There have been countless articles dedicated to the similarities between America's growing imperialism and ancient Rome's. The similarity, of course, is too pronounced to ignore, though its accuracy and degree may reasonably be debated.
Now we have taken yet another step in Rome's direction. The Roman Republic had, as part of its governance structure, the emergency office of dictator which could only be held for six months in states of emergency. The dictator was just that: an authoritarian figure whose pronouncements carried the force of law. The office had such a short term limit because it was designed to free up impediments to solving an immediate crisis, and once that crisis had been resolved, the regular rule of law was supposed to resume.
Of course, that's not the way it always worked. The dynast Sulla managed to install himself as dictator indefinitely. And, importantly, Julius Caesar's demand that he be made dictator for life was the final nail in the coffin of the Roman Republic.
There are plenty of cases where authoritarian regimes come to power in times of national emergency, and this was clear to our Founders. Nonetheless, they never created a constitutional office of dictator even in cases of severe national distress precisely because they were so acutely aware of what that provision had brought about in the Roman Republic. And yet, here we are now. Our president has created the National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive which effectively gives him dictatorial control of our branches of government for the duration of:
any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions
I wonder how long our republic will last.
Labels: 'merica, george-bush, history, politics, rome
When asked about torture, people inevitably point to the "ticking time bomb scenario" as an example of a situation in which torture is justified. Most of the time, torture apologists don't point out the no ticking time bomb scenario has ever been recorded in history. Read that again. There has never been a situation where a terrorist has been captured and torture would have been able to save lives in imminent danger.
And yet we have mealy-mouthed presidential candidates like Mitt Romney who claim that we need to engage in "enhanced" interrogation techniques (in Romneyspeak that means "not torture") in ticking bomb situations. He wants to double our detainment camp at Guantanamo for the express reason that it denies prisoners of the rights they would be afforded on American soil. The line about doubling Guantanamo, by the way, was the money line that drew enthusiastic applause from the audient. You see, suspected terrorists are like radioactive HAZMAT, we can't risk them touching the very land we live on!
Don't get me wrong, I don't think there's any real chance at all the Mitt Romney will be the Republican candidate for president, but it's a sad state of affairs where a man who is as wrong as he is on security is considered a serious candidate.
Labels: election, mitt-romney, politics, rebpulicans
The latest craze these days is to come up with an Iraq withdrawal plan, preferably with bullet points. Well, budding political strategist that I am, I've written up my plan to withdraw the troops from Iraq and paved the road to the White House for any candidate who has the courage to take me up on it. Look at the footer of this page, this plan is licensed under a Creative Commons license (as if that were relevant). You, too, can adopt the Darian Plan For Withdrawal From Iraq:
- Announce immediate closure of the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp, return of habeas corpus rights for all Americans, and a renewed commitment to the Geneva Conventions.
- Immediately begin public, high-level negotiations with Iran and Syria and ask those countries for help in Iraq. Our interests are aligned with theirs. Cease beating the war drums against Iran.
- Having thus laid the groundwork for a return to international law (you may also want to close our "secret" CIA prisons and our "extraordinary rendition" programs), go back to the U.N. and tell the truth this time. Offer to pay for whatever international U.N. troop numbers are necessary to bring some measure of order back to Iraq and withdraw American troops. One of the reasons the United States is losing the war of ideas is because we started this war under false pretenses and we've turned Iraqi life into a living hell. The U.N. does not suffer from our deserved lack of credibility.
- Broach that subject we've desperately avoided: maybe Iraq is not a viable state; maybe it needs to be broken into a Sunni, Kurdish, and Shiite state. This is an international debate and belongs on the floor of the U.N. General Assembly in addition to the Iraqi Parliament.
- Open all of the civilian contract work bidding up to international corporations. Sever the sweetheart deals that have made a mockery of the sacrifices our armed forces have made. With a transparent bidding process, other nations will have a stake in rebuilding Iraq and the American people won't have to be fleeced by the likes of Titan, C.A.C.I. and Halliburton (among others).
Always remember that
Iraq ≠ Baghdad. We have not been able to pacify the
capital of Iraq, so it's time to admit our mistake, seek outside help, and, yes, pay for it.
Labels: iran, iraq, politics, syria, U.N., war
Andrew Sullivan says Britain is humiliated, Amos at Kishkushim says Iran is humiliated, The Independent covers the spin. But in the end, I think I like Terry Jones' take the best.
Labels: britain, diplomacy, iran, politics, war
This story about prison programs that are clearly (if not explicitly) designed to indoctrinate and convert inmates who - as the headline astutely points out - are a "captive audience" sickens me. If you want to know how Americans
should be reacting to this, just try this simple mental exercise. Read the article and make a few replacements:
- Replace "Christian" with "Muslim."
- Replace "Christianity" with "Islam."
- Replace "Christ" or "Jesus" with "Allah."
Now, tell me how the average American would react to such news. Imagine the outcry against the politicians who are lining up to support the current program if they supported the one in our mental exercise. That reaction (focus on it again) should be exactly the same as the reaction to the actual content of the article. Is it?
Labels: christianity, conservatism, islam, politics, religion, sham
Scott Adams argues that atheism is becoming more acceptable to the American public, but I think he's misreading the significance of a few bestselling books.
I think the hidden benefit of Islamic extremism is that it freed the atheists from their closets. The old mindset in the United States was that almost any religion was good, and atheism was bad. But since 9/11, atheism has moved above Islam in the rankings, at least in the minds of Christians and Jews in the United States.
(Scott Adams - The Dilbert Blog: Atheists: The New Gays)
I think if there has been a trend, it has been one of polarization. The religious in this country (and
others) have become a much more concerted voice than they used to be. To a
much lesser extent, atheists, too, have been asserting themselves in public discourse. This isn't one of those cases - like general politics - where I can claim to be a centrist. "Faith" is ruining the modern world. Perhaps it has always existed, but
why should it always have to?
Labels: atheism, christianity, islam, judaism, politics, religion
As most people outside of California now know (in the wake of the special election that made Arnold Schwarzenegger the governor of California), California has
a ballot initiative system that allows anybody to bring an item up for vote in a referendum and bypass the state legislature entirely. This system makes it impossible for California's State Assembly to overturn a referendum item that has been put into place by the voters.
I was approached yesterday by two people who asked me if I would sign a petition to "get an initiative on the ballot to pay for more cancer research." It sounded like a good idea, but I was wary. As a rule, I don't think California's state referendum system is a good idea. It is supremely wasteful, undermines the elected legislature, and allows for some private factions to wield too much political power by virtue of having enough money to mobilize a street campaign to get initiatives onto ballots and the resources to blitz the public with ad campaigns.
Nevertheless, what's wrong with funding
cancer research, I thought? So, despite my better judgment, I agreed to sign the petition.
As I was writing my name, I thought that perhaps I should read the text of the actual proposition. As it turns out, the bulk of the initiative had nothing to do with cancer. It is a proposal to raise taxes on the sale of tobacco by $1.50 per each pack of cigarettes. Now, I don't smoke, so this tax would not directly affect me. I did feel like I had been baited-and-switched, however, and I crossed out the "
Afshin" I had already written and told the petitioners that I would not sign it. I told them that it seemed to me that they had misrepresented the issue. And regardless of the issue, I felt that the referendum system was inherently flawed.
One of the two campaigners was perfectly willing to accept my refusal, but the other thought he could still convince me. He told me that by signing the petition, I was only helping the initiative make its way onto the ballot, and I was not actually voting for the issue. True enough, I responded, but regardless of the actual content of this initiative, I don't like the idea of initiatives at all. To this, he countered that I was putting people like him out of a job, because he got paid to find signatures for these petitions. This, I thought, was a low blow. I told him that it was nothing personal (and I even tried to smile as I said it), but I would not sign the petition. I asked him to take care and have a nice day.
Research the petition!
When I got home, I decided to look into the issue. Sure enough, the whole story is
significantly more complex than the man and woman I met yesterday would have had me believe. Apparently there are two separate proposals to impose a tax on tobacco products. The two are not mutually exclusive, but it's unlikely that both can pass (because that would entail a $3 tax per pack of cigarettes). Each proposal is designed to address healthcare costs: one wants to offset the cost of emergency care and the other aims to pay for health insurance for all of California's uninsured children (which is a noble cause, but surely California can come up with a better system for trying to bring this about rather than paying petitioners to lie to voters). Notice the conspicuous lack of "cancer research." If you look closer, one of the proposals would spend one-third of its revenue to "disease research." That would be the proposal that is backed by American Cancer Society. Or perhaps the lobbyists I met were referring to the
1 percent of the other proposition's projected revenue that would be allocated to the breast cancer fund.
I'm still not sure which of the two propositions I refused to sign for.
(Most likely) reject the petition!
This is the first time I've been approached to sign one of these petitions, so it wouldn't be fair to characterize every referendum drive as deceptive, but it sure does confirm my original suspicions about the entire process. And I still think
we should get rid of this system.
Labels: ballot propositions, california, politics
Bruce Reed is positively gleeful as he points out President Bush's low approval rating.
He's not alone. In fact, the
New York Times has been hammering the point home all month. The trouble with this assessment, of course, is that it's just
plain wrong. Don't get me wrong, I think Gilroy goes a bit nuts in his piece, but he's right that all of these rhetorical losses mean very little in terms of political power.
Ladies, do you really dig UNIX?
I ran into
this shirt on ThinkGeek and it made me wonder: how many of the girls in these action shots actually have a computer running some UNIX or *nix OS? I'm guessing the
Google employee probably does. The
cute girl holding the
O'Reilly book probably does, too. The
girl with the stuffed Tux (the penguin) is also a likely candidate. But I'm skeptical of
some of the more
teenybopper-looking photos. Maybe those girls dig
eunuchs. Touché, double-entendre'd shirt, touché.
Rock alert:
I just received an email saying that
Lifetime will be playing in San Francisco in January! I definitely don't listen to the same music I listened to in 1998, but you can bet I'll be at that show. Tickets go
on sale on the 20th.
Lightning rods are the Devil's work.
There is an interesting
op-ed contribution in the
New York Times today about how some Americans have always valued "faith" over reason.
Seasonal Colors
Now that I'm skinning my page (this refers to an earlier incarnation of this blog) according to the terror alert level, I'm hoping that the Department of Homeland Security plans to change the terror alert level according to the seasons (that is, the
natural seasons, not the
electoral ones - another
link), because this yellow/orange color suits the fall, but winter is fast approaching and I wouldn't want my page to go out of style.
Labels: fud, music, politics, religion, technology, terrorism
Since I found out about it, I have been duly disgusted by the "
Conservative Punk" website, not because I don't like conservatives, though I tend to reject a lot of what they stand for, and not because I don't like punks, though I can't help but recoil in embarrassment at my own punk rock youth. Rather, the whole "wolf in sheep's clothing" conceit is a powerful deterrent, and here is that motif played out as fully as anywhere. I am not a big fan of contradictions, and "conservative punk" sounds more like a bad joke than a real movement. Anyway, there is a funny segment of that site endorsing a
boycott of Chinese goods:
While some websites will encourage you to boycott companies based on the perceived political bend of their CEO (IE Buyblue.org), we at Conservativepunk feel that punishing workers because the suits might have made donations to political causes we might not like is not an intelligent use of the power of our dollar. Instead, we believe that our consumer power can be put to the best use through the boycott of Chinese goods.
So, basically, it's wrong to punish workers because "the suits" might have politics we don't like, but
it's perfectly fine to punish the Chinese because
their "suits" have politics we don't like. Good call. What was it I was saying about contradictions, earlier?
The punks go on to point out several reasons why we should boycott Chinese goods. Some of them are indeed valid, but the very first one is:
China's labor practices encourage outsourcing and drive down American wages. Aren't you tired of manufacturing jobs leaving the US?
In effect, aren't you tired of allowing the Chinese to compete with us fairly? Wouldn't you prefer to tip the scale back in our favor? I guess they take the punk D.I.Y. ethic so seriously that they demand we "do it ourselves."
Heir Apparent apparently errs:
I'm a little mystified by
this report that Prince Charles plans to "explain the virtues of Islam" to President Bush. Apparently, he believes that the US has been too confrontational against Islam (as a religion, I take it). Believe me, I have plenty of objections to the Bush administration, and I have often complained about them here. But I do
not think Bush has misrepresented Islam as a religion, and I can think of many occasions where he has made it a point to stress that our enemy is
not Islam or Muslims. Frankly, I think too often our liberal (and honorable) tendency to try not to offend the sensibilities of others leads us to absurd situations where we are paralyzed to speak the truth. One group I particularly admire for taking a hard line against Islamist terrorism are the
Free Muslims. Perhaps if Prince Charles advocated a line more akin to the Free Muslims (which British Prime Minister Tony Blair is now beginning to do) than an unconditional appeal to multiculturalism and acceptance, then Britain might be a less hospitable place for
radical clerics who want to destroy the open governments that allow them to preach in the first place.
Sort of related to terrorism, I guess:
My friend Brandon asked to see the code for the terror alert function, so I thought others might be interested as well. Here it is:
function getTerrorAlert() 'Version 1.1
'*********************************************************************
'Do not modify the variables unless you know what you're doing. *
'(1) intTimeout is fair game, change it to whatever timeout length *
'you like, but don't exceed Server.ScriptTimeout. *
'(2) strErrorResponse is self-explanatory. *
' *
'Version 1.0: Got the alert *
'Version 1.1: Includes a timeout value. *
'Future versions aren't planned unless something is wrong with this. *
' *
'Afshin Darian - http://eighties-night.com/ *
' *
'AS USUAL, THIS IS UNDER A CREATIVE COMMONS LICENSE. CHECK MY SITE *
'FOR THE LINK TO THE MOST CURRENT VERSION OF THE LICENSE. *
'*********************************************************************
dim intTimeout : intTimeout = 10 'in seconds
dim strErrorResponse : strErrorResponse = "couldn't contact dhs"
'*********************************************************************
dim strTemp, xml, xmlhttp, timeStart, timeCurrent, LOADED, strURL
strTemp = ""
LOADED = 4 'This is the readyState value when xmlhttp has loaded
strURL = "http://www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryCondition"
set xmlhttp = server.createObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
set xml = server.createObject("Microsoft.XMLDOM")
xml.async = false
call xmlhttp.open("GET", strURL, false)
call xmlhttp.send()
timeStart = now
do
timeCurrent = now
intTimeTaken = cint(datediff("s", timeStart, timeCurrent))
if (intTimeTaken > intTimeout) then
strTemp = strErrorResponse
call xmlhttp.abort()
exit do
end if
loop while xmlhttp.readyState <> LOADED
if (xmlhttp.readyState = LOADED) then
call xml.loadxml(xmlhttp.responsetext)
strTemp = xml.selectsinglenode("/THREAT_ADVISORY").getAttribute("CONDITION")
end if
set xmlhttp = nothing
set xml = nothing
getTerrorAlert = strTemp
end function
Labels: coding, conservatism, fud, islam, music, politics, religion, terrorism
Afshin Molavi, who is a fellow at the New American Foundation, contributes an op-ed piece in today's
New York Times, called "
Our Allies in Iran." He makes the case for easing some of our relations with Iran, in order to encourage the democratic-minded middle-class of Iranians, without ceding anything to the hardline regime. I think he's right, but I don't imagine anybody in the Bush administration would be convinced by his argument.
Speaking of the New America Foundation . . .
While I was reading about the New America Foundation, I ran into
this blog entry, by Nathan Newman, which complains about a statement made by the New America Foundation that points out the basic flaw in employer-based healthcare. Newman makes an analogy that should strike you as flawed even if you don't catch the immediate problem:
When Wal-Mart's trucks break down, no one expects the government to pay to repair them. Wal-Mart pays to fix them and the costs are included in the price of the goods they sell.
Yet moderate Democrats apparently think that when workers get sick, companies don't have the responsibility to "repair" their workers.
The problem, of course, is this:
Wal-Mart owns its trucks, but Wal-Mart does not own its employees. So while it is perfectly natural that Wal-Mart should expect nobody to care for its possessions, it simply does not follow that Wal-Mart has to pay for its workers' healthcare.
And while I'm pretending to be a right-winger . . .
(note: this has since been disabled)
In the spirit of civic awareness, I have decided that my page should serve as more than just a waste of time. So, I have changed my theme to indicate the Department of Homeland Security's Terror Advisory level at the time you load the page. If the DHS's website is unavailable, the theme will default to the "baby blue" theme I had before. However, if the DHS site is down, you should probably be more concerned about what happened to the DHS than what color my page will render. Of course, the problem could be on my end, so you might want to (perhaps) check a more reputable news source. In case you need to brush up on what the colors mean, here is the Terror Advisory
reference, or you can just look at the "terror_alert" sidebar on this page. If you want to do something similar, here is the XML file from the DHS site. It is sparse:
www.dhs.gov/dhspublic/getAdvisoryConditionLabels: conservatism, fud, iran, politics, terrorism
Arrested Development is quite possibly the funniest (live-action) show on television these days. For a brief moment in the most recent episode (second episode of season three), they flashed this very real image on the screen and it was sheer comedic genius:
Labels: arrested development, comedy, politics
I read an interesting account of mass "panic" during disasters. I have to say that my own limited experience corroborates Professor Fischhoff's claim that there is a "public resilience" that emerges whenever the circumstances call for extraordinary humanity:
Whatever its source, the myth of panic is a threat to our welfare. Given the difficulty of using the term precisely and the rarity of actual panic situations, the cleanest solution is for the politicians and the press to avoid the term altogether. It's time to end chatter about "panic" and focus on ways to support public resilience in an emergency.
(nytimes.com/2005/08/07...fischhoff.html)
Labels: politics, public-safety, society
In response to an editorial in the Washington Post today, I wrote a short piece further detailing the parallels between the political situations in Iran and Pakistan. I agree with the Post's editorial, but I think the similarity is so striking that it deserves a closer look:
Most Americans either do not know, or have chosen to forget, that the seeds of Iran's 1979 Islamic Revolution were sown by the CIA and Britain's MI6 in 1953 when they successfully arranged a coup d'etat which removed Iran's elected prime minister, Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh. Mossadegh was seen as a threat to British and American interests because he had passed a law nationalizing Iran's oil assets. When Mossadegh was removed from office, the Shah was free to exercise complete authoritarian control over Iran until he was overthrown in 1979. The U.S. and Britain realized that it would be much easier to influence Iranian policy through one man, the Shah, than proposing policies that would be mutually beneficial to Iran and western nations would have been.
Their miscalculation, of course, was an underestimation of Iranian dissatisfaction with their appointed dictator. The government of the Shah had been tempered by an elected representative government led by Dr. Mossadegh, and without these checks, the Shah was free to rule oppressively over an Iran that had tasted freer government. By 1979 many groups were vying for the overthrow of the Shahís government. Decades of tyranny had galvanized the people, and the more radical right-wing revolutionaries eventually gained the greatest prominence in the ensuing revolution. America and Britain, in 1979, were in the awkward position of having to reject a government based on the will of the Iranian people, a people driven to a radical government entirely due to British and American policies.
Today, both the American left and right completely ignore the devastating policies, of their own government, that led to the creation of the Islamic republic of Iran. Iranís government is demonized as anti-western, but historical context is conveniently omitted from the diatribes. Even worse, American politicians are making the same mistakes their predecessors made in the '50s. Just as America and Britain supported the Shahís authoritarian rule in the decades leading up to the Iranian revolution, they are now, under the guidance of President Bush, supporting Pakistanís despot General Pervez Musharraf. Like the Shah of Iran, General Musharraf gained complete authority over his state by a coup, which disenfranchised Pakistanís representative civilian government. He is widely reviled by Pakistanis and he is rightly seen as a tyrant whose power is guaranteed by American and British policies. Like Iran's radical clerics did in the '70s, radical Pakistani religious groups are gaining power, and a revolution like Iranís is entirely conceivable.
Musharraf has occasionally paid lip service to the idea of democratizing his nation. Most recently, he had promised to resign as the Pakistani Army Chief of Staff by today. He has reneged on this promise, and he still retains control of both the "civilian" government and the military of Pakistan. Like Iran, Pakistan has a history of representative civil governance, and like Iran before it, that tradition has been suppressed by western governments. If President Bush is sincere about his oft-stated desire to spread democracy in this region, then he would do well to learn the lessons of his predecessor and threaten to withdraw American support from General Musharraf if the Pakistani dictator does not make significant progress in his promise to re-democratize his increasingly radicalized nation.
Labels: history, iran, pakistan, politics
Note: This post originally appeared on a now-defunct site on May 11, 2004.
I unapologetically supported the idea of going to war in Iraq. I never really believed in this whole WMD idea, but I thought the war was just on humanitarian grounds. From the beginning, I wished the UN had supported taking action against Saddam Hussein's regime; but despite their inaction, I still agreed with the Bush Administration's stance of unilateral force if necessary. In fact, I still hold Russia, France, and Germany indirectly responsible for much of the botched operation that has since ensued because it was clear from the start that their objections were based on political and cynical motivations rather than legitimate ones. I always had misgivings about the Bush Administration's ability to conduct this war properly; after all, Afghanistan was still left unfinished, and the timing of the Iraq war did seem somewhat questionable. But I was willing to let it slide: I thought we had a military that could handle a war on two fronts.
As it turns out, our military cannot handle the war adequately on either front. My cautious trust in the Administration was misplaced. I always had misgivings about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but I thought that Paul Wolfowitz and Colin Powell were reasonable men. Boy, was I wrong about Wolfowitz. If I've learned one thing from this affair, it's this: neo-conservatives are no more enlightened about the "real world" than anybody else. If anything, they seem to live in a fantasy world where America's superpower status is somehow magically omnipotent and needs not answer to anybody, including the American populace.
The war in Iraq could have been a just war. I thought I was seeing through rhetoric on both sides. On the left, the "no blood for oil" peaceniks just seemed too cynical to be right. On the right, the WMD threat did not seem credible. And so, I arrived at my conclusion based on moral reasoning: any dictator we remove is a good thing. If the UN wasn't going to live up to its role as the world's governing body, maybe America could fill some of the gap.
America has not filled this gap. Donald Rumsfeld has openly admitted that the tortures we have so far seen are only the tip of the iceberg. As far as the larger war effort, Rumsfeld's Pentagon has been woefully (perhaps criminally) unprepared for the occupation that was certain to follow an invasion. Colin Powell's strategy of overwhelming force, though more expensive, would have been the only realistic way to succeed in this war. I was amazed that Rumsfeld's invasion-on-the-cheap policy won the support of the White House. As a result of that policy, and other failings, this Administration has seriously damaged, if not destroyed, any chance of building a friendly, democratic Iraq.
If I'd known then what I know now, I never would have supported this war. I sorely overestimated the leadership ability of this Administration. Like many liberals, I hoped for an internal coup which would increase Colin Powell's influence. But that did not happen. And I will be the first to admit that I was taken in by the neo-conservatives. But I was wrong on nearly every front.
Labels: iraq, politics, sham, war
