E.J. Dionne

LINK:

In my view, the new media forms are answering a great need that traditional journlism was not answering. Though as a consumer of blogs from left to right, I often get important and accurate information from their work, they do not exist primarily to inform. They exist to engage citizens in the obligations and magic of politics. They draw people into the fight. They have made millions of people feel that their voices will be heard somewhere and, when aggreghated together, can have a real influence on the outcome of policy debates and elections.

In fact, the opinionated forms of journalism are not new to the media or our public life. They take us back in our history to a time when most journalism was partisan and raucously engaged on one side or another in our political battles....

If there is a problem with traditional, just-the-facts-m'am journalism and its twist-your-self-into-a-pretzel effort to appear non-partisan or bi-partisan, it is that such journalism was in many ways demobilizing. Because journalists could not declare that they were Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, they often went out of their way, sometimes unconsciously and unintentally, to sell a variety of ideas that actually drove people away from politics. You couldn't be partisan, so you said they were all crooks or liars. (Every once in a while, you even got the "they are all good men and women" stories.) You couldn't be partisan, so you said there was no difference between or among the politcians - or, alternatively, that they were all too extreme....

The real issue confronting modern journalism is thus a paradoxical one. There is a need to resurrect a concern for what's true---to draw clearer distinctions between fact and opinion, between information and mere assertion. At the same time, there is an urgent requirement that the media take seriously their obligation to draw people, as citizens, into the public debate, to demonstrate that the debate is accessible and that it matters. What is needed, in other words, is both a strengthening of the older professional ethic involving accuracy and balance and a new engagement with the obligations of journalists to democracy.

For all of its shortcomings, the success of opinionated journalism on the radio, cable television and the blogs reflects a public thirst for debate and argument that goes beyond the confines usually imposed by conventional definitions of news. The lesson is not that all should copy their style of argument, but that argument and engagement are very much in demand. For the established media, this will mean going back to the original debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey. The objective should be to salvage Lippmann's devotion to accuracy and fairness by putting these virtues to the service of the democratic debate that Dewey so valued.

In broad terms, the media need to help us recover what Lasch called "the lost art of argument."

Don't Go There

A script for an advertisement targeting black voters aired during the recent election campaigns (produced by America's PAC):

D: The night's still young! Let's head to the river and try out the slots!

M: Naw, I gotta get home. I promised Kathleen I'd help the kids with their homework.

D: You know, the Army really changed you.

M: War does that. It makes you value what you're fighting for.

D: So I suppose you want me to vote Republican, like you and your soldier buddies.

M: Not at all. You've got no reason to.

D: How's that?

M: Well, you don't work for a living. So what do you care about keeping taxes low?

D: Hey, that's cold.

M: You cheat on your wife. So why would you want an amendment to protect marriage?

D: A man's got to do what a man's got to do.

M: And I know you're not going to enlist to defend your country.

D: Not everyone's as slow as you are, bro.

M: And if you make a little mistake with one of your hos, you'll want to dispose of the problem toot sweet, no questions asked, right?

D: Naw, that's too cold. I don't snuff my own seed.

M: Huh. Really? Well, maybe you do have a reason to vote Republican!

The Kinks - Father Christmas

NBA Salaries

You know the league is f-ed up when Chris Weber is the second highest paid player, making more than Shaq, Duncan, Kobe Bryant, Nowitzki, etc.

Cats

Mrs. A-train, I want a cat.

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Smart children "more likely to become vegetarians"

LONDON (Reuters) - Children with high IQs are more likely to be vegetarians when they grow up, according to research reported on Friday.

A British study of more them 8,000 men and women aged 30 whose IQs had been measured when they were 10, showed that the higher the IQ, the greater the odds of being a vegetarian.

"People who are more intelligent as children, who will obviously keep that intelligence when they are 30, were more likely to say they are vegetarians at that age than those that were less intelligent," said Dr Catherine Gale, an epidemiologist at the University of Southampton in England.

She added the findings, which are published online by the British Medical Journal, were consistent with other studies showing people who are more intelligent tend to eat a healthier diet and exercise more.

Global Warming

Sustainability, energy independence and agricultural policy.

Some ideas.

Barack Obama

Will and imagination.

The War on Drugs

Little Pink Houses.

Believe it or not, there was a time when people would have doubted a picture like this could have been taken in America. No one would believe it -- probably some third-world despot or Eastern European dictatorship.

In fact, it was taken in Durham, North Carolina by a college photojournalist, and recently won in the "Spot News" category of the College Photographer of the Year competition.

Here's the description:

A member of the Durham Police Department Selective Enforcement Team escorts a child to use the bathroom after serving a search warrant at a suspected drug house. Working closely with the police department's Gang Units, SET is responsible for making high-risk entries into dwellings to serve search warrants. Gang Unit Two made two controlled buys, or drug purchases, from the home with the help of an informant, giving them probable cause for a search warrant.

Killer Products

LINK

Justice Grover v. Justice Oscar

Scalia and Breyer sell very different constitutional worldviews.

Schoolyard bullying in Japan leads to rash of student suicides

NAGANO, Japan - The sixth-grade girl was found early one morning hanging from an overhead screen in her classroom. She left seven separate envelopes for her classmates, mother and school authorities, each decorated with a teddy bear, balloon or other cute picture.

Torture, a political winner in the U.S.

Even though I'm glad the Republicans got thumped in the last election, I found it very depressing that people like Ohio's senator elect Sherrod Brown voted for Bush's torture bill. I found it even more depressing that Bush's torture proposal was specifically timed so that it could be used as a campaign issue (so that officials who voted against the torture bill could be painted as soft on terror). In other words, in American politics being pro-torture is a political winner. What have we become?

Lt. Brandon del Pozo on torture:

Henry Shue, and more recently David Sussman, describe at length the way torture violates the person in an extremely sinister way. They talk about the way torture makes a person feel, the vulnerabilities it exploits, and the way in which it turns the very substance of personhood against itself. It uses a person’s extension in the physical world to enslave her consciousness, devolving her personhood to a state where it is no more endowed with dignity and rational agency than the most primitive sentient being, all the while subjected to the most severe forms of distress, fear and agony that sentience permits. Sussman argues that “through the combination of captivity, restraint, and pain, the physical and social bases of rational agency are actively turned against such agency itself... [a] perversion of the most basic human relations.” Making clear that in his view this cannot be justified by our present understanding of when and how we may cause harm, he concludes that “whether such objections could ever be overcome by legitimate military or punitive interests is a question that waits upon more comprehensive understandings of the morality of punishment, warfare, and self-defense.”

...

[comparing war to torture] What is warfare, after all, but an attempt by one army to control and shape a battlefield’s ecology so that it not only kills the enemy, but induces mental states in the survivors that produce capitulation? Battle, when “properly done,” produces intense feelings of isolation, hunger, and exhaustion. It induces extreme fear, deprives of sleep, and causes a person to consider abandoning convictions that are deeply-held enough to fight and die for only for the sake of escaping misery and suffering. It seeks to exploit every type of physical weakness in a person in order to enslave her soul to them, so that she will give anything she is asked for rather than persevere. If war planners had a completely free hand, and the proper means, they would design a battlefield to be a torture chamber for those soldiers who are not directly killed.

Del Pozo argues that torture and war may not be different in kind, only different in degree. According to del Pozo, torture (unlike war) cannot be justified. I'm not convinced. It seems to me that a key difference is that the victim of torture is an unarmed prisoner.

Torture should still not be permitted, but not because it is a morally special act. Instead, it should not be permitted because the requirements of justice and our own ethics do not allow for its coherent practice. We must build requirements of certainty into our justifications for actions that harm others, and we have established certain thresholds before which we will not consider exercising certain harmful options. These thresholds and requirements grow in proportion with the magnitude of the harm we might inflict. These requirements are not only in effect in domestic settings, in cases concerning fellow citizens, but also in international settings, and in war, as well as in private transactions. They are designed to respect our own feelings of empathy for fellow human beings, to safeguard ourselves from the damage done to us as a person when we ignore them, and they also acknowledge the dignity and rational agency of others. If we honor these requirements, then we cannot construct a torture policy that would plausibly indicate its use. War gives us levels of certainty that are not present in torture; we can kill a man with a certain uniform, for example, because the uniform is meant to convey knowledge of his status, but we can almost never know if the person we may torture possesses the knowledge we seek, or if torture will produce the end we want, for all of its awfulness. To put it most simply, when applied to torture, justice and our ethics create practical epistemic and policy problems that simply cannot be solved.

Also, two excellent podcast lectures on torture and U.S. policy.

"The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil" by Philip G. Zimbardo.


"Into the Light of Day: Human Rights after Abu Ghraib" by Mark Danner

Chucks

Has there every been an item more impervious to changing fashion than the Chuck Taylor Converse All-Star basketball shoe? Was there ever a time when Chucks weren't cool?