A Reminder

Via Politics, Theory and Photography

Blueberries

Photo: Dave

Stolen Watch

Bush's watch gets stolen in Albania. Video here.

Richard Rorty Dies - "He reveled in contingency..."

Richard Rorty, the ever-controversial, iconoclastic, and important American philosopher, died on Friday. My very best wishes to his family.

I'll have more soon.

UPDATE (12 June):

I've been meaning to write a longer piece on Rorty, but I have not been able to find the time. Shame on me. Up until last week Rorty was one of the greatest living philosophers. Only perhaps Jürgen Habermas meets his level of influence and renown. He has been hugely influential for me as well, often by representing the positions I want to argue against, always representing positions that can't be ignored. I deeply admired his provocative style, his gentle wit, his decency, and of course his intelligence.

I didn't know Rorty very well. I met him on two occasions - first, when I had just moved to philosophy from engineering as an undergraduate, and later when I had just finished my PhD. But we had email exchanges over the years about a number of things, and he contributed an essay to another book I'm editing. A busy man, Rorty nonetheless took the time to correspond in the same witty and thoughtful way that he wrote philosophy.

I've noticed that the few discussions out there about Rorty's life and death mostly take the opportunity to bash him again as a postmodern relativist. That discussion is too hackneyed for my tastes and, frankly, requires too much effort to plod through again. As with other pragmatists, most of the critics have never spent much time actually reading their works. And, as with other pragmatists, we often find ourselves spending far too much time defending pragmatism, not merely as an opposing set of substantive philosophical arguments, but as a matter of getting critics to understand it in the first place. This is exhausting. Read the books, I say. Rorty took up the task as his own.

Here are a few links to obituaries and commentaries. They're really too few and far between.

Habermas on Rorty at Signandsite

David Luban on Rorty at Balkinization

Todd Gitlin at TPMCafe

A final interview with Rorty at The Progressive

The Washington Post obituary

The San Francisco Chronicle obituary

The NY Times obituary

The Nation's obscenely brief obit (Rorty was a longtime contributor and supporter - maybe they'll rethink this)

Rorty's 2006 essay, "Democracy and Philosophy" at Eurozine

And, finally, Rorty's 1992 autobiographical essay, "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids"

The Toll of Mining

Open-pit mine in Siberia

While much of the world focuses on the geopolitics of oil exploitation, mining remains one of the largely hidden modes of resource extraction known for its high human cost and exploitative and corrupt political arrangements. This is at the root of Bolivia's recent leftward shift, for example, although the US press only seems to understand Bolivia as a puppet of external political interests. The central concerns are control of national resources (the main source, after all, of revenues for especially least developed countries); water and air pollution; exploitative labor arrangements; long-term health problems for workers and locals; and the oft-corrupt contracts that are a boon for national/local elites and mining companies but a disaster for the citizens of the country. Mining usually takes place in areas of high poverty. Curious, that. It thus opens the issue as one of environmental justice - why should income level determine whether or not one has a right to a healthy environment?

[Some cases: El Salvador gold mining, Eastern Europe uranium mining, Argentina gold mining, Honduras, Peru, West Virginia mountaintop coal-mining, Romania, cyanide leach mining, Mexico, Papua New Guinea copper mining, Africa generally]

When I was in Honduras last year, there was a protest that shut down the country's main highway. Asking around about the reasons for the protest, I learned that the demands centered on a mining law that allows open-air mining and opens up thirty percent of the country to mining firms while these firms are required to pay in return only one percent of their revenues in taxes. One percent.

A lawsuit on behalf of the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea making its way perhaps to the US Supreme Court demands restitution for upwards of ten thousand deaths over a decade and a half of copper mining at Panguna by the mining firm Rio Tinto. The case encapsulates the complex issue of mining: its politics and its human disaster. The story omits the consumer end.

In November 1988, militants forced the mine to close through blowing up power pylons and other acts of sabotage. For a decade following the mine’s closure, a war raged between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and Papua New Guinean and Australian military forces trying to quell the independence movement and reopen the mine. By the time a ceasefire was signed in 1998, more than 10,000 Bougainville residents—about one-tenth of the island’s population—had been killed.

The lawsuit alleges that, in addition to the 10,000 dead, the mine also caused the destruction of a way of life—the matrilineal tribal and subsistence fishing and farming culture that earned it the name “Sacred Island.” “A deep sense of social malaise set in, which expressed itself in clan tensions, depression, alcohol abuse, rage, traffic accidents and incidents of violence—all distress signals of a people severed from their roots,” the suit claims.

The suit quotes tribal leader Perpetua Serero, who says, “We don’t grow healthy crops anymore, our traditional customs and values have been disrupted and we have become mere spectators as our earth is being dug up, taken away and sold for millions.”

An alternative view on Panguna here (see also here).

Note: It is curiously difficult to find photos of Panguna. The ones below are borrowed from here.

Friday Dinner Party Conversation Stopper

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse, I know I'm not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hopes it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. more than five years later, however, nearly half the American people still believes that Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought it was the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just unfortunate excess --- and unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our news media. now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsession that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.

Late in the summer of 2006, American news coverage was saturated with the bizarre false confession of a man who claimed to have been p[resent at the death of JonBenet Ramsey --- the six-year-old beauty queen whose unsolved murder eleven years before was responsible for another long-running obsession. A few months prior to John mark Karr's arrest in Bangkok, the disappearance of a high school senior in Aruba and the intensive search for her body and her presumed murderer consumed thousands of hours of television coverage. Both cases remain unsolved as of this writing, and neither had any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic.

Like JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. has recently been back at the center of another fit of obsessive-compulsive news, when his hypothetical confession wasn't published and his interviews on television wasn't aired. This particular explosion of "news' was truncated only when a former television sitcom star used racist insults in a night club. And before that we focus on the "Runaway Bride" in Georgia. And before that there was the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra levy tragedy. And of course we can't forget Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole, Tom Cruise jumped on Oprah's couch and married Katie Holmes, who gave birth to Suri. And Russell Crowe apparently threw a phone at a hotel concierge.

In early 2008, the wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death, embalming, and funeral plans and the legal wrangling over the paternity and custody of her child and disposition of her estate, served as yet another particularly bizarre example of the new priorities in America's news coverage.

And while American television watchers were collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness.

Al Gore

(From Digby)

Turks, Kurds, and Americans

I mentioned this earlier as a brewing problem about to bubble to the surface and spill hot liquid all over the laps of the Mayberry Machiavellians (that's what they get for drinking while doing foreign policy).... OK, that's pushing the metaphor far too far, but this is rather serious. Turkey is not going to allow an autonomous Kurdistan, while this could very well be a necessary element of any settlement that gets the US out of Iraq. The AP reported yesterday that Turkey sent some troops across the border into Iraq on a brief incursion (Turkey has already built up its presence on the frontier). This may or may not be true. It's denied from a number of different quarters with different interests at stake. But the reality is that this situation is brewing, and the killing of three Turkish soldiers today and Turkey's setting up of "security zones" looks to set the place alight.

Pat Lang has more background:

...The tensions between the Turkish government and dissident Kurds is what it has always been. Sporadic fighting and terrorist action in Turkey is a continuing fact of life in the region. The Turkish government regards northern Iraq, with some justification, as a sanctuary and redoubt area for Turkey's Kurdish rebels.

The United States has encouraged the ambitions of Kurdish Iraqis for political and social autonomy in the north. The US has protected a nearly independent Kurdish autonomous zone for over a decade. It should be obvious that the real aspiration of the Kurds is northern Iraq is independence.

Turkey regards that as a threat to its long term stability and territorial integrity.

Should the American government not have foreseen that? How difficult was it to see that coming? Has the US government tried hard to resolve the potential for further war in the region over this issue?

Now Turkey is assembling its forces on the border. It is not too late to act. The US government shold aggressively seek an agreement in which Turkey and the Kurdish entity in the north accept a US guarantee (enabled by an American military presence) that preserves both Kurdish and Turkish equities. The US is now a Middle Eastern regional power and must accept its responsibilities as such.

We Are All Democrats Now?

Ouch.

Poll: Americans Lean Dem By Wide Margin
The new AP-Ipsos poll has a fascinating number. Respondents were asked they identified as Democrats, Republicans or independents, and then independents were asked which way they lean. With leaners, 54% of Americans are Democrats, compared to only 36% Republicans — an almost 20-point Dem margin. This is likely a product of recent Washington scandals and mishandling of foreign affairs by Republicans, but it could very well turn into a full-fledged political realignment if the Democrats can sustain it.

Unripe Cacao Pods, Honduras

Photo: Helmut

The Argument from Authority for Pirates

And there is a strong case to be made indeed.

The parents of one of my fellow five-year-olds are taking him to Los Angeles today where they will, among other things, visit Disneyland. Now I'm not a fan of Disney Corp., but I've got some pretty fond memories of going to Disneyland as a kid. These fond memories almost all revolve around the ride, "Pirates of the Caribbean." So I told my little friend (I usually call him "Monkey Boy") at dinner last night that he absolutely had to go see the pirates.

And what do pirates say, Monkey Boy?

"Aaarghh!"

Good boy.

"But... but my friend at school says that there are underwater bumpercars. I want to do that. Are there underwater bumpercars?"

Maybe. But what's important is that there are pirates. You have to go see the pirates.

"Do they shoot guns?"

No, they mostly swordfight, just like we do - you know, when we're going "aaarghh!"

"Will they get me? Do they come close to you and go 'rrraaawww'?" [tiger claws and grimace]

Oh, not that close. They're mostly swordfighting among themselves. They also shoot cannons at each other from their ships. You get a little wet when cannonballs fall near your boat.

[sotto voce] "Are they real pirates?"

Uh. Well, yeah, they're real pirates. They sing.

"Are there underwater bumpercars?"

Dude, Disneyland is all about the pirates! Go see the pirates!

"Okay...."

Pineapple Fields, Hawaii

Photo: Selvin Chance

War Profits!

You too can profit from the Iraq War! Follow along with your favorite characters, the ones who produced and marketed the war, and whose stock portfolios are now fabulous! Invest now, and see how good you can actually feel about war!

In this age of outsourcing, 70 percent of the nation's estimated $48 billion intelligence budget goes straight into the pockets of private contactors—and an additional $58 billion is earmarked for homeland security. For security and defense firms, the road to profitability is paved with government contracts. But landing those coveted deals is often dependent on having friends in those high places where procurement decisions are made.

Lately, we've noticed a stream of former Bush Administration officials and insiders signing on as directors at obscure companies that compete for contracts at their old agencies. Where other observers might see revolving-door corruption, or perhaps an orgy of military industrial profiteering, we see a tantalizing investment opportunity. Just because this crew, which includes George Tenet, Paul Bremer, and Richard Perle, monumentally bungled their duties to the American tax payer doesn't mean they aren't capable of feathering their own nests—and yours.

Torture and Democracy

Another book plug! Friend Darius Rejali's most recent book is the massive, Torture and Democracy, which will appear in early fall. You can pre-order here.

The Paris Hilton Prison Diaries

Thirty days in jail, with my back turned to the wall
Thirty days in jail, with my back turned to the wall
Yes you know some other skinner must be kickin' in my stall

Hey mister jailer please, will you please bring me the key
Hey mister jailer, will you please sir bring me the key
I just want you to open the door, cause this ain't no place for me

- Clarence Smith / Lightnin' Hopkins, "Jailhouse Blues"

Yes, we've got the Hilton diaries, courtesy of the LA Times. Some excerpts:

DAY 1: Arrived late Sunday night. So tired. Asked if I could check into my room immediately. Quite possibly the rudest concierge I have ever met. I told him he was fired. Not the effect I'd hoped for. And no, I did not register under the name "Little Miss Whore." What kind of hotel forces you to strip and delouse (maybe Marriott?). Although instead of a robe I got a fabulous orange jumpsuit with a cute number on it. Nothing to do at night. I'm told (as there was, like, no information in my room) that there is no bar or lounge area. I wish I'd brought flats...

Day 3: So that's what a bitch slap is. Wow. Just … wow. MUST remember not to make that sarcastic face again anytime soon...

Day ??: I have stopped counting the days. I live in the now...
Lately I'm identifying with the Jews and all the horrible things that happened to them during Vietnam....

Sisters in the Struggle

Chummy-chums Felipe Calderón Hinojosa and Nicolas Sarkozy bummed around for a while yesterday -- the latter explaining the problem of illegal immigrants to the former, who shared with the latter the drawbacks of leading a country in danger of being overrun by violently fractious crime syndicates. They don't appear to have had a conversation, so much as a pleasant exchange of sound-bite rehearsals; but that's what political allies are for, right?

The leaders, who hit it off like a pair of Catholic schoolgirls, had nothing, it turns out, on their wives. At a cozy dinner last night, Sarkozy's old lady and Calderón's old lady found that they had, like, so much in common:

En la cena, su esposa Cecilia Sarkozy coincidió con Margarita Zavala en que ambas estudiaron en colegios manejados por las hermanas de la Asunción, y que incluso la francesa había previsto asistir al Vaticano -como hizo la mexicana- a la canonización de la madre María Eugenia de Millares, fundadora de la orden religiosa.

Neato!

It left me in mind of the recent Lesbians on Ecstasy track, "Sisters in the Struggle," with its sticks-in-your-head refrain: "we've been waiting all our lives / for our sisters to be our lovers."

Arid Down Under

I don't believe I've mentioned anything Australian since the ignominious first day of this blog's life. Here's something.

Excerpts from UN's IPCC report on the threat of global warming to Australia and New Zealand:

"As a result of reduced precipitation and increased evaporation, water security problems are projected to intensify by 2030 in south and east Australia and, in New Zealand, in Northland and eastern regions."

"Significant loss of biodiversity is projected to occur by 2020 in some ecologically rich sites, including the Great Barrier Reef and Queensland's tropics. Other sites at risk include the Kakadu wetlands ... and the alpine areas of both countries."

"Ongoing coastal development and population growth in areas such as Cairns and south-east Queensland (Australia) and Northland to Bay of Plenty (New Zealand) are projected to exacerbate risks from sea-level rise and increases in the severity and frequency of storms and coastal flooding by 2050."

"Production from agriculture and forestry by 2030 is projected to decline over much of southern and eastern Australia, and over parts of eastern New Zealand, due to increases in droughts and fires."

"The region has substantial adaptive capacity due to well-developed economies and scientific and technical capabilities, but there are considerable constraints to implementation ... Natural systems have limited adaptive capacity."

Integrity and Honor

From A Tiny Revolution:

...Here's how Kissinger pretends to see the world, when writing to a judge:

I met Scooter early in the second Bush administration, when he served as Chief of Staff to Vice President Cheney. In that capacity, he attended all my meetings with the Vice President. He also acted as a kind of liaison for me to the National Security process. I was deeply impressed by his dedication, seriousness, patriotism and essential dignity...in my observations, he pursued his objectives with integrity and a sense of responsibility.

Here's how Henry Kissinger actually sees the world, from The Final Days:

Kissinger counseled his aides that deviousness was part of their job [on the National Security Council]. "You systems-analysis people have too much integrity," he told one of them. "This is not an honorable business conducted by honorable men in an honorable way. Don't assume I'm that way and you shouldn't be."

Random Monday

Unable to do much today - although it has nevertheless somehow been one of those "busy-work days" - and unable to find much of interest in the news - everything seems so... obvious today, if that makes sense - I can really only post a random ten (OK, twenty) of songs from my iTunes library. Matt at Tattered Coat used to do this on Fridays, but he's been busy too.

Here they are, completely random and thankfully avoiding embarrassments this time. Feel free to play along.

1. Buddy Holly, "Every Day" (1959).
2. Nina Nastasia, "This Is What It Is" (2002).
3. Ramona Cordova, "One Day Someday" (2006).
4. Ms. John Soda, "Unsleeping" (2002).
5. Shiina Ringo, "Souretsu" (2003).
6. Isabel Parra, "La Celosa" (1970s?)
7. Nourallah Brothers, "Lightness and Space" (2004)
8. Eddie Gale, "Black Rhythm Happening" (1969)
9. Gilberto Gil, "Palco" (1994)
10. Sonic Youth, "Incinerate" (2006)
11. Rykarda Parasol, "Hannah Leah" (2006)
12. Machine Go Boom, "Captain Obvious" (2004)
13. Arzigul Tursun, "Yarbagi" (2006)
14. Forget Cassettes, "Quiero, Quieres" (2006)
15. Carla Bruni, "Quelqu'un m'a dit" (2003)
16. Les Sultans, "Je t'aime bien" (1967)
17. Urusei Yatsura, "Plastic Ashtray" (1995)
18. Cristina Branco, "Corpo Iluminado" (2001)
19. The Only Ones, "Lovers of Today" (1977)
20. Sly and the Family Stone, "Family Affair" (1971)

Mangosteen, mon amour

Climate Change Policy

Since Bush announced that he will pursue a side-agreement as an alternative to the Kyoto Protocol at the G-8 summit this week, there's been a lot of misinformation floating around the internet, including misleading statements from the US government. The right, of course, wants to show how the US stance on Kyoto is ultimately Clinton's fault. But the left, also erroneously, wants to demonstrate how it's Bush's sole fault.

Some historical facts are in order. If you need the basics on the science of climate change, there's no better place to start than here at RealClimate. The Pew Center on Global Climate Change also provides good information on the basics as well as more advanced downloadable documents.

The good news about Bush's proposal is that the administration has finally decided - last in the world to do so - that global warming is real and anthropogenic (and note the uncertainty range in the graph above - "scientific uncertainty" was the basis for denying the reality of climate change). I guess their calls for "more research" finally panned out. But they've replaced that stalling tactic with a new one.

The central problems for the US regarding the Kyoto Protocol, which was signed by the US in 1998 but never ratified (the latter is necessary for an international agreement to become binding, though the US has broken plenty of other binding agreements over the past six years) are:

• that the US views ratification of Kyoto as not in its national interests. This position assumes that a) national interests are synonymous with economic interests; b) that there is no technological alternative for economic growth [also a value assumption] to increasing emissions; and c) that only national interests matter when it comes to climate change.

• that developing countries excluded from the first round of Kyoto should have been included, especially China and India, along with the developed Annex I countries.

172 countries have ratified the Kyoto Protocol to date, but effective policy action has always been held up by US intransigence, given that it is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases whether one measures by total emissions or per capita emissions. Carbon dioxide emissions represent the largest GhG with industry and transportation being the largest sources of CO2 emissions. The implication is that control of emissions means drastic policy changes for industry and transportation. Residential changes (say, conversion to solar energy technologies) would impact, at the wildest limit, 17% of total US emissions.


China, today, is the second largest carbon dioxide emitter, but only if measured by absolute emissions for the country. Per capita emissions remain quite low (Americans are responsible for five times the CO2 emissions per capita), although they are rapidly rising as China's economy continues to boom and produce a mass-consumer class. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Chinese remain poor - poverty entails lower consumption, which entails less pollution, at least per capita.

The basic argument from the developing nations is that, given the disproportional emissions on the part of the industrialized countries - which are a direct result of industrialization or modernization of their economies - to call for regulation on emissions from developing nations is to unfairly disadvantage their own industrialization or economic growth. In other words, it is a luxury to have modernized economically, while producing the majority of emissions, and now demand of economically developing nations that they reel in emissions (and thus, by implication, halt their economic growth or experiment with new technologies, something which the US in particular has been wont to do). This is, of course, not perceived to be in developing countries' economic interests by those countries.

As some of the bloggers on the right correctly point out, the 1997 Byrd-Hagel Resolution (S. Res. 98) on which the US Senate voted 95-0 stated that the US would not ratify any agreement that would harm the "national interests" of the United States. Read: "economic interests." But this was not a binding legal rejection of the Protocol. A Simple Resolution (abbreviated "S. Res.") in the Senate is a non-binding political statement of the Senate's general views on a given matter. As bloggers on the right often do not note, President Clinton, knowing thus that the chances of ratification were basically nil, never submitted the Protocol to Congress for ratification. In other words, he was not willing to submit the Protocol to final defeat.

Nearly immediately after taking office, Bush hammered the nail in the coffin of US participation in Kyoto by stating that the US would never ratify the Protocol. Although Clinton was hindered by Senate reluctance and thus, politically, was unable and/or unwilling to submit the Protocol, Bush flatly rejected it and all hope of US participation. The reasons were the two noted in the bullets above. As comparative rejections of Kyoto go, Bush's was a flat statement of rejection. There is absolutely no argument to be had on this.

Now, Kyoto is not a panacea. It was, as my friend Richard Benedick (architect of the Montreal Protocol on the ozone layer) says, "a product of game theory." It ultimately calls for a global 5% reduction in carbon dioxide emissions by reducing emissions to 1990 levels by 2012, which will hardly make a dent in the problem of global warming. Moreover, emissions have increased during the period since Kyoto, the US hardly containing itself at all, even if there are a number of promising local and state measures.

Finally, it appears most countries won't even make their own individual commitments. What Kyoto did do, however, is put climate change on the map as a serious problem requiring serious normative commitments. Without US participation, whether during the Clinton years or the Bush years, those commitments have lagged.

Current discussion about climate change mitigation turns on whether we ought to focus, rather, on adaptation to the effects of climate change. This new focus is fatalistic - likely realistically so, unfortunately - but also gives up on the least developed countries and Small Island States which are and will be most affected by the consequences of climate change. This is an unforgivable ethical shortcoming because those who have contributed least to the problem will face the most dire consequences. Countries that have generated the problem, like the US, largely look the other way. Adaptation might be a necessary strategy, but it cannot be a sufficient one.

Any future agreement that really does mitigate climate change will require the participation of the US, the largest emitter, as well as China, the fastest growing emitter. The US has made Chinese participation a condition of its own participation, mostly because the US fears Chinese economic dominance. This concern was less pronounced at Rio in 1992 (the UNFCCC, from which the Protocol was developed) and is much more so now. The concern with Chinese emissions is a very real one, but the conditionality of Chinese participation in any climate change regime is used politically by the US to deflect its own obligations.

Bush now proposes an alternative agreement to the UN process through an endless series of meetings designed to outline individual nation efforts. He is a fan of "voluntary measures" to reduce emissions, which he will apparently also propose at the G-8 summit. We need only look to Bush's time as governor of Texas, where he also favored voluntary efforts, to see the effects of that policy.

Texas, where coal barely edges out cleaner natural gas as the top power source, belches almost 1 1/2 trillion pounds of carbon dioxide yearly. That's more than every nation in the world except six: the United States, China, Russia, Japan, India and Germany.