The Supreme Court does something right. How nice.
Human Rights Abuses Worldwide Are Held to Fall Under U.S. Courts
By LINDA GREENHOUSE
Published: June 30, 2004
WASHINGTON, June 29 - A Supreme Court decision on Tuesday kept federal courts open to lawsuits by foreigners who allege that they were victims of serious human rights violations anywhere in the world.
The decision interpreting the Alien Tort Statute came as a relief to human rights organizations that had feared the court would accept the Bush administration's invitation to narrow the application of the 215-year-old law.
At the same time, the result was a sharp disappointment to international business interests, which have been alarmed by increasing use of the law to sue multinational corporations for human rights violations and had looked to the Supreme Court to curb the trend.
The case before the court did not involve a corporate defendant, and the 6-to-3 decision did not conclusively resolve the status of such cases. That opportunity may come soon, because lower courts with corporate cases on their dockets have been deferring decisions while waiting to see how the Supreme Court would rule in this case...
Just a quick note on Michele's latest round of strawman bullshit:
It's interesting to note how they have embraced Michael Moore when just a year ago, they were calling him a fringe element. Anytime I would mention the left and Moore in the same sentence, I would be taken to task for lumping the loonies in with the more moderate lefties. Suddenly, they are all Moore fans and he is their hero. How did he go from being a fringe moonbat to being embraced by mainstream Democrats, even running politicians?
So, two points:
1. If you scroll down to the previous entry on this blog, you will see a less-than-glowing review of Michael Moore's last movie, and a less-than-glowing opinion of Michael Moore himself. Indeed, many lefties are unimpressed by Moore and his movie. I've never claimed that Michael Moore was a fringe moonbat, but neither have I "embraced" him, and my opinion of Moore and his work has not changed since the release of this film.
2. As far as "mainstream Democrats" embracing Moore— give me a fucking break. Mainstream Democrats are still politicians, which means they'll lick a dog's asshole if they think it will get them a big enough campaign contribution. Michele's chosen candidate for president has literally embraced members of the Saudi royal family, as well as various Christian fundamentalists. Michael Moore may be a big fat idiot, but at least he's never claimed that evolution is a myth and that the earth is only 6,000 years old.
Furthermore—
In case it's not obvious by now, Michele is basically a one-trick pony singing a two-note song. It's a favorite tune among right-wing bloggers and it sounds something like this:
1. "The left" is amoral.
2. "The left" is insane.
So, take this line of Michele's:
And therein lies the answer to my question on what the left stands for. They don't stand for anything, really. They stand against Bush.
And yet, here I am. I wrote a post saying that lefties should get behind the U.N. endorsement of the U.S. handover plan. I wrote a negative review of Moore's movie. And, hey, a lot of my friends agree with me. We're all left. We're all voting for Kerry. And yet, our critical thinking skills seem to be intact.
What Michele has been doing, pretty much since the first time I ever visited her blog, is to claim that "the left" are all hate-mongers, pathological liars, and lunatics— and that anyone who doesn't fit that definition isn't "the left". That's her whole gag. Michele finds something inconsistent or irrational that someone opposing Bush has said or done, puts it up on her blog, and says, "See? A vote for John Kerry is a vote for whackos like this! This is the left. This is what they think."
It's fucking bullshit. The position that forms the foundation of most of Michele's attacks on John Kerry, on John Kerry's supporters, and on anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq—is bullshit. Michele's world-view is built on bullshit.
Michele recently wrote, with regard to the left:
The hell with everyone else, we just want to see Bush lose. It's a selfish goal, really. I once was on the left, you know. But back then the left was mostly selfless. It's strange to see what they've come to be.
The content of this blog proves pretty well that Michele is talking out of her ass. And obviously the content of this blog isn't the only evidence indicating that Michele's delusional— much of what one sees in the real world demonstrates that Michele's thesis is patently false.
And yet, she returns to it over and over again.
So who's irrational? Who's amoral?
Me? I'm just goofing around on my lunch break.
Most reviews of this movie make liberal use of the word "savage". It's a savage documentary, or it savages the presidency of George W. Bush. Savagely powerful, savagely intelligent. Savage this, savage that. To the extent that "savage" means "crude and unfocussed", the word is sometimes appropriate. But, for the most part, Michael Moore's new anti-Bush polemic is almost pedestrian, and sometimes frustratingly vague.
For those of you who have been living in the bole of a fossilized tree buried under one of the polar ice caps, Fahrenheit 9/11 is a movie, written and directed by Michael Moore, aimed at criticizing the Bush administration and their response to the 9/11 attacks. So, basically, this is a movie that lists what Michael Moore believes to be George W. Bush's most egregious mistakes in handling the 9/11 attacks and the threat of global terrorism.
One of the first "issues" Moore raises is Bush's slow response time on the morning of 9/11. Now, George W. Bush has made a lot of stupid mistakes during his presidency but, as far as I'm concerned, taking seven minutes, on the morning of September 11th, 2001, to absorb the fact that the United States was under attack is not one of them. A stupid mistake he, or someone within his administration, did make was to allow members of the bin Laden family to leave the country after 9/11. But Moore's presentation of that situation is so thoroughly spun that it's actually a little hard to pick out the facts.
I had this frustration with Moore's last movie, Bowling for Columbine; awash in a sea of salient data, Moore often chose to go for the cheap insult. That cheap insults are the bread and butter of most right-wing political commentary is no excuse for failing to make one's point. I went to Fahrenheit 9/11 hoping to get some good leads that I could then research myself. And there were a few nuggets of useful information— certainly many more than one is likely to discover during a similar 2-hour stretch of FOX News. However, to turn that point around, 2 hours spent listening to the BBC would have been much more productively employed.
Remember how, in 1967, the Yippies, led by Abbie Hoffman, held a rally to try and levitate the Pentagon with the power of their minds? 50,000 people turned out for that. It was pretty funny. And it made a point. But you hold that in one hand, and Daniel Ellsberg's theft of the Pentagon Papers in the other hand, it doesn't take long to figure out which one's more important in the scheme of things.
Michael Moore wants to be Ellsberg. But he consistently plays as Hoffman.
Ah well. Better luck next time, Mike.
Has anyone else heard about this Marla Ruzicka chick? I remember reading something about her in a BBC piece a while ago, but I didn't follow up on the story until tonight.
I went and checked out her site and her journal-- her writing has a lot of the same kind of flaky idealism I remember from Rachel Corrie's letters home. But fuck'n a. Let's hear it for flaky idealists.
People who do stuff like this amaze me.
Evidently, Michele recently put up a post addressing some of the points I raise in the previous entry ("context"). In that post, she makes some accusations, and denies some others. Let's take a look at some of these, shall we?
Perhaps these two men have never had a gut reaction to terrorism like I have. In fact, I'm willing to bet they never had a reaction like mine at all because, judging from their sites, we're only getting what we deserve. [emphasis added]
I've never said that. Don't believe it. Don't think this site suggests it.
What I have said is that the role of Western intervention in exacerbating the hostility of Middle Eastern Arabs toward the West is worth looking at because it suggests actions that we might take to alleviate the hostility; not because we want to appease the scary terrorists, but because justice makes more efficient foreign policy. A change in our economic and political relationship with the Middle East may save more lives and do more to foster social reform in the region than a direct large-scale invasion. This does not even, necessarily, rule out a direct large-scale invasion. But it does recontextualize it, and create opportunities for more attainable goals to such an invasion.
Many people choose to interpret that as, "let's appease the terrorists," or "we're only getting what we deserve." I tend to chalk that up to panic on their parts (see above re: "gut reaction to terrorism"), but it's still pretty annoying.
Michele again:
Perhaps I might have stayed at their sites and argued my position in the comments, if not for the tone.
Now, for anyone who's ever been to A Small Victory and commented there, this is just plain funny.
More Michele:
The other author, who once declared that he was devoting his entire blog to disseminating my words, parlays his rant against me into a rant against Jews and Christians and, well, I lost interest in what he had to say pretty darn quick.
Okay. "His entire blog" is a little misleading, because of course what I really did was just use a separate space I already had lying around in order to parse my Michele-related rants out from the rest of my writing. Michele has a link you can follow to see everything she's ever written about Micah Wright. This is basically the same thing. But whatever.
As far as this "rant against Jews and Christians" business… the post she's talking about is right here. If anyone would care to point out how that is "against Jews and Christians", I'd be interested to hear what you have to say.
Michele also wrote:
Anyone who claims that anti-Semitism, religious intolerance and extremism are basic tenets of Islam is talking out of their ass.
Well, I never said that. I have said over and over again that the so-called religion the terrorists of the Middle East are practicing is a warped, twisted version of Islam, defined to their own benefit. But don't let that stop you from your baseless conjecture, Josh.
So.
I will concede that she has never claimed that "anti-Semitism, religious intolerance and extremism are basic tenets of Islam". But I didn't say she had. What I did was to turn that statement into a link to a page at A Small Victory. Michele wrote the initial post, but there's also a comments section where a great many things were being said. Some of them are fairly extreme, and several of them advance the possibility of using thermonuclear weapons on the Middle East. One may argue that such an attitude falls short of an absolute failure to differentiate between "Islam" and "Islamofascism". But, even there, I don't make the call. There's a sentence, which is, I believe, essentially accurate. Then there's a link to a web page, where some things are said. The reader is encouraged to draw his or her own conclusions.
With regard to the "I want to go to war with the entire Middle East" comment of Michele's that I quoted several times, she says the following:
They did not reference the rest of the post at all, which would have given their readers a better feel for my anger and a sense of how raw it was at the time I wrote that.
As far as that goes, again, she's right. Sort of. I linked to her blog when I quoted her. Anyone who wanted to look at the quote in context was free to hop over and take a look at it. But, for those of you who don't know how to use a web link, let me be specific: there was more to that post of Michele's. Go read it if you like.
And, more Michele:
I really want to know what Joshua means by murderous indifference, though.
Joshua was fairly clear about what he meant by "murderous indifference". Joshua wrote some stuff about what he perceives Michele's attitude to be, then concluded with "What self-important delusional bullshit. What murderous indifference." See, it's a fairly simple rhetorical device. Sort of like if Joshua had said, "Yellow, orange, lime green. What bright colors."
And then Michele asks, "What do you mean by bright colors?"
And then Michele, after being very specific about what she did or didn't say and accusing me of "baseless conjecture" starts engaging in some very broad conjecture of her own:
I think - and I've said this before - that Josh and his kind are in a state of denial about the war on terror…
And it kind of goes on from there.
You know, I'm reminded here of a time, not so very long ago, when Michele wrote, in reference to Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, a man suspected of helping to plan the 9/11 attacks who was allegedly tortured by the CIA:
Pardon me for my barbarism, but I do think that waterboarding ["strapping a person to a board and repeatedly dunking them under water to make them think they're going to drown" – JN] the man was the very least of what should have been done to him. But Ted Rall thinks that was too much. The horror! The outrage! And Ted wants you to suffer the same fate if you vote for Bush in November. Hell, I'd vote for Bush with less ambivalence than I have right now if he would order all people like Khalid Sheikh Mohammad to be treated as such, and then to be shot afterwards.
So, just to put that in context, Michele has written that she approves of torturing and executing prisoners suspected of having been involved in terrorist activities. No trial. Nothing like that. Just torturing and executing them.
This is one of the ways Michele advocates waging the "war on terror". Never mind that ordering such a practice would galvanize the Arab population against us like nothing else could. That it would drag the war out, resulting in more U.S. military deaths and many more Arab deaths. Michele has had a "visceral" reaction to terrorism, so of course it's perfectly understandable if she advocates torture and murder.
And that, by the way, is a good example of murderous indifference. Michele's fear of terrorism has given her a taste for inflicting suffering on others, even though any fool would know— and Abu Ghraib amply demonstrates —that such a course can only result in a needless waste of lives. Michele believes that her visceral reaction to things she reads about in newspapers and sees on television justifies her attitude.
Disagreeing, often quite strongly, with Michele is not the same thing as being in denial about the war. That Michele uses the war to justify her own bloodthirsty rants is unfortunate on may levels. That she claims those who call her on her bullshit are "in denial" is just fucked up.
Okay.
First of all, let's be clear about something: the warm fuzzy feelings that western Christianity displays toward Israel and Jews is a relatively new phenomenon. As in, "after the Holocaust," new.
Prior to World War I, Muslim Arabs were much more tolerant of Jews than Christians had been up to that point. Muslim persecution of Jews during the Muslim occupation of Spain was rare, and fairly light when compared to the treatment of Jews at the hands of medieval Christians. As Christians took the Iberian Peninsula back from the Muslims, so fell the fortunes of Spain's Jewish population. There was a massive forced conversion of Spanish Jews in 1391, and the Spanish Inquisition was established expressly to investigate the loyalty of Jews who converted to Christianity during that time. In 1492, the last Muslim stronghold in Spain, Granada, fell to Christian armies. That same year, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled all Jews from Spain.
Jews were also expelled, at various times and with varying degrees of effectiveness, from almost every country in Christendom; England (1290), France (1306, 1322, 1394), Germany (1182,1348, 1394), Switzerland (1348), Portugal (1497), Provence (1490), Hungary (1349-1360), Austria (1421), Lithuania (1445, 1495).
The First Crusade, in 1096, resulted in a wide-spread and sustained massacre of European Jews.
And when shit like that went down, Jews went to Arab countries because Arabs, by comparison, were extremely tolerant of Jews.
You go look at a timeline of Jewish expulsions and massacres, you'll see immediately that, until World War I, the overwhelming majority of heinous large-scale anti-Semitism was carried out by Christians in Christian countries. The only comparable event in Muslim lands was the persecution of Jews by the Almohad Moors, from 1147 to 1212. And the Almohads did not, even at the time, represent the main stream of Muslim thought— they were a kind of radical sect within the larger Moorish community.
That all changed after World War I, when the Ottoman Empire was beaten by the League of Nations, opening an opportunity for Arab independence in the Middle East. Whichever side of the "Balfour Declaration versus McMahon Agreement debate" one comes down on, it is fairly clear that Middle Eastern Arabs felt that the region known as Palestine had been promised to them by the British and that the British had reneged on that promise. They also felt that Zionist Jews, whether operating as agents of European imperialism or simply as foreign colonists, were acting exploitively by occupying that region and attempting to create a "Jewish Homeland" in Arab territory. Things went downhill from there, and you can blame Arabs or Israelis for how things eventually played out depending on which books you read. But a few facts remain, regardless of which side of the Arab/Israeli conflict you choose to support:
This started out as a political conflict, and it's been allowed to continue for so long that it's turned into a cultural conflict. Anyone who thinks a military solution will resolve a conflict like this is an idiot. This situation needs to be handled carefully, and with an awareness of the larger context of the conflict.
But Michele, over at A Small Victory, talks about "rounding the corner". She's "rounding the corner" toward wanting "to go to war with the entire Middle East". She's harboring that belief that seems so common to Americans, that the United States is an indestructible giant; that other countries only exist because we allow them to exist and that all sovereignty but ours is conditional on our approval. Michele reacts to every headline as if her reaction to the death of an American is somehow more significant than the reaction of an Iraqi woman to the death of one of her countrymen. Michele, by virtue of being an American, is a kind of superhero. She's who the comic book is about; flying around, throwing cars, stopping bullets and outrunning speeding trains. All those little people in Iraq, whose lives are destroyed every time the United States throws a car at a bad guy and misses, are only safe for as long as Michele is sane and rational. But if they make her too mad, she'll stomp them flat.
Michele is "rounding the corner". She's getting angry, and the rest of the world won't like Michele when she's angry.
What a load of self-important delusional bullshit. What murderous indifference.
Michele and her kind will throw punches that will drag this conflict on and on.
So, just as a point of order: would all the people demanding that the U.S. get "out of Iraq now!" please reconsider their position in light of the U.N. endorsement of the U.S. plan to hand power over to an Iraqi interim government? Thank you.
I am not over-pleased with the plan myself (mostly for political, rather than logistical reasons), but we who opposed the invasion of Iraq (and by that I mean, "the not-U.N.-supported invasion of Iraq") need to be willing to admit, at some point, that the milk's been spill't, and just needs to be cleaned up. Whatever should have happened in Iraq, the fact is that there is no government there now and an immediate pull-out would be disastrous for the people who live there. Insisting that the U.S. leave with no replacement government established is a particularly callous manifestation of political correctness that will be extremely expensive for the Iraqi people. Anyone attempting to pass such a position off as being supportive of Iraqis, or sympathetic to their plight ends up looking like an idiot, a liar, or some combination of the two.
I will repeat my usual shtick about needing a more international (that is to say, U.N.-directed) military presence in Iraq. But even a U.S. military presence is better than no military presence at all and with U.N. approval the current U.S. exit plan is, effectively, as legal as it can be.
The invasion itself must be answered for this November. Direct your resources toward that.
Evidently, the United States spent more money on its military than all the other countries in the world combined; 47% of the total worldwide military spending for last year. Japan accounted for 5%, while Britain, France, and China each accounted for 4%.
Also, according to Demcracy Now internet radio, "The State Department has been forced to correct major portions of its annual report on global terrorism that was released two months ago after major mistakes were cited. The original report concluded that the number of terrorist attacks in the world in 2003 had dropped to its lowest level in 34 years. Now the report will be rewritten and it may show that 2003 had more attacks than any year in the last two decades." [emphasis added]
Hm.
A couple of weeks ago I bought a book through the internet called The Managerial Revolution, by James Burnham. I got the tip on the book, indirectly, through Clew, in connection, I think, to one of several essays I wrote in response to John Kenneth Galbraith's Economics and the Public Purpose. She suggested I look at George Orwell's critique of Burnham's book. The Orwell essay was great, and I was immediately intrigued by the book he was discussing. The problem, as it turned out, is that the book is hard to come by. The only copy in Seattle is located in the University of Washington library where, as it happens, I still have lending rights. But I like to own my own materials (I tend to reference books for years after I read them, so I like to have them ready to-hand), so I found a copy on Amazon and ordered it.
And-- okay. You know what the Necronomicon is?
It's a fictional book about black magic, written by the mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred. One of the running jokes in H.P. Lovecraft stories is that some tosser gets turned onto this book called the Necronomicon through rumors or academic curiosity. So they go through some weird process to get ahold of the book, only to have the forbidden knowledge in its pages drive them insane.
That was kind of my experience reading The Managerial Revolution last weekend.
And the weird thing is, it's not like the book says anything I haven't heard before. Most of the key ideas are actually present in another essay I posted awhile back, about Galbraith, planning systems, and Robert S. McNamara. But it strings a number of observations about the economy of industrialized nations together in a way that just floored me.
One of the things in Burnham's work that's hitting me pretty hard is a point that Orwell actually gets wrong in his review of The Managerial Revolution. Orwell's reading of Burnham's thesis is that, "the rulers of this new society will be the people who effectively control the means of production: that is, business executives, technicians, bureaucrats and soldiers, lumped together by Burnham under the name of ‘managers’. These people will eliminate the old capitalist class, crush the working class, and so organize society that all power and economic privilege remain in their own hands."
Orwell's recap of Burnham's theory mistakes a key point regarding the working class. Burnham doesn't theorize that the new managerial class will "crush the working class". His theory is, essentially, that the "working class" will cease to exist in the sense that the word is normally understood; that the proletariat will just disappear, obviated by encroaching technology, which will eliminate the role of skilled labor in the process of production.
I wrote an essay covering that idea about a year ago, but it was fairly theoretical. I didn't really have a larger context to plug the idea into.
But, in spite of the fact that I basically know better, I've always been pretty much of an anarchist. A social democrat. A believer in the power of "the workers". My earlier theorizing about the extinction of a functioning working class was, for most intents and purposes, science fiction. Burnham's writing has changed some of that. It's not that I haven't thought of most of what he's writing about. I just never added it all up. I walked right to the edge. But I didn't jump in. I understood the managerial class revolution well enough to criticize it, but I stopped short of recognizing its inevitability.
Let me repeat that last line: I stopped short of recognizing its inevitability.
And that's the Necronomicon part of the experience of reading this book. Because, as Orwell suggests, Burnham is basically a fascist, and the managerial revolution he imagines is basically a fascist social revolution. And while his specific predictions of what was going to happen after World War II are flat-out wrong (largely owing, I believe, to some important misapprehensions about the geopolitics of his time), his general predictions of what will happen to industrial economies agree exactly with observations I made a year before I'd even heard of this book-- and 60 years after it was written. So whether you, reading this post, would agree with Burnham or not, for me the experience is entirely disturbing. Not least of all because Burnham's theories suggest, generally, the ascendancy of a kind of global fascist oligarchy, with the masses of the people basically living in miserable subservience to an elite class of managers who control the hyper-technological means of production with an iron fist. The accuracy (or so I perceive it) of many of his analyses over the long run give his forecast of this global oligarchy a terrible unnerving weight.
I may have a less extreme reaction to all this once I've had a chance to digest it a little more. But at the moment I have the distinct feeling that I'm staring my own death in the face.
Evidently, Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire.
Does anyone else find the phrase "friendly fire" inherently funny in a way that's just not appropriate at a moment like this?