Psychopolitik 2.0

On top of the moral problem with detainee treatment — and the logic issue of whether there even should be detainments, let alone whether the “right” people are being detained — there’s deciding what to do with them. Congress is giving Bush another shot at having those tribunals, and as is par for the course with government, it’s ass-backwards:

The bill that Congress approved Friday to bring terrorism suspects to trial contains a central irony: The suspects considered most dangerous will have the most rights, while the others will remain in legal limbo with no ability to challenge their detention.

The government plans to try about 100 of the detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba — those suspected of the most serious crimes against the United States. These prisoners, and any others charged, would be able to appeal convictions to the U.S. courts.

The other 355 detainees, who are considered less of a threat, may never be tried and may therefore be denied the right to challenge their imprisonment. (emphasis mine)

So non-factors can rot, while Khalid Sheikh Mohammed gets a fast-track to his day in court. You honestly cannot make this shit up…

The tribunal legislation also raises the prospect for the first time that foreigners in the United States could be declared “enemy combatants” and sent to Guantanamo, according to defense lawyers and advocacy groups.

Under the legislation, “enemy combatants” are defined to include not only people who have engaged in hostilities against the U.S. but people who have “purposefully and materially supported” hostilities.

The definition, which “certainly goes far beyond the battlefield, will include people who never took up arms or planned attacks, and will include people who simply gave money,” said Chris Anders, a legislative counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union. “It greatly expands the number of people who can have their habeas rights stripped and potentially be brought before military commissions.”

“purposefully and materially supported” hostilities. To the average person, that means they gave money or active assistance to a terrorist group. However, since the heads of the GOP regularly claim that any citizen engaging in any degree of disagreement with current policy is tantamount to supporting jihadists, you can safely assume that the standard will be even lower than that for non-citizens.

It says a lot about where we’re at as a country that we’re actually saying “well, look on the bright side! At least those secret CIA prisons where we torture people are being closed!”. An’ it ain’t good…

You wouldn’t think I’d be reading this one: “China Inc.: How the rise of the next superpower challenges america & the world”

Seems like it’d just be Dobbs-ian barking about trade, right? Well, if that kind of crap is its goal then I’d have to say it fails, and fails gracefully. It actually ends up informative about just how China operates. Some of the info is the usual stuff for an authoritarian country:

• Since ownership of all land in China is under the Communist party, they can obliterate entire neighborhoods on as little as a week notice for new projects. No compensation, they just declare it & kick you out.
• The government-run banks there — meaning pretty much all banks — are legally barred from lending to private businesses, so many shops are under-the-table partnerships with local authorities.

Others are, shall we say, more amusing:

• VCDs (the precursor to DVDs) took off there mainly because they didn’t feel like paying for the liscensing to get VCR technology imported. In poor areas, a video player would be shared among the entire neighborhood.
• Speaking of DVDs, they actually sell a kind of DVD player in China designed for playing poorly-made bootlegs.
• The bootleg software market is so big that Microsoft came to an agreement where they’d give away software as part of a program to train chinese software developers.
• Even cars are bootlegged: one auto factory there exports knockoff luxury-model Jeep Cherokees — with leather seats & DVD players — to the middle east for between 8 & 10 grand.
• Eastern China is running its maintenance & construction of expressways like the US runs local utility companies, as businesses with monopoly ownership grants. One province actually makes a “profit” off of its roads & uses the money for other things.
• If Wal-Mart was a nation, it’d be the 5th largest export market for China

Millions of dirt-poor people who’d accept anything to get out of a state-mandated extreme poverty, the entirety of land permanently under Eminent-Domain Plus status, a government that is eager to sacrifice human rights in the name of short-term rapid economic growth…”China Inc.” is an appropriate title: in many ways, it’s paradise for corporate statism. What’s interesting though is how in other ways they (unintentionally, of course) actually defy restrictions that other countries put on the market. The commonness of piracy & the blatant ignoring of patents shows how little that patents & brand names actually mean compared to the US-led fuss over them: if someone can make, for example, clothing with a Ralph Lauren logo, or a watch that resembles a Rolex, well enough that most people can’t tell the difference other than price, then it begs the question of just what the price premium on the “real” one is paying for.

Weird world we live in, folks…

If all other animals are morally equivalent to human beings to the point that it is unethical to harm them, then why is it OK for cockroaches to bite us but not for us to bite cockroaches?

Mel Gibson proves that old adage of “a broken clock is right twice a day”:

Mel Gibson has returned to the spotlight to promote his upcoming movie “Apocalypto,” and to criticize the war in Iraq, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

Almost two months after he railed against Jews when he was arrested for driving drunk in Malibu, the actor made a surprise appearance Friday at Fantastic Fest, an event in Austin, Texas, devoted to new science fiction, horror and fantasy films, the trade paper said in its Monday edition. […]

In describing [his movie’s] portrait of a civilization in decline, Gibson said, “The precursors to a civilization that’s going under are the same, time and time again,” drawing parallels between the Mayan civilization on the brink of collapse and America’s present situation. “What’s human sacrifice,” he asked, “if not sending guys off to Iraq for no reason?” (emphasis mine)

Too bad he probably blames that on “the jeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeews”…

TChris of TalkLeft reads the NY Times so you don’t have to, and finds that yes, local judges can be dickheads too.  The examples mentioned of New York municipal judges’ misbehavior ranges from denying a domestic violence victim a protection order because he believes “every woman needs a good pounding every now & then”, to deliberately violating the 6th Amendment by denying defendants an attorney.

Apparently in most of the cases described these are less actual judges than random schmoes given a robe.  Yet this highlights an issue I’ve had with the entire judicial system for a long time: the power & opportunity of judges to follow their own petty whims rather than any reasonable interpretation of the law.  That some podunk town judge that has less of an education than I do & Supreme Court justices with lengthy backgrounds in the law can use similar logic says a lot, none of it good…
I remember arguements with people over constitutional interpretation where they’ve essentially argued that since the task of interpretation is given to the courts no one can argue that any decision is wrong — the judicial equivalent of the “it’s legal if we do it” defense of the executive branch.  Frankly, I’m puzzled as to how anyone can believe that & not call for radical change.  Trouble is, how?  What is even possible that would reliably reign in the judiciary?

While flipping through channels I remembered that over a YEAR ago I’d particpated in a meme about whether or not personality traits & political views had correlations (my contribution would be here).  So what did I do?  Why, try to find out wtf the result was!

Luckily, the guy who did it still has the results on his site.  From the sounds of it, everything turned out the way one would reasonably expect — slight correlations shown, but scientifically suspect because of self-sampling.  Eh, was amusing though.  My own personality part confirmed the obvious: I’m an anti-social brain who pours himself into intellectual pursuits to keep from cracking up completely.
Out of curiousity I went ahead and did the Political Compass part of it again.  From the point listed on The Zoo (4.8, -3.8) I’ve since moved to the left & slightly “south” (current spot: 1.8,-5.3).  In retrospect I must’ve been really bored to even bother, because in the time between taking the questionnaire I’ve rejected some of the central premises of it — those being that one can seperate civil liberties & economics without being a complete hypocrite, and that a market order is a “right-wing” thing.

Eh, whatever.  Those few minutes weren’t going to waste themselves.

Was reading a Fareed Zakaria column, noticed the Newsweek site had pictures of the covers to each edition of the magazine (screencap, w/ helpful highlighting, here)…

Call it my cynicism boiling over, but I smell a calculated move here.  They know that the US audience is more concerned about celebrities than the real world, so despite being ostensibly a news magazine they dangle shit like this out to catch the eyes of people who’d otherwise stick with tabloids.

-Via Hammer of Truth, finally some good news: Cory Maye is no longer on death row.  The efforts aren’t for naught, with time he WILL be free…

-I was going to post about how eerily convenient it is that the rumors of Osama’s demise come about during election season, but Glenn Greenwald beat me to it.
-Logan spots a Zogby poll that proves — yet again — that not only is a significant amount of the US public willfully ignorant of reality (46% still think Saddam had something to do with 9/11), but panicky enough to gladly toss their civil liberties (36% said they’d let the government open their mail — and that was the LOW among the tactics offered).
-”No Child Left Behind”?  More like No Crony Left Behind.  Nope, no surprise here, run along…

-While we’re at it, how ’bout a War on Hernias?

Why is this news?

Henrietta “Etty” Allen said Wednesday that she concealed her upbringing as a Jew in North Africa from her children, including Sen. George Allen (R-Va.), until a conversation across the dining room table in late August. […]
Allen’s heritage became an issue in the Virginia Senate campaign Monday, when television reporter Peggy Fox raised it at a televised debate in front of 600 business executives in Fairfax County. Allen repeated what he has said in the past: “My mother’s French-Italian with a little Spanish blood in her. And I was raised as she was, as far as I know, raised as a Christian.”

In fact, Allen had just recently learned about their Jewish roots when he made those comments. Allen declined to comment, but his mother said she had sworn him to secrecy.

Dude is a racist, holds a confederacy fetish despite not even being from the south, and supports every attempt by his party of wiping their asses with the Constitution.  So who cares about this?  What, are there a bunch of voters in Virginia that otherwise support that moron who’re now thinking “I can’t vote for no jeeeeeeeeeew”?  Is the state really that backwards?

Shorter Washington Post: “Whut, muslims are gettin harassed more?  Who’da thunk it?”

Complaints of anti-Muslim harassment, violence and discriminatory treatment registered with a national Muslim civil rights group jumped 30 percent in 2005 from the previous year, the group said today in releasing its annual report .

The 1,972 complaints made to the Council on American-Islamic Relations are the most the group has received since it began the annual reports following anti-Muslim incidents after the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. The group said it actually received 2,300 reports but deemed some of them illegitimate.

The number of complaints has continually risen since 1995, but began spiking significantly in 2003, the report said. (emphasis mine)

2003.  The same year we invaded a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.  Coincidence?

CAIR officials said the jump between 2004 and 2005 seems to be due to “a rise in anti-Muslim rhetoric fed by the Internet and also on talk radio,” group spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said at a news conference. “You can’t turn on the radio without hearing negative, bigoted comments about Islam.” 

Well…I can, but that’s because if my radio isn’t on one of the old-school soul stations (we have two in Georgia) it isn’t on at all.  I can’t stand talk radio.