Category Archives: current events

post-debate chatter

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Just a bunch of links I’ve collected for my American Dialogues course:

The first round. I’m mixing commentary from bloggers with that of columnists for the “traditional media,” as well as overview news articles. More later, ac (after coffee).

And a second round of links to post-debate commentary:

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which candidate advocates torture?

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Tonight’s presidential debate is on foreign policy. I know what I’d like the first question to be.

Others have made this point, but it bears repeating: Maybe you don’t think it’s wrong to torture people. Maybe your conception of “evildoers” is such that you can think of them as less deserving of human rights than others. But have you ever stopped to think that the more the world perceives the U.S. as a nation that condones and facilitates oppression, pain, suffering, and injustice, the more likely we are to suffer oppression, pain, suffering, and injustice ourselves? When our soldiers are captured by the people they are fighting, what is their treatment likely to be when it’s known around the world that we stop at nothing to get what we want?

“Plan Would Let U.S. Deport Suspects to Nations That Might Torture Them,” by Dana Priest and Charles Babington (Washington Post):

The Bush administration is supporting a provision in the House leadership’s intelligence reform bill that would allow U.S. authorities to deport certain foreigners to countries where they are likely to be tortured or abused, an action prohibited by the international laws against torture the United States signed 20 years ago.

The provision, part of the massive bill introduced Friday by House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), would apply to non-U.S. citizens who are suspected of having links to terrorist organizations but have not been tried on or convicted of any charges. Democrats tried to strike the provision in a daylong House Judiciary Committee meeting, but it survived on a party-line vote.

The provision, human rights advocates said, contradicts pledges President Bush made after the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal erupted this spring that the United States would stand behind the U.N. Convention Against Torture. Hastert spokesman John Feehery said the Justice Department “really wants and supports” the provision.

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“they only answer, more, more,more…”

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A woman whose son was killed in Iraq showed up at a speech by Laura Bush to voice her unhappiness about his death. Mrs. Bush listened thoughtfully, and the other members of the audience expressed their condolences and thanked her for the sacrifice made by her son in the service of a cause they continue to support.

Wait… I’m sorry. It seems I’ve gotten just a few of the details wrong.

It turns out that Mrs. Bush ignored the woman, the other audience members started chanting “Four more years!” (of the deaths of young American soldiers perhaps?), and the woman was led away in handcuffs.

Welcome to America.

Continue reading →

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lessig on the issues that garner our attention

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I agree 100% with Lawrence Lessig when he writes that we should discuss the policies the candidates are proposing and the likely effect of those policies on the future of our nation rather than chase the scandale du jour. However, this kind of policy discussion requires a much more sophisticated understanding than most of us currently have of the “cause and effect” claims contained within fields such as economics, foreign relations, and social psychology. For example, if we adjust this interest rate over here, what effect will that have on rates of home ownership over there? Do we even know how to evaluate the different possible answers to that question?

Furthermore, the press would have a hard time boiling down into a pithy headline an announcement by one of the campaigns regarding, say, a particular position on our relationship with North Korea. Remember the news stories about how confusing the new overtime rules are? The story wasn’t “Here are the new overtime rules”; instead, it was “These new rules are confusing to everyone.” This is how the press handles things that are complicated, apparently.

The campaigns (and their supporters) know this, and so in order to capture the attention of the press, they put other, simpler issues out front. We end up with a public discourse that focuses on “Did he or didn’t he?” questions that appear to have easy answers.

But it also strikes me that these “ridiculous questions” (How many times has the president been arrested? Did Kerry shoot himself to earn his Purple Heart?) all fall within the boundaries of epideictic rhetoric. They are meant to put into the voter’s mind powerfully affective concrete examples from a candidate’s life that will establish and reinforce either a positive or negative view of that candidate. Epideictic rhetoric like this does not, perhaps, serve our needs as voters very well, but it does serve the candidates’ needs in that it’s very effective at pushing people to vote one way or the other.

[Cross-posted at American Dialogues]

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a good day

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The UMKC September Project events yesterday went very well. Not as many people showed up as I thought were going to, but the conversations that took place were fantastic, probably the most satisfying exchanges I have yet had at this school. Unfortunately, none of the conservative groups or individuals to whom we extended invitations attended. One of my colleagues suggested that this is because the concept of dialogue with a diverse set of opinions is inherent to a liberal ideology but not to a conservative one. I hope this is not true.

Many valuable exchanges took place, but a few have stuck in my head. I’ll start with one and perhaps add more if I have time.

On the subject of freedom, when Zell Miller spoke at the Republican National Convention, he said this:

For it has been said so truthfully that it is the soldier, not the reporter, who has given us the freedom of the press.

It is the soldier, not the poet, who has given us freedom of speech. It is the soldier, not the agitator, who has given us the freedom to protest.

It is the soldier who salutes the flag, serves beneath the flag, whose coffin is draped by the flag who gives that protester the freedom to abuse and burn that flag.

As my colleague Steve Dilks pointed out, however, this simple-minded statement ignores completely the work of many people who are not soldiers and who play an active and essential role in articulating, advocating, and preserving freedoms. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and their followers, come to mind. No war was fought to earn women the right to vote in America: suffragettes did the work. Legislators write into law the official recognition of freedoms, and judicial bodies consider the constitutionality of those laws. Someone has to negotiate and put into writing the peace treaties that mark the end of war and that represent the beginning of freedom. Writers and speakers have historically created the framework by which a people decide whether they will believe in and support certain freedoms. Soldiers clearly have sacrificed a great deal, but Miller’s statment is, in a word, ignorant.

At the start and finish of the two events I attended, I reminded everyone that we were taking part in a very large project. A recent email from the national September Project organizers read as follows:

September Project events [took] place on Saturday, September 11 in
all 50 states. In total, there [were] 460 US libraries, schools, colleges,
community colleges, universities, jails, community centers, and parks
holding events.

With the recent addition of September Project events in Venezuela
and Singapore, there are now 8
countries participating: Australia, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain,
Switzerland, the US, and Venezuela.

washburn.silver.jpg
Thousands of people gathered on this day to exchange ideas about important issues, and we owe the original concept to the work of just two people: David Silver and Sarah Washburn.

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