digital emunction

Lured by the opening reference to Leo Strauss, I uncharacteristically managed to make it through William Kristol’s extraordinary Times column this morning. Here’s how it begins:

Half a century ago the philosopher Leo Strauss remarked that the passage in which the Declaration of Independence proclaims its self-evident truths “has frequently been quoted, but, by its weight and its elevation, it is made immune to the degrading effects of the excessive familiarity which breeds contempt and of misuse which breeds disgust.”

What’s extraordinary about the column is that Kristol doesn’t misuse Strauss. Most people who cite that quotation from Natural Right and History cite it as evidence of Strauss’s goodwill toward American democracy. But of course it’s nothing of the kind; in fact it’s the opening salvo in a long, dense, and often deceptive attack on the philosophical and political justifications of democracy itself.

Which is why I found it fairly amazing to see Kristol follow the Straussian line through to its nasty anti-democratic end, right there in the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times:

[Read more]

Tumbling on the heels on that last story is this item from the No Good Deed Goes Unpunished Department: it turns out that Andy Martin, the original promoter of the Obama Muslim smear, has now decided to smear… that’s right, the person who called him out in the Washington Post: Danielle Allen.

Here’s some highlights from the ridiculous press release that Martin put out today. If you have any questions about the talents, intelligence, or reliability of Prof. Allen, I happily direct you here and here and even here.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled buffoonery:

“In so far as my contact with the Post,” Martin will state, “Mr. Mosk accurately reports my role and, as far as I can remember, correctly reports our interview.

“But Mosk produced an incomplete form of journalism. He writes a long article about Danielle Allen, but she is a very suspicious character to say the least. [Read more]

The Washington Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the origins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

I should start by saying that Allen is something of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doctorates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Humanities Division at the U. of C. she was the university officer most directly responsible for Chicago Review.

Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s validation of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been covered by him and others:

There’s some interesting stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doctorates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a marginal Illinois character named Andy Martin—without even resorting to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsessing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.

This kind of turf-guarding is fairly predictable, especially when it’s journalists and academics who are standing on opposite sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)

But Smith’s self-confessed superciliousness seems misplaced. [Read more]

And on a more depressing note, the Times also has an article today on a new report (PDF) that describes how the U.S. government blocked the disbursement of loans intended to fund clean-water and sanitation projects in Haiti for political reasons.

The revelation of the role the American government played in keeping the loan money from reaching Haiti is the most disturbing part of the report–though given our history in that country it would be difficult to describe the news as shocking–and I’ll get to it in a moment.

But the report’s real effort–and arguably its most important–is to construe this meddling as a human rights violation. Specifically, the report concludes that “it is clear that actions taken by the United States in blocking IDB development loans earmarked for water projects in Haiti were a direct violation of the U.S. government’s human rights obligations.”

The key conceptual hinge for this argument, which seems fairly novel to me as a legal argument (but what do I know?) is that

the human rights of individuals in many parts of the world—including the right to water—are directly affected by the actions that some States take at the international level through international organizations, development programs and, most importantly for this report, IFIs [international financial institutions]” (p. 50).

This opens the path to the report’s conclusion that

the United States actively impeded the Haitian State’s ability to fulfill the Haitian people’s human right to water through its actions, thus breaching its duty to respect human rights. Such blatant frustration of the object and purpose of the human rights treaties to which the United States is a signatory or a State party is a clear violation of international law.

In any case, here are the paragraphs that describe the U.S. government’s interference with the Haitian loans, from pages 11 and 12 of the report, which was jointly authored by the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice (CHRGJ), Partners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Lasante:

[Read more]

Should it ever happen that the sacred poem
to which heaven and earth have set their hand,
such that I am made lean after all these years,

conquers the cruelty that locked me out
of the sweet sheepfold where I slept as a lamb,
enemy of the wolves who brought it war,

with another voice and another fleece
I shall then return a poet…
            —Dante, Paradiso XV.1-8

The Telegraph reports that the city council of Florence has voted to revoke the sentence that sent the Italian poet into exile for the remainder of his life. The March 1302 condemnation promised death by fire were Dante ever to set foot in the city.

This is not the first time that Florentines have tried to achieve formal reconciliation with the man they would later honor as “the highest poet.” Wikipedia gives this account of an early effort:

In 1315, Florence was forced by Uguccione della Faggiuola (the military officer controlling the town) to grant an amnesty to people in exile, including Dante. But Florence required that as well as paying a sum of money, these exiles would do public penance. Dante refused, preferring to remain in exile. When Uguccione defeated Florence, Dante’s death sentence was commuted to house arrest, on condition that he go to Florence to swear that he would never enter the town again. Dante refused to go. His death sentence was confirmed and extended to his sons. Dante still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honourable terms.

The Florentine resolution, which passed 19-5, restores Dante’s full citizenship in the city. The five naysayers not unjustly called the process “a stunt,” and Vittorio Sermonti, one of the most famous readers and commentators on Dante in Italy today, was likewise skeptical. “Well,” he told La Repubblica, “now they can start the rehabilitation process for Brutus and Cassius as well.”

I couldn’t help but cringe a bit when news of my native county crept up in several news stories about gay marriage in California, for example in this Wall Street Journal article:

June 17 marks the date that gay and lesbian couples can marry legally in California, following a landmark ruling by the state’s Supreme Court in May that struck down the ban on same-sex marriage. The day will be marked by joyous celebrations and eager couples earning a right they have waited years to obtain.

Yet, the occasion will also be punctuated by the division it creates throughout the state. On the one hand, San Francisco County has added additional staff and expanded hours so the clerk’s office can accommodate the surge in demand from same-sex couples seeking marriage licenses and wedding ceremonies….

In contrast, the Butte County clerk-recorder issued a June 11 news release saying her office will stop performing wedding ceremonies altogether–for gay and heterosexual couples.

For Rick Perlstein and others, actions like this last amount to nothing less than a twenty-first-century version of the massive resistance campaigns that followed Brown v. Board of Education. Until I looked into it, I was inclined to agree.

But it turns out that what’s going on in Butte County is much less sinister than the WSJ and others would have us believe. [Read more]