clear as computer science progresses and invents more and more high-level meta-languages that the code continues to behave unpredictably and that it remains a tricky proposition to tell exactly where a bug comes from, and so anticipating problems is still something that requires a certain skill and a reasoning prowess above simply knowing how to tell the machine what to do. So if you're trying to, say, create a public policy that will encourage a certain behavior, you maybe realize beforehand that it's going to conflict with either an established policy that prescribes something like the exact opposite (an earlier bit of code), or is going to run into opposition from other administrators (other programs) or is going to run into public opposition (conflicts with the operating system or machine code). Thus you either change the new code, or try and kludge the old code, or hack around the old code with a whole new bit. And maybe it works, or maybe it doesn't, and maybe you ship it anyway.

But a lot of times you don't catch a problem, and it causes an immediate bug that you can patch (but some people don't get the patch), or it causes a long-term conflict which you can't patch and later programs just have to code around--or, worst of all, it goes totally undetected because it's so low-level it's hard to notice, or it doesn't anticipate a certain future situation, and it causes problems no one ever thought it would. Like, say, the Y2K bug.

A lot of computer geeks are put off by politics, I think because of its imprecise nature, but it would be nice if they realized that just as it requires a certain skill to be a computer programmer, it requires a certain skill to be a politician or policymaker, and there's just as much precision and intelligence required there, too. There's just a lot more old code you have to work around.

More on Arendt--presumably more coherent--later.

[1] Arendt, an anti-Stalinist if anything, I think wrote this before the full extent of Stalin's genocides was known. Isn't it nice, though, how she doesn't use scare quotes around "savages" and "monstrosity"? Oh, and it's a nice reminder that colonialism by democracies can be just as bad for humanity as totalitarian ideologies.
posted by Mike B. at 5:25 PM 0 comments

I've seen this contention come up in a few places lately, most notably Newsweek, so let's give it an explication. From Kristof's column today:

One step came in the Clinton administration, when the defense secretary gained greater control over the handling of images from spy satellites. Mr. Rumsfeld then started up his own intelligence shop in the Pentagon. The central philosophy of intelligence — that it should be sheltered from policy considerations to keep it honest — was deeply bruised.

There are certain reasons why having intelligence be more available to the cabinet and President is a good idea. For instance, we run into the problem of "plausible deniability" wherein the President's staff intentionally shields him from certain information so he can have political cover if it blows up, and this problem of imperfect information can result in bad policy.

But in the other scenario, imperfect information becomes even more of a problem, as the issue of the selling of Iraq shows: instead of inadvertently receiving bad information, the President actively solicits bad information, cherry-picking from the (apparently indigestible) mountain of data. To me, this is much more of a danger than plausible deniability. Instead of honestly making a decision based on the information he has (while at the same time recognizing some political realities), the President makes a decision and then finds the intelligence to back it up. This then becomes less policy and more fiat, and fiat is bad for a democracy.

But I think it's important to move beyond the intelligence issue into the whole of the civil service, which is always at a danger when it becomes politicized (because, among other things, this puts it at a far greater risk of losing the public trust due to an appearance of corruption, as Hannah Arendt points out). The job of the bureaucracy is to serve the citizenry, period. Now, obviously interpretations of this service differ, and there is undeniably also a responsibility for any individual agency to preserve its mandate, but I think there are points where that border between playing politics to further your ability to effectively implement policy and pursing politics at the expense of policy is crossed. As it is, for instance, when we decide to eliminate birth control from our foreign aid, or require schools to teach creationism, or give military contracts to companies our Vice President used to work for, we put some external political goal over the goal of helping foreign people develop their countries, or educating our yoot, or gaining the trust of the global community.

We also, of course, erode the public faith in government, and that, sad to say, is probably the idea. Paul Krugman gives us, in an excellent column, another choice Grover Nordquist quote, which I'm going to put in big letters and bold because it deserves it:

"I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub."

Ah, the rich conservative tradition of mustache-twirling villains. Hey, Democrats--can we jump on this one, please? Christ. Ironic quote time: "If you don't like government, get out of our democracy! You damn hippie!"

Not to be overly facetious, but where would we be today if the Founding Fathers had thought this way, huh? Conquered by Canada, that's where.

posted by Mike B. at 4:34 PM 0 comments

The libertarians at Reason weigh in on the illegal immigrant detention issue.

posted by Mike B. at 2:06 PM 0 comments

looks like Ashcroft didn't get laid again last night
In what has to be one of the most weirdly dumb moves in recent years, the Justice Department has banned a staff gay pride event.

The Justice Department has barred a group of employees from holding their annual gay pride event at the department's headquarters, the first time such an event has been blocked by any federal agency, gay rights leaders said today.

Justice Department officials told the group, called DOJ Pride, that it could not hold its annual event at the department because the White House had not formally recognized Gay Pride Month.

OK, first, that's a weak-ass excuse. But second: why JD? I mean, if you're going to do this somewhere, wouldn't you pick a bureau where there weren't a whole bunch of goddamn lawyers? Well, I guess Ashcroft hasn't done anything obviously insane in a few months, so he was due.

Oh, and then there's this:

Gay Republicans have become a more vocal force in party politics of late, but President Bush, unlike Mr. Clinton, has refused to issue a proclamation declaring a Gay Pride Month. The White House has said that the president does not believe "in politicizing people's sexual orientation."

Mr. Bush has issued more than 250 proclamations, acknowledging events like Greek Independence Day, Leif Erikson Day, Save Your Vision Week and National Hospice Month.

*cough* Yes, well. It's rather too bad that Republicans can get away with this, but it does seem clear that it's a safe political position right now. Oh well.

posted by Mike B. at 11:19 AM 0 comments

Thursday, June 05, 2003

Fluxblog today gives us a track from Jarvis Cocker's new electroclash (!) band, Relaxed Muscle. He also points us to a Sun article featuring Jarvis in his new getup of a drugstore skeleton costume and weird makeup, on stage in a pub. God bless that man.

There's a great Rapture track, too. Go read.

Fuck, that Rapture track gave me chills. It starts off like you don't quite know what it's going to be, and then at 0:19 all the percussion cuts out for this fucking Southern rock guitar riff from Luke, and then the great little drum fills come crashing around it, and then at the end it even adds the now-trad cowbell, but instead of making it sound dancy it makes it sound like, well, like Steve Miller. But really good! I don't remember if this was the song that confused me the last time I saw them at the Bowery--there was one bit that sounded like a downtempo semi-indie-rock love ballad, which felt very out of place. But if this is it, I'm gonna listen closer tonight.

If you see me at the show, come say hi--I'll be with the rest of Galvanized, so you can check our pics on the front page to see what we look like. I'm the boy, although in retrospect I don't look much like that anymore. Think tall and hair that keeps sticking up no matter what I do, which admittedly isn't much, and red sideburns. Kind of anglo-irish, I guess. Try this pic (I AM INTENSE AND PLAYING GUITAR) or this one of me with the violin.

posted by Mike B. at 1:31 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, June 04, 2003

I am unfortunately too busy to reply to harm (although I would point out that my previous update was less a response and more of a link for further consideration, which is why I haven't "offer[ed] a workable modus operandi") so instead I will post this press release just for him, because he will find it very amusing. I also found it very amusing, for the record, and I know that harm will enjoy it way more than my nominally-lefty friends will. Well, except for Rachel, who would also think it's hilarious.

>>SCREAM OUT!
>>
>>WHAT: SCREAM OUT is a performance/protest. One by one, hundreds of women
>>will condemn the Bush administration for destroying our basic American
>>freedoms. Each charge will be answered with a scream of rage and
>>resistance, fury and frustration. The event is free and open to the
>>public.
>>
>>WHO: SCREAM OUT was initiated by performance artist Karen Finley and
>>organized by the Women's Action Coalition (WAC). Speakers and screamers
>>will include prominent and not-yet-prominent women artists, performers,
>>writers and activists including Finley, author Mary Gaitskill, Franklin
>>Furnace's Martha Wilson, poet/performers Nicole Blackman and Emily XYZ,
>>and many others. A more complete list of participants will be announced.
>>
>>WHEN: Monday, June 9th 2003, from 5 to 7 pm.
>>
>>WHERE: In the courtyard of St. Mark's Church in the Bowery,
>>131 East 10th Street at Second Avenue in New York City.
>>
>>WHY: We are out of time. The Bush administration has launched a relentless
>>attack against our civil liberties.
>>
>>We are out of options. Millions of Americans have protested against the
>>administration's policies and our voices have been ignored.
>>
>>We are out of patience.
>>
>>PUBLIC INFO: The WAC website at www.wacnyc.net Information will be updated
>>regularly.

Yeah, because nothing says "potency" like screaming wordlessly at people who agree with you. We're out of patience so we're going to have a big group scream? That'll, uh, make us feel better. I dunno, maybe it's a chick thing.

*sigh* I kind of like Mary Gaitskill...

posted by Mike B. at 3:59 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

So I got a bunch of stuff done and took a late lunch, and after eating I went to the Virgin Megastore in Union Square. I picked up the Yes New York compilation, because I am shameless and it was $10 and there were a bunch of tracks on there I wanted to hear (Radio 4, Rapture, LCD Soundsystem). And then I went over and listened to the Broken Social Scene album, which at first confirmed my MP3-aided suspicion that it really wasn't that good, and then the drums on track 2 kicked in and it's like, fuuuuuuuuck. (Now how to convince my respective drummers that a distorted drum sound rocks hard?) And for some reason I started thinking that really, living in New York (especially Brooklyn) right now, we are living through a moment, which as stupid and clichéd as that may sound is still something we will be asked about and envied for later; that despite all the trendiness and hipster ennui bullshit, it's still really fucking exciting, and that I am listening to and seeing and playing with some great bands right now. It's a moment, and it's pretty cool.

And then David Byrne walked by.

Do I know what he was doing in the Virgin Megastore at 3 on a Tuesday? No I do not. But it was definitely him. (He passed by the listening booths and went to the magazines and read the Wire, if you're curious.) And it felt...well, it felt cool, but it also felt, maybe only in retrospect, weirdly like an omen. I dunno--you think about the moment, David Byrne walks by, you get the brief sensation that your brain has conjured him out of whole cloth and the bonus features from Stop Making Sense, and you wonder what the hell is going on, and then you buy your CD and go into Union Square and read some liner notes and think about arrangements and FX boxes and songs and songs and songs, and walk through Manhattan and feel right in place.

And fuck, I gotta say, I am on a songwriting tear right now. I mean--shit. Some good pop tunes are coming from my brain right now, moment or no.

So I guess I'm in a good mood right now, and I am very much in love with music and the sounds we can make together. But Ted Leo still sucks.

UPDATE: Kristie suggests that David was there to pick up Liam Lynch's Fake Songs. "I've done a salsa mix!"

Oh, and the Witnesses suck too. They really, really suck.

posted by Mike B. at 4:14 PM 0 comments

Sorry so few posts today--my boss is out sick, so I'm trying to actually get caught up on some work. (Successfully, so far.) So, more sometime. But for now: political theory pick-up lines.

posted by Mike B. at 2:29 PM 0 comments

Looks like I won't be reading Salon today, as its "ultramercial" for XP has crashed my computer twice.

And I'm using Windows!

posted by Mike B. at 11:25 AM 0 comments

Josh Marshall points out that there's something even jucier than the "we just settled on WMD for bureaucratic reasons" thing in the Wolfowitz article in Vanity Fair.

In fact, for all the buzz surrounding the WMD quotes, the real stunner comes in the very next paragraph. It's there where Tanenhaus says Wolfowitz is "confident" that Saddam was "connected" to the original World Trade Center attack in 1993 and that he has "entertained the theory" that Saddam was involved in the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995.

Ahem. OK, leftists have some pretty wacky conspiracy theories too, but generally we try not to express them in public, especially if we're, you know, in the cabinet.

Saddaam and Oklahoma City, eh? Guess all that flap about the media initially assuming it had to be Arab terrorists was unwarranted! Looks like the neo-con message can be summed up as: "All your fears are right again!"

posted by Mike B. at 11:17 AM 0 comments

Monday, June 02, 2003

Every lefty blogger worth his salt will be jumping on this, but just for the record:

The Justice Department's round-up of hundreds of illegal immigrants after the Sept. 11 attacks was plagued with "significant problems" that forced many people with no connection to terrorism to languish in prison in unduly harsh conditions, according to an internal report released today.

The long-awaited report from the Justice Department's inspector general concluded that officials with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, particularly in New York City, "made little attempt to distinguish" between illegal residents who had possible ties to terrorism and those swept up "coincidentally" in the investigation.

This is so fucking frustrating. This was something lefties were going on and on about, and we got tarred as traitors or weaklings or naifs for it, but apparently we were making some sense, huh? And this isn't even some dumbass "we were right" thing--this is just a tragedy. Real people suffered because of this public policy; real people were held in jail for a month without any charges being filed, and then continued to be held, often without access to a lawyer, for nearly a year after that. And this is how the Justice Department responded:

"We make no apologies for finding every legal way possible to protect the American public from further terrorist attacks."

Yes, I'm sure they had the best of intentions. It would be nice if someone admitted that they fucked up here, but even nicer if we learned from it for the future.

UPDATE: Harm replies. I'd probably point him to this NYT article (even though it is lib'ral propaganda) and the report itself (PDF).

posted by Mike B. at 4:54 PM 0 comments

Nice piece at Last Plane to Jakarta about the White Stripes as pop and as Supertramp ripper-offers. (In a good way.) Go read. It's like Marcus, but way more geeky than nerdy.

posted by Mike B. at 4:36 PM 0 comments

...now that the rape jokes are out of the way...
Not too many strokisms in Safire today, but there is something that probably won't catch on. Saying that the biggest intelligence failure in GWII was the overestimation of the strength of the Republican Guard, he writes:

What if our planners had believed Kurdish leaders who predicted that Saddam's super-loyalists would quickly collapse? We would have sent fewer combat troops and more engineers, civilian administrators and military police. But the C.I.A. and the Pentagon had no way of being certain that the information about the Republican Guard's poor morale and weak discipline provided by Kurds and Iraqi opposition leaders was accurate.

With thousands of lives at stake, optimism was not an option. Sensibly, we based our strategy on the greater likelihood of fierce resistance. That decision was as right when made as it was mistaken in retrospect.

Now, I don't think this particular spin is going to catch on, because it's directly contradicted by the pretty persistent idea that we sent way fewer troops to Iraq than we were "supposed" to, in line with Rummy's desire for a lighter, more mobile armed forces, so those are sort of at odds; couple this with the fairly stubborn liberal meme that we sent too few troops to adequately police post-war Iraq, and I think you have a twofer that will make this perspective look like the desperate justification it is. Righties probably either won't talk about the "intelligence failures" even when administration types gloat about them, and some decent-sized graves will be dug. It also misses the point that while assuming Iraqi soldiers were going to fight to the death instead of desert was good for the war effort, it's pretty bad for the peace, since it means all those weapons and trained mercenaries--and, maybe, the missing WMD--are now dispersed through the population instead of captured, which is only going to cause trouble down the line.

Of course, Safire then goes on to try and explain that the various ways in which we were lied to before the war were OK because it meant we ended up getting rid of Saddaam. I won't even try the ends-means argument, since I know that sometimes you do have to lie to people to accomplish a good (viz. FDR with WWII). But c'mon, William. Saying that when our leaders want to do something they should just lie to us to get what they want runs pretty contrary to the precepts of democracy, don't you think? The idea is that we're all informed about what's going on and then we all make decisions together. It's silly to think that our government will never lie to us, but when we catch it lying, it seems really questionable to say, "Well, it was only for the best of purposes!" You can justify a lot of things with the best of intentions.

Oh, and William, there was an intelligence hoax. Let's at least be honest about this.

UPDATE: Josh Marshall talks about the Safire column too.

posted by Mike B. at 4:05 PM 0 comments

As a political scientist-slash-theorist, I'm always interested in new ways of classifying and describing governmental functions, since these taxonomies can bring out hidden similarities and previously clouded truths that assist in our analysis of policies and the precepts behind them. So I was particularly interested to hear Grover Norquist say: "Bipartisanship is another name for date rape."

Well, this certainly piqued my interest--it was, after all, quite a new way of classifying things. I mean, he didn't just call it "rape," he called it more specifically "date rape." So I thought, heck, why not run with it? Maybe this will yield some useful tidbits!

The bicameral system: anal rape
Federalism: mouth rape
Gerrymandering: hand rape
Appropriations committees: plain "vanilla" rape
Having the Senate majority leader take a piss in a sink while you're trying to talk to him: watersports rape
Allowing lobbyists to write legislation: bedroom rodeo rape
Impeaching a President for getting a blowjob: legal rape
Raping the environment: metaphorical rape
Using overblown metaphors to describe minor events like "bipartisanship" or "drilling for oil" : linguistic rape
Forcing someone to listen to Anne Coulter: rape fantasies
Passing a reasonably massive abridgment of civil liberties while everyone is still reeling from a national tragedy: "no one expects the Spanish Inquisition" rape
Confessing that you have "lusted in my heart": pretty much raping yourself there, Jimmy
The war on Iraq: "good" rape
Having your own party support a policy its base clearly detests (i.e. Dems passing welfare reform, Bush supporting assault weapons ban): incestual rape
This strategy then helping your party get elected: raping your sister and kind of liking it but then feeling dirty about it afterwards
Giving your stridently partisan news channel the motto "fair and balanced": cynical rape
Naming the national airport after a President who fired striking air traffic controllers: ironic rape
Claiming being called a bad name constitutes rape: postmodern rape
"Hey, maybe we should invade Syria": theoretical rape
Tax cuts: raping the fuuuuuture!
Sunset clauses: statutory rape
Senate confirmation hearings: gang rape
"Republicans who don't support the tax cut are like Jacques Chirac": professional rape
Media deregulation: monopolistic rape
Democratic strategy: really wanting to rape but not being able to get it up
The Heritage Institute: rape that looks like consensual sex
Escaping to Oklahoma to break a quorum: rape, but funny rape
Using the DHS to track them down: "dude, this rape was funny before, but you took it too far."
Catholic priests: raping for Jesus!
Leftists going on right-wing talk shows: "baby I'm sorry I just love you so much" rape
This list: taking rape to a whole new level

Well, that's all I got for now. Any other suggestions?

posted by Mike B. at 1:11 PM 0 comments

I've got a reasonably big post on the Franken / Ivins / O'Reilly argument coming later, but for now I wanted to highlight this one O'Reilly quote that comes at around the 54 minute mark of the MP3 I linked.

"We have to make judgments, and these judgments are harsh, and these judgments have to be sold in a way that arouses people's ire, or things will never get better."

(and this in response to a question about how to improve discourse in American civil society!)

It's an interesting response; it's honest, certainly, although it must be said that a more honest (and less noble) reason would be that making harsh judgments get you ratings and eyeballs and bucks. It gives you a platform to say something, although it encourages you to continue saying the same vituperative things you've been saying before and not to try to make real positive change.

At any rate, I think the interesting point here is the similarity to the way in which lefty activists (think Greens) justify their activities, i.e. as sure-it's-bad-but-people-are-suffering-and-is-vomiting-in-public-any-more-offensive-than-the-killing-of-innocents?!?!?!?! It would be nice if this obvious similarity would cause both sides to rethink their priorities, although I don't really expect it to. And hey, how lame is it that the annoying people on the left are way less rich, huh? That said, I admit that it does seem true that you have to yell louder (and more offensively) than everyone else in order to get a voice in the current culture, although I've often found that a good strategy is leading with an ad hominem and then following up with a smart, well-reasoned, respectful argument. It seems to work and get attention, so woo.

Incidentally, my response to the question would be: "Eliminate TV." Not that I have anything against television--woo, American Idol!--and I think that it's actually done some very good things for informing the citizenry, although it could do much better. Still, historical evidence does suggest that people were much more into reading and/or listening to lengthy, well-reasoned arguments before the rise of electronic media, so if that's what you consider elevated discourse, there you go.

posted by Mike B. at 12:05 PM 0 comments

They passed it.

Now make 'em pay.

posted by Mike B. at 11:30 AM 0 comments

I'm apparently 5 months late on this one, but better late than never. Check out the 365 Days Project, wherein the goal is to post one strange, obscure, and/or "outsider" MP3 per day for an entire year. And they're doing wonderfully so far. (Today's entry is "Jogging For Jesus.")

I would especially single out "Even Squeaky Fromme Loves Christmas" which features the truly immortal first line "Jesus died for man's sins/he even died for Manson's."

posted by Mike B. at 10:26 AM 0 comments

Sunday, June 01, 2003

weekend update
It's been a long and tiring weekend--did music for about 16 hours so far since Friday--but here are a few great links to keep you occupied.

Doonesbury is always pretty good, but sometimes it's absolutely brilliant, and today is one of those days. "9/11. Any followup?"

Atrios posts a transcript of Kennedy on Hannity talking about the ANWR, and Kennedy absolutely calls Hannity on an outright lie. It's truly astounding. Go read it. UPDATE: Apparently the Hannity link isn't working due to being bloggered, which is annoying. Anyway, just go to the main Atrios page and search for "Hannity." It's there, I swear! Hopefully the archive will be fixed by the time it gets run off the main page.

C-SPAN ran a great panel discussion last night in which Al Franken and Bill O'Reilly go at each other's throats. Here is an MP3 of most of the performance and here is the Eschaton thread that informed me of it.

posted by Mike B. at 5:45 PM 0 comments