perfidy

The Washington Times (I know...) has this story about how the French government recently helped Iraqi Ba'ath Party officials escape through Syria with the aid of French passports. Thanks a lot, guys. Big help. Big help.

I'm curious: does anyone have an idea as to how Massachusetts came to be identified as Communist Central, Bastion of The Bleeding Heart? 'Cos I don't see it. Cambridge is liberal. Amherst and Northampton are insanely liberal. And granted, these communities are some of the most nationally prominent areas of the Commonwealth. But, outside of that tiiiiiny portion of the populace, the huge majority of Massholes think just like the red states in the middle of the country. They vote Democratic not out of support for liberal social policy or because they like giant spending initiatives. They vote Democratic for two reasons: labor is king here; and they just always have. Memories are long here-- very long, and that peculiar breed of Yankee contrarian conservatism is strong. May I remind you that our current governer is a Republican and a Mormon?

Public smoking bans do fall under a different set of ethical issues than most personal liberties. As public smoking is possibly a public health nuisance or threat, it's not like free speech or freedom of the press. But part of my point was that public smoking bans are just one of many objectives of the Neo-reformists. In antebellum America, reformists initiated movements to abolish slavery. They also initiated temperance movements and rabid Protestant Christian Evangelicalism. While abolitionism was a noble cause in that it demanded an end to slavery, temperance and evangelicalism sought to force everyone else to live their lives the way that Evangelical reformers did.

I'm drawing an analogy here. Public smoking bans might be the parallel to abolitionism as an effort to create a greater good. But beneath those efforts for the greater good, or right alongside them, are efforts to make everyone else live exactly the way these present-day reformists, who are frequently guests on Oprah Winfrey's talk-show, live. In addition, public smoking bans are part of an effort to make everyone safe in a world where life turns on a dime, nothing can be predicted, and anything can happen.

If the neo-reformist and pro-safety camps are indeed coming together and pulling their resources, they will not stop at public smoking bans. They won't be happy until everyone has a helmet and everyone lives they way they think people should live. In addition, lots of abolitionists were just as racist as the people who owned slaves. Maybe Neo-reformists pushing the public smoking ban don't really care about public health. Maybe they just want to legislate their narrow vision of morality. When it comes to a moral issue on which we cannot agree, it's best to leave it out of the legislation. Permit it for those who want it, by not outlawing cigarettes altogether, but don't subject people who don't want it to it. A public smoking ban is a way to do that, perhaps. A counter-argument is that non-smokers could simply stay away from bars, but that's not fair.

Of course the problem is that the Neo-reformists don't want to permit naughty things to the people who want them and keep it out of sight for those who don't. Neo-reformists think, "Well, I live my life this way so everybody else has to live their life that way too." Neo-reformists want everyone to wear drab clothing without hooks or fasteners (because they're flashy), not smoke, not drink, not eat red meat, not barbecue, not eat baked potatoes because they're carcinogenic. Of course this brings in the pro-safety camp who agrees with most of the above (except maybe the clothing), and wants everybody to put on a helmet, and wants potential terrorists or people they can paint as such, even though they aren't herded into camps, where they can't hurt the people with helmets on.

The public smoking ban is one thing. It's not the same kind of personal liberty issue. But the pro-safety types want helmets on non-smokers, too, just to be safe. And no baked potatoes, either. The Neo-reformists want to ban cigarettes altogether, because their god told them cigarettes are evil tools of the devil. They have the souls of smokers to save.

In response to Windy City Mike’s comments a couple days ago:

Mike is right to point out that passing legislation against certain behaviors based on what is good for people is dangerous and usually wrongheaded. He's also correct that it's the "in thing". I would like to extend his analysis a little, and bring up the deeper issues that may or may not be at stake.

I see in the Boston Globe today that a total ban on smoking in Massachusetts is in the offing. Whaaaaat? Are those bastids on Beacon Hill caving to the tiny liberal enclaves in Cambridge and Amherst? Do the squint-eyed Puritan moralizers carry the day? Quite the contrary! Check this out:

Two days after Boston outlawed smoking in taverns and nightclubs, momentum quickened on Beacon Hill yesterday to extend the ban statewide, as pivotal adversaries from past years abandoned the fight while surprising new backers emerged in force. . . .

The groundswell of support comes at a time when more cities and towns than ever before - 78 - have adopted local prohibitions against all workplace smoking, covering one-third of the state's population. Politicians and restaurant owners from those communities have become vocal supporters of a statewide law, in part to prevent bars in communities without a smoking ban from poaching customers.

But just as important as the voices being raised in favor of smoking prohibition are those that have fallen silent under the golden dome of the state capitol. The Massachusetts Restaurant Association, a muscular presence against the smoking ban in earlier debates, sent no one to testify yesterday at a hearing about the proposed ban before the joint health care committee. And tobacco company representatives offered no public statements at the hearing. Veterans of the smoking wars in Massachusetts could identify only one or two lobbyists present with ties to the tobacco industry.

Though it’s not perfect, the proposed ban is the result of a grassroots movement that has spread throughout the state.

The difference between the New York and Boston cases is that New York brought the dancing ban down from on high, and the proposed Massachusetts smoking ban springs from a general popular movement. That is the essence of federalism, and it creates a conflict for me. On one hand, I favor smoking bans in bars and restaurants because I prefer to go out for a night and come home free of smoke-reek and a headache. If the people of Massachusetts decide this is the way they should go, I applaud it. It's a local issue, settled locally. Many issues are best decided this way.

But on the other hand, what if Massachusetts also outright banned assault weapons, gay marriage, or abortion? Each of these issues raises serious questions of individual liberties versus public interest. Just this week the Ninth Circuit Court revived the question of whether the Second Amendment provides for an individual right to gun ownership. Gay Marriage may or may not threaten the Full Faith And Credit Clause, since couples joined in Vermont could return to Utah and apply for spousal benefits. Abortion pits the liberties of mothers against the liberties of the unborn, and extends the debate over citizenship into totally new arenas.

Where does the line fall between the right of a community to legislate behaviors to maintain public order, and the liberty of citizens to act freely where they are not injuring others? Do smoking bans really address these same fundamental issues, or is smoking in public subject to a different set of ethical and (pseudo-)legal tests?

What I'm saying is, I like the smoking bans where I live. I just can't find a way to justify them.

Read 'em and weep. The TotalElfFina scandal just gets worse, the more the company's ties to the Hussein regime come out. Aside from the multi-billion dollar extraction contracts TEF had with Iraq under Hussein, there is growing evidence of massive corporate corruption up to and including government payoffs. Blech. The Guardian has this story:

An Iraqi-born British billionaire told a French court yesterday how he had paid millions of pounds in kickbacks to French oil executives. Nadhmi Auchi, 65, reputedly Britain's seventh-richest man, is one of 37 company administrators and business partners accused of being involved in France's biggest postwar financial scandal in which the oil firm, now TotalFinaElf, allegedly paid out huge sums in bribes and backhanders to expand its empire.

N.B. Auchi is a native Iraqi who has had ties with Saddam Hussein in the past, and whose brothers were murdered by said dictator.

Also see this story, from last month:

The former head of Elf admitted yesterday that the French oil giant had secretly paid out millions of pounds to political parties of both right and left in an illegal campaign to buy backing. In testimony that will shake France's political system, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, one of 37 defendants on trial in its biggest postwar sleaze scandal, said nearly all the cash had gone to Jacques Chirac's conservative RPR party until the former president Francois Mitterrand demanded it be spread more evenly.

Even better (worse), Auchi is also on the board of the French Bank that holds $13b in Iraqi Oil-For-Food money, funds that are now suspected of being misused by Iraq. Good news! Here's the NY Times abstract from April.

I'm not going to claim that France's anti-Iraq-libervasion stance was purely about the oil-- it was also about sticking it to the USA, and also about living by their EU-European collectivist ethos. But stories like these make the picture rather darker, and bring the underpinnings of Chirac's stance into question.

Side note: France are one of the leading vendors to Iraq under the Oil For Food program. That program goes away if economic sanctions are lifted, as the USA wants. Let's sit back and watch! This'll be fuuun!

Popular Science is running an article about the latest advances in "less-than-lethal" weaponry at the Pentagon's Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate. There is some very excellent analysis of the pros and cons of nonlethal crowd-control weaponry (after all, guns all look like guns, no matter what they are firing), some suitably awestruck descriptions of the improbable sci-fi devices currently in beta testing, and even a self-test of one of the farthest out of the weapons. Why do I suddenly feel like I've stepped into a James Bond film? From the piece: 

Broadly speaking, the directorate slots nonlethals into three categories, depending on their intended strategic use: counter-personnel, counter-materiel and counter-capability. Counter-personnel objectives, naturally enough, include controlling crowds, incapacitating individuals, denying areas to personnel and clearing people from buildings or battle areas. Counter-materiel systems are used to deny areas to vehicles, vessels or aircraft, and to disable or neutralize equipment. Counter-capability objectives include disabling or neutralizing facilities and systems, and denying use of weapons of mass destruction. As you ascend this scale, from humans to systems, from soft targets to hard, there are bumps along the way at which on-the-ground reality seems likely to strain the semantic tolerances of the word nonlethal. Take, for instance, the high-tech end of the counter-materiel category, where we find supercaustic agents designed to rapidly corrode metals; depolymerizing agents that dissolve or decompose plastics; and, most impressively, the Advanced Tactical Laser, which will produce a four-inch-diameter beam of energy that can slice through a tank from a distance of 9 miles, presumably counting on the quickness of enemy soldiers to maintain its nonlethal credibility. (Indeed, in recognizing that no weapon or confrontation can be controlled well enough to justify the term nonlethal, the directorate prefers the phrase "less than lethal.") 

On the counter-personnel front, the technology is only marginally more tame. Nonlethal, after all, does not mean nonviolent. Although information here remains scarce—and the directorate won't share details—the pulsed-energy projectile rivals the Active Denial System pain beam in its sci-fi promise. The weapon will fire a pulsed (in brief shotlike bursts) deuterium-fluoride laser that will produce an ionized plasma on whatever surface it hits. That in turn will cause both pain and a kinetic shock, and could literally knock people off their feet.

Later in the article, the author takes a couple shots with the "pain beam" right in the back!! It hurts!! Cool!!

Live from Baghdad, Salam! Pax! Is! Back! 

(for those of you who don't know, 'Salam Pax' is an Iraqi twentysomething(?) who has been posting to a weblog from Iraq since February or so. He just coughed up about six weeks' worth of posts that have backed up since Baghdad lost internet connection. Sweet! And, incredibly interesting. Read it! Read it! Read it! 
 

[cue finger-wagging] Speaking of revising stories, here's a story about why I'm not a professional card-carrying historian. 

[cue bug-eyed ranting]According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, (via Volokh) the AHA will no longer investigate claims of plagiarism or other professional misconduct by historians, citing an inability to bring sanctions against offenders. 

Thanks, guys! You're already a bunch of bedwetting little pansies, and now you've admitted it. Well, acceptance is the first step toward healing. Why not just disband, now that you've proven you have no power to police the mores of the profession? Ohhhhh right the American Historical Review. Because that's such an excellent publication. Y' know? I'm an historian. That's my training, and part of how I identify myself. It's not a very encouraging sign when I cannot stand to read through even a single issue of a leading journal in my chosen field. Well, it's still better than the Journal of American History. Every quarter that bumwipe features stuff like "The New England Bean Farming Community, 1790-1820: Capitalist Hell or Proto-Marxist Paradise?" or "Roundtable: Interrogating The American Family-- Four Centuries Of Unrelenting Patriarchy" or "Rethinking Marx: How the Revolution Can Still Happen If We Wish Really Hard"

(I'm making these up - barely.) 
 

Well this is interesting...

The New York times is reporting that the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad is likely much, much, MUCH less severe than originally thought. The Times cites a number of twenty-nine items verifiably missing, down from 170,000. I’m going to be a nut here and suggest that the damage lies somewhere in the middle range, probably closer the high end. Nevertheless, this sucks slightly less than previously thought.

In other news, Orin Kerr suggests that, if librarians are in a purple rage over the Patriot Act's provisions pertaining to libraries, they should also be campaigning against about pre-existing statutes. Whereas the Patriot Act makes it possible for the FBI to obtain library and bookstore records secretly, that power has long existed for any enforcement agency who can get a subpoena for them. So there. I'm married to a librarian, and respect them very much. I just want to make sure they don't get off on some Quixotic campaign and ignore other possible dangers to the integrity of their profession and the privacy of patrons.

In a recent post (permalinks are hosed-- thanks, blogger!), Bad Thoughts took the Bush camp to task continuing to "rattle sabers" at North Korea. Daniel Drezner agrees this is a baaaad idea. For that matter, so do I. The Bush Administration's policy on North Korea has been oddly unfocussed, given Bush's general tendency to assert his will and [Patrick Stewart voice:ON] Make It So[OFF].