Brains: The Politics of Revenge, and the Revenge of Politics

[elfs]

Thought for the day:

After the recent death-by-trampling at a Wal-Mart, can we finally forgive the Who for the 1970 Ohio incident?

Stuart Taylor advises Obama to keep on wiretappin'

Stuart Taylor writes:

Civil libertarians are rightly outraged by the brutality of some Bush administration interrogation methods; by Bush's denial of fair hearings to hundreds of suspects at Guantanamo and elsewhere who claim that they are not terrorists; and by his years of secretly and perhaps illegally defying -- rather than asking Congress to amend -- the badly outdated Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

But the civil libertarians' outrage does not stop there. Indeed, the prospect of anyone in the U.S. being inappropriately wiretapped, surveilled, or data-mined seems to stir the viscera of many Bush critics more than the prospect of thousands of people being murdered by terrorists.

This is a false dichotomy. Stuart does not provide-- because he cannot provide-- an example where surveillance has prevented the tragedy he describes, or one where it might have prevented such. There are other ways, ways within the purview of traditional law enforcement, that do not depend upon the government illegally (Taylor says "inappropriately") listening in on your private life.

The distinction between privacy and secrecy in an important one: As Cory Doctorow wrote recently, the dimensions of your body aren't a secret, but you'd be pretty outraged if your government was hoarding naked pictures of you, wouldn't you?

The Fourth (and the Third, although nobody ever talks about it) Amendments to the Constitution of the United States are about privacy: both are responses to the way King George's men invaded the privacy of colonists for the purposes of intimidation and data collection. Let's take them seriously.

The Neo-Hooverite Movement

Herbert Hoover, now that we've learned a lot about his financial woes first-hand, famously fought to cut the goverment's deficit, putting the federal budget into balance in a way that, everyone agrees, deepened the great pain of the depression even further.

We're now seeing the Republicans in the Senate putting out the same exact policy proposals, opposing any stimulus or rescue package of any kind whatsoever. This is despite the fact that the vast majority of academic economists say it's exactly the wrong thing to do.

Benen proposes five explanations: The Moral Explanation, that economic pain would be "good for us," the Benefactor Explanation, that the Republican party opposes any attempt to move money to "the wrong people," namely the poor and lower middle classes, the Illiterate Explanation that these Republicans just don't understand economics, the Strategic Explanation, that a horrible economic era under Obama would benefit them in 2010 or 2012, and the Manchurian Explanation, that they hate America and want to hurt it.

Benen thinks the last explanation is unlikely. If you think of it as the Revenge Explanation, though, it works: they were trounced in the last election. We now know that revenge is pleasureable in the short term, even when our rational self knows the long-term consequences will include a painful personal cost. I would not at all be surprised if some of their motivation came from a deep resentment against the current anti-Republican mood.

Is Clarence Thomas giving aid and comfort to the paranoid?

Are you sick and tired of the whore birth certificate thing yet? Because Clarence Thomas has asked his colleagues on the Supreme Court consider one of many birth certificate lawsuits floating around the country.

I can only hope that he's not so much giving aid and comfort to these wackaloons as giving them enough rope so they can go hang themselves.

Comments

[zvi-likes-tv.livejournal.com]

Why do you think a hospital has 47 year old birth records? I mean, they might have them, they might be rats' nests, they might be melted microfiche, or they might have been purged to provide space for an intern lounge.

As for "people who knew his mother back then", you're assuming that Obama knows of anyone who knew his mother at the time. I'm a 30 year old Army brat, and the only people I know who knew my parents at the time of my birth are my relatives, none of whom were in the state of my birth when I was born. Tracking down "that girl Sue who was in an econ class with Mom" to disprove something only believed by the sort of people who believe the Clintons murdered Vince Foster is, to my mind, not worth the time and money, and, I hope, not worth the President-Elect's attention time and attention either, since he's sort of busy leading the country, since W is hiding in his room a very lame duck, indeed.