Random Thoughts

Remember that horrible Blackwater shooting in Iraq where guards mowed down 17 unarmed Iraqis in a crowded square?  Well a judge has thrown the case out because the State Department personnel who first interviewed the guards promised them immunity in exchange for their testimony, despite the fact that they had no authority to do so.  Bottom line:  this is why you don’t fight wars with mercenaries.

If you knew the kind of people who go to work for Blackwater it would horrify you that we send we give them guns and send them into foreign countries with no legal mechanism in place for punishing misconduct.

I haven’t bought his book on growing up in West Baltimore yet, but this piece by Ta-Nehisi Coates is quite good.  In it he discusses, among other things, the impact of having two parents who were present:  he draws an analogy of “being dragged across the finish line” while growing up that I think is quite perceptive.

Hello Republican House in 2010:

Award winning columnist Joe Klein  writes the following:

As Karen notes below, Senator Tom Coburn from Oklahoma–who, with James Inhofe, constitute the most extreme Senate delegation from any state–prayed for the incapacitation or death of a Democratic Senator so that health care would be blocked.

Sounds absolutely terrible, doesn’t it?  This Coburn guy must be a really terrible fellow… Except, of course, that’s not what Coburn said.  Here are his actual words:

What the American people ought to pray is that somebody can’t make the vote tonight.

Now you can certainly interpret those words as Klein did, but when you’re a respected journalist you don’t get to simply assume the worst about people and move on.  You’re supposed to provide as accurate and balanced reading of events as possible — even if you’re just blogging.

Klein, of course, is a huge fan of health care “reform.”  One of his favorite provisions is the individual mandate, which he argues will force young, healthy people to buy insurance they wouldn’t otherwise purchase, lowering costs for everyone else.  What he doesn’t mention is a less popular, but economically equivalent way of achieving the same outcome:  instead of forcing young people to purchase something they don’t want, we could just have an “under 30 tax” and distribute the proceeds to the rest of the population.  That way people who are early in their careers and suffering under a mound of student debt could be saddled with yet another financial obligation, for the benefit of those with much higher salaries.  I know the AARP thinks it’s a great idea.

The law says I can walk away from my house, even if I can afford to make payments.  Is is ethical to do so?  I say no:

So no, I don’t see jerks who speculate on houses and then walk away from their mortgages because they’d rather spend the money on cruises as heroes of the working class, striking a well-deserved blow against the banks for the rest of us.  I see them as the folks who are doing their best to ruin a very good thing for the rest of us.

(Are you allowed to do things like “quote of the day” for a site as irregularly updated as mine?)

From the Talking Mirror comes this Word on Internet Commenters:

Turns out, the overwhelming majority of people with internet access are inarticulate, misanthropic pricks with a surplus of time but a deficit of brain activity.

Not to be confused with eigenvalue.

And The New Yorker was born:

The Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

I am of course being unfair here to the New Yorker, which is a fine magazine to which I subscribe.  However, I do feel that they sometimes stray into this territory, especially when it comes to writing about current events that are outside their normal purview; good examples are the financial crisis or in a recent article about UAVs when they attempted to provide context on the laws of war.

A couple days late for the holiday, but this passage from Lincoln’s second inaugural address came to mind:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

We shouldn’t do this, but we should get our elected representatives to say so, not unelected judges.  And it should be our elected representatives, not judges, who decide how much people should be compensated in cases like this.  Unfortunately, by choosing to lobby the judiciary the New York Times is taking pressure off of where it needs to be — Congress.

According to James Fallows, an Atlantic correspondent who’s been in China for the past three or four news, Fox News has a striking resemblance to the Chinese media propaganda machine:

I didn’t see anything on Fox from mid-2006 through mid-2009; for better or worse, it’s not carried in China. (The English TV news channels you can get there are BBC, CNN International, CNBC, sometimes Bloomberg.) I have seen it since coming back this summer. And in a way, I realize that I had been seeing it all along: except for more modern production values, it’s the closest thing America offers to what it’s like to be exposed to the Chinese government’s 24/7 internal propaganda machine. When I saw the clip below from Media Matters, as highlighted by Andrew Sullivan, I thought: make it a little more boring, put it in Mandarin, and substitute “splittists” etc for the people Fox is talking about (maybe the Dalai Lama in place of Van Jones), and I could be right back in Beijing.

Are Maddow and Olbermann on MSNBC comparably relentless and “biased”? Of course they are. But no one pretends their shows are “real” news operations or are “fair and balanced.” And certainly they have become what they are as a market and political response to Fox’s success. Indeed, the general polarization and spectacle-mindedness of the news ecology in part is homage to what Fox has figured out as a business and political model.