In slightly less apocalyptic news…
Check out Israel’s entry to this year’s Eurovision, Push the Button. It’s disturbingly catchy. Lyrics (in a combination of English, French and Hebrew) are here. The runner-up, Salaam Salami, is also pretty… um… extraordinary.
(For those of you who have never seen the Eurovision song contest before, yes, pretty much all of the music is that bad. But of course, there’s controversy — the contest organizers want to ban Israel’s entry because of “inappropriate political content.” This link also has translated lyrics)
Since nobody seems to have translated Salaam Salami, here’s a go at it
Tick tock…
You may have heard rumors that the US and Israel are planning a joint strike against Iran. I don’t have time to read through all the sources now and check on the rumors, but we’re definitely building up military strength in the Persian Gulf. Short summary of possibilities:
- This is just some saber-rattling to point out to Iran that it should, in fact, be thinking more seriously about negotiation. If so we’re in luck, because that would be a not entirely stupid move. Of course, it’s no good if you’re not willing to follow through, but that’s a legitimate negotiation tactic.
- These forces are actually going to be used in Iraq. That could go well with option 1.
- We’re planning some limited sort of operation, or to act in support of an Israeli operation. Possibilities include bombing selected targets or even doing highly targeted ground operations against them. I would have to spend a lot more time analyzing data, and for that matter analyze highly classified data, to get a sense of whether this is workable or not. It’s very risky.
- Our President has decided to make the First Classic Blunder for a third time in a row, and has no understanding of the relative military strengths of the force he just put in the Gulf and the Iranian military, nor of the consequences of turning Iran into another Iraq. Normally I would rule this out under “even he isn’t that stupid,” but the past few years have taught me the folly of betting on that.
Anyway, keep your eyes open. If I have time I’ll sniff more.
(And thanks to for pointing me at the recent changes — I’ve not been paying proper attention to political news lately)
Philosophical dilemmas
I’m in the middle of reading The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten, by Julian Baggini, a lovely little compendium of 100 classic philosophical thought experiments discussed in plain English. (I quite highly recommend this book, by the way; it’s the sort of thing that could kick off many a late-night philosophy binge with good friends and good food. Although that seems to happen even without this book)
Anyway, I just read through an example that referenced The Matrix, on the old subject of “what if we’re living in a simulation? Would it matter?” It reminded me of a few other philosophical questions that movie raised, and so in the interest of sparking some late-night drinkingphilosophy binges, here goes.
- In The Matrix, Neo discovers that his life is actually a computer simulation, and in the “real world” people are actually kept locked up in vats to power the computers. The few people who have escaped this simulation are ruthlessly hunted down by their robot captors, and have managed to create a marginal existence for themselves, hiding in fortified caves. He is convinced to aid this rebel cause, and free humanity from their artificial prison. Given that at the moment, humanity is living a relatively normal existence, and if this mission were successful humanity would be living in caves on a ruined world, hunted by robots, exactly what is the moral argument for doing this?
- At the end of the second Matrix movie, we discover that Neo’s magical abilities to control the state of the world around him in the simulated world (due to his understanding of its simulated nature) also extends to the real world. Set aside, for a moment, the explanation the movie gave for this;1 imagine instead that they took the more complicated route, and that these extended abilities were actually the first clue to realizing that the “real world” they thought they were in was also a simulation, and the actual “real world” was one step above. In such a case, would this change Neo’s obligations to his original world, and to the world he originally thought was the “real world?” How?
- To take this to its logical conclusion, there’s no reason the number 3 ought to be special. If there were an infinite hierarchy of worlds, each simulating the next (or even a branching tree of simulated worlds, some worlds simulating hundreds of others) so that none of them have a sound claim to being the “real” world, what are Neo’s obligations then? Is it right and/or worthwhile to save one world? At the expense of another? (As if he had saved the original “real world” by destroying the simulation where he started out) Or if one world sucks, is it reasonable for him to simply pack up and move to some other world of his choice? And given this infinite spectrum of worlds, in some of which people are systematically and deeply suffering, does he have some moral obligation to try to help people in less fortunate worlds? Given the infinitude of worlds, does this differ in any interesting ways from the ways people in this world are responsible for people in other parts of this world?
1The explanation was that he is actually the Messiah and has magical powers in the real world, as well. This is also right about the point where the movies stopped being even a little bit interesting, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence. But that has nothing to do with philosophy.
Revocation of authorization
A friend recently brought up an interesting point in a thread: the recent Congressional non-binding protest vote against the war in Iraq was a pretty half-assed (in fact, kind of cowardly) measure; it doesn’t actually require anyone to do anything. But there’s an alternative.
The War Powers Act requires that the Congress explicitly authorize any use of force, either by a declaration of war or other explicit statutory authorization; in the absence of such authorization, the President is required to report to the Congress every 60 days, and the Congress must explicitly (by passing a law) authorize a further 60 days of operations, or the President is legally required to withdraw forces. The Authorization for Use of Force in Iraq is such an explicit statutory authorization.
But what if the Congress were to pass a bill rescinding said authorization, and returning to the 60-day period required by the WPA? It’s not clear from the text of the WPA that such a rescindment is possible, but nor is it clear that it isn’t, and I think that given a clear Congressional intent to do so the courts would agree that it is within their power (and the spirit of the WPA) to do so. It could be drafted to restart the War Powers Act clock at the effective date of the bill, so that the President would be granted 60 days’ authorization immediately, but would need to re-apply at the end of that.
This would give the Congress direct, non-financial control over the conduct of the war: they would have the power, by simple non-passage of a bill, to “terminate any use of United States armed forces.” They would have a regular review authority, so they wouldn’t be required to simply withdraw immediately or later; in fact, they could even negotiate directly with the President about terms such as when withdrawals would occur. (Hopefully they would have common sense in not trying to micromanage a war, but I suspect that Congress’ innate avoidance of personal responsibility for controversial things will protect us from that)
What do people think about this? Should we start trying to prod our representatives to introduce such a measure?
Well, that’s reassuring.
I open up the news quickly, just to see if something interesting is up in the world, and what do I see?
Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the hand-crafted tools to hunt small mammals — the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans.
Which is pretty damned interesting from an anthropology (and primatology) perspective, although not the most cheering thing to read.
News day!
Hi everyone, lots of significant news stories today. Top of the line: the new Int’l Panel on Climate Change report is out. Or at least, the Summary for Policymakers; their web site is such an utter mess that I can’t find the actual report anywhere. Haven’t read it yet, will post once I do. (Maybe to ) Here’s pretty good news coverage from NYT. However, this report needs to be taken with a very serious grain of salt: Apparently they caved to political pressure and seriously damped the prediction about sea level rise, to basically assume that nothing bad ever happens to an ice sheet ever again. This is unfortunately total nonsense since ice sheets have been collapsing all over the place, and so it means that a lot of the predictions in this document are probably very off — in the conservative direction.
Next story, more fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Palestinians fall deeper into civil unrest. Subtext of this: After Arafat died, there was no central strongman. Hamas has been thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian agents and is working on its own little agenda, which is part of why it started shelling Israel a while ago and kidnapping soldiers (they did it before Hezbollah, when the latest Lebanese war started! These groups work in sync now) without bothering to ask the Palestinians if that was a good idea. And Fatah, Yassir Arafat’s old party, specializes mostly in corruption, despite what appear to be good intentions by its current leader Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah has the presidency and Hamas the parliament, and both have their own armed forces. So the two factions of Palestinian government are busily killing each other. If it weren’t for the fact that this is wholly destructive of any remaining bits of functioning civil society and infrastructure in the Palestinian territories, and thus one of the few ways left to make life systematically worse for the average Palestinian, I would say that these batch of idiots shooting one another is the best thing they could do with their time.
And yet another report on Iraq indicating that the place is a mess and deteriorating rapidly. (Shocking!) On the same day, a suicide attack in southern Iraq killed 60 and wounded 150.
OK, for anyone who hasn’t figured this out yet, something important to understand. Majority rule is not the defining feature of democracy; there have been plenty of dictatorships that had the support of the majority. The key feature is protection of the rights of the minority. This is the center of the “deal” in democracy: when group X loses an election, they relinquish power, because they trust that the group taking power will not use that power to, say, brutally kill group X, or take everything X owns, or change the laws so that X is never again allowed to be in power. Without that level of trust, any election is simply a sham. In Iraq, there has never been this basic level of trust, because the basic level of political alliance is to tribe (and sect, and so on). A Sunni would have to be out of his mind to vote for a Shi’ite candidate, or even to let a Shi’ite candidate take power, because they know that the Shi’ites would have no compunction at all about killing them if they had the instruments of power, and vice-versa. In a situation like this, hopping for democracy is utterly ridiculous; civil war is the only possibility, ended either by one group seizing power forcibly over the others or by stable partition.
Please, please, please, don’t forget that. Having elections does not make you a democracy any more than going to a garage makes you a car.
OK, back to work for me.
(PS: Sorry, I’m just linking to the NYT stories today; these are being covered everywhere, check your favorite news outlet for details. Except for the climate report, which I couldn’t find anywhere at all on Fox News’ web site; what a shock)
Stupid mapping question
I find that I very often want to see something like an outline of “1,500km from the Saudi border” or something similar to that, superimposed on an ordinary political map of the world. I’m sure this is really easy to do. Does anyone know of something on the web, or some simple software solution, to quickly bring these up?
Even a stopped clock.
There’s an article in the NYT about the president authorizing US troops in Iraq to use force against Iranian agents they encounter there. And for the first time in a long while, I think the president said something that wasn’t simply asinine. But what I hope this means is something significantly more aggressive. Iran is currently engaging in a very sophisticated proxy war across the Middle East, with their agents infiltrating and taking over groups and using them for violent confrontations and takeovers. (Hamas against both Israel and Fatah, Hezbollah against all of Lebanese civil society, various agents including al-Sadr in Iraq, Iranian “military representatives” in Syria, and sleeper cells in every country with a Shi’ite population) These guys are using Iraq as a perfect opportunity to set up people who can do all of the things that they don’t want to do openly; a really significant fraction of the violence in Iraq is being driven by these agents, for Iranian purposes. (Mostly, to screw with the US, and to even have a chance to attack US forces, train against them, and evaluate their capabilities in the field)
If Iran is going to fight a “secret war” with the US, the US should feel no compunction about fighting a secret war back. Let me armchair-general for a moment: I would have already issued orders to capture or kill any Iranian agents found in Iraq, and if they have any local cell organizations that aren’t valuable for some other purpose, to simply wipe them out. Iran can’t complain about nasty things happening to its people when it denies that they’re in there; OK, let’s take them up on that. The fewer remaining members of their “intelligence services,” the better.
So for once, I actually think that our president’s call for increased military action in some regard is a good idea. Mark it well, it won’t happen that often.
If you can buy this…
…I’ve got a prison colony I’d like to interest you in.
A lovely little exchange between our Attorney General and Sen. Specter at the Jan. 18th Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, which were mostly about legislative and judicial oversight of Gonzales’ mass wiretapping program. The main story of that day was that Gonzales basically indicated that the executive would do everything in its power to evade the substance of the order, but the fun part was the conversation that began when Gonzales said, “There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away.”
From the fact that the Constitution’s only mention of habeas is that “The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it,” he therefore concludes that the Constitution does not grant you this right at all.
I love the sort of fellow we have in the AG’s office. I really wasn’t certain if our administration could find a more odious person than Ashcroft, but apparently if you start with people whose past experience is in writing legal justifications for torture, you can.
Side note: This story appeared on slashdot with a note that it wasn’t being covered by the mainstream press, but only by the indies. However, today’s Washingon Post corroborates the story.
(For those who don’t follow the law, habeas corpus is the right that, if you are imprisoned, you can go to a court and demand that whoever is imprisoning you show that they have the legal authority to do so, e.g. that they’re doing so in order to charge you with a crime. Without it, you can be hauled off to prison “just because” and left there)
Edit: You know, it takes a certain marvelous skill for an Attorney-General to get Bay Area Indymedia and the John Birch Society to simultaneously consider him a dangerous scumbag, and for the same reason.
Edit 2: Here, watch the conversation. It’s a gas.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 