Obama gets it

An endorsement from David Rees, the man behind the satirical comic Get Your War On:

Cluster bombs and landmines are particularly terrifying weapons that wreak havoc on communities trying to recover from war. They are fatal impediments to reconstruction and rehabilitation of agricultural land; they destroy valuable livestock; they disable otherwise productive members of society; they maim or kill children trying to salvage them for scrap metal.

Over 150 nations have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. It pains me that our great nation has not. But in the autumn of 2006, there was a chance to take a step in the right direction: Senate Amendment No. 4882, an amendment to a Pentagon appropriations bill that would have banned the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas.

Senator Obama of Illinois voted IN FAVOR of the ban.

[...] As is so often the case, there was no political cost to doing the wrong thing. And there was no political reward for doing the right thing. But Senator Obama did the right thing.

Read the whole thing.

I hope he’s right…

Jim Harper over at the Cato blog thinks the anti-immigration opinions held by many in this country are in fact only “weakly held” and will fade if presented with the correct arguments.

Having watched this issue, and having heard from lots of angry people, I know that anti-immigrant views are a classic weakly held opinion. Angry as people are about the rule of law and “coming to this country the right way,” that anger melts when they learn more. Stuff like this:

“We haven’t permitted anywhere near enough legal immigration for decades. You can sit back and talk about legal channels, but the law has only allowed a smidgen of workers into the country compared to our huge demand. Getting people through legal channels at the INS has been hell.

“America, you’re going to have to get over what amounts to paperwork violations by otherwise law-abiding, honest, hard-working people. And that’s what we’re talking about – 98% honest, hard-working people who want to follow the same path our forefathers did, and who would be a credit to this country if we made it legal for them to come. Our current immigration policies are a greater threat to the rule of law than any of the people crossing the border to come here and work.”

I sincerely hope he’s right, though I fear he’s not taking full account of the fundamentally irrational nature of xenophobia.

Meanwhile, Republicans in the House want to add a $3.1 billion tax burden for companies looking to hire high-skilled immigrants. Is there anything holding the Republican party together right now other than shared fear? It sure as hell ain’t principles, ideas, or any respect for traditional American values.

A helpful tip

The inimitable Daniel Davies:

Mahmoud Ahamdinejad’s name is fucking difficult to spell. It’s also difficult to pronounce. This forms the basis for my latest raft of pronouncements on international affairs.

It is based on the Davies BBC Pronunciation Department Theory Of Geopolitics, which basically states that the importance of any foreigner to the politics of the UK can be reasonably assessed by looking at how much trouble the newsreaders take to get his name right. In general, the BBC appears to believe that all foreigners are pissy little no-marks and you pronounce their names phonetically as if they were English words.

I’d say the theory holds for the U.S., too.

Viz, the pronunciation of Ahmadinejad’s name (which is actually much easier to spell than Khruschev’s if you remember that it is actually a double-barrelled name – Ahmadi-Nejad – the Guardian actually used to spell it this way for a short while but seems to have given up). This is basically pronounced as “I’m a dinner jacket”.

Go see what he has to say about the rest of the world’s leaders.

The war in Spain

Being here in Spain the last few days has allowed me to get a little window on how the war(s) is/are looking from outside the U.S. The news here has been full of the story of two young soldiers who died in Afghanistan, and there was a protest today in Seville against the wars.

Speaking of wars, I´m noticing that everyone from protestors to the national press (what I´ve seen of it) seems to tie Iraq and Afghanistan far more tightly than in the U.S. At home, the public is decidedly gloomy about the Iraq war, while Afghanistan is more or less invisible. Even so, I would imagine — and when I´m not at an Internet cafe on my vacation I´ll probably look this up to verify — that if you polled Americans today, you´d still get a solid 70% in favor of staying in Afghanistan.

The rhetoric I´m hearing in Spain doesn´t support that. Of course, I don´t know enough about Spanish politics to make any sort of educated guesses about how much domestic exasperation is being taken out on the president (a la ¨Why are you letting Bush push you around?¨)

Also, I asked the young woman handing out flyers at the demonstration if the group was a religious one and she looked at me like I had two heads. There´s a data point in favor of Europe as much more secular than the U.S. (I did explain to her that in my country, groups protesting the war are often doing it in part because of religious beliefs. Just so she wouldn´t think my question was coming out of thin air.)

Never prouder

This afternoon, President Bollinger gave a speech that can only be called rousing and inspirational. Watch it here: part 1, part 2 (it’s unfortunate that the video doesn’t capture the response of the several thousand students who were watching out on the lawn; needless to say the atmosphere was electric).

Interestingly enough, just two hours later, Prezbo — miraculously — showed up to teach POLS 3285 Freedom of Speech & Press to thunderous applause. It was a good day to be in his class.

Today was a glorious affirmation of of the values my university and nation espouse, and I’ve never been prouder to be a part of both.

A sampling of the pictures I took throughout the day after the jump

Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow should be interesting

Seen just now while walking to the library:

Bwog coverage here, for those who don’t know what’s going on.

The moral dimensions of baseball

Imagine you’re a poor kid from a poor country. At 15 you quit school so you can concentrate full-time on baseball. It’s a huge gamble; the odds are low that you will ever be a big-league American star. So does the major-league U.S. team that’s encouraging you have a responsibility to provide a Plan B? Like, say, a basic education?

That’s the provocative argument buried in the final paragraphs of Kate Kilpatrick’s excellent analysis of baseball in the Dominican Republic.

And before you say no, recall that without the talented-but-not-superstar players to make up the remainder of the practice teams and junior leagues, MLB player-development programs would never be able to pick out the stars.

(Note to alert readers: I am hoping to sneak this baseball post past our gracious host, not otherwise known for his charity toward this noble sport. It’s really about ethics, anyway.)

This is not fiction

I remember a time when when this stuff was only to be found in dystopian novels:

SHENZHEN, China, Aug. 9 — At least 20,000 police surveillance cameras are being installed along streets here in southern China and will soon be guided by sophisticated computer software from an American-financed company to recognize automatically the faces of police suspects and detect unusual activity.

Starting this month in a port neighborhood and then spreading across Shenzhen, a city of 12.4 million people, residency cards fitted with powerful computer chips programmed by the same company will be issued to most citizens.

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Even personal reproductive history will be included, for enforcement of China’s controversial “one child” policy. Plans are being studied to add credit histories, subway travel payments and small purchases charged to the card.

More terrifying details await in the rest of the NY Times article.

There is no safe system

When people advocate a national ID system for the US, it’s worth keeping in mind that massive databases of personal information have some easily foreseeable vulnerabilities. Britain has just learned that lesson again:

[Several years ago, a] private company, VFS, [was] contracted by the Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office to process the online visa applications of Indians wanting to visit Britain. It later won similar contracts in Russia and Nigera.

But in 2005 it became apparent that the system was chronically flawed. An applicant informed VFS and UK Visas, the government agency in charge of visa processing, that he was able to obtain confidential information – including passport numbers, criminal convictions, ethnic origin and travel details – about other users of the service. He also showed how he could amend other people’s visa applications online. But despite the warning, the system wasn’t shut down until May 2007.

Let’s recap: After the government and the contractor were told that people’s lives could be at risk^[1] due to compromised data, the system was left up and running for another 18 months.

The answer here is not “Whoops, we hired an incompetent contractor. Better luck next time.” The answer is “Good God, what a disaster. Given that predictable political and logistical pressures always affect these type of projects, we should reconsider them entirely.”

1. 
   Remember, if you’re an immigrant and someone obtains your personal details, it’s not like the minor hassle of a credit-card statement with $50 in fraudulent charges. In the US immigraton system, if there is even a hint of inconsistency (let alone criminal background!) in your application, it can be delayed for years or denied altogether, often without possibility of appeal. It is not an exaggeration to say that for someone on provisional status, as all non-citizens are, having someone hack into your official record and change it can literally send you back to your death in a home country torn by war or other violent social disorder.
   ↩

Do the right thing

What do we owe the Iraqis who have risked their lives serving as interpreters for the U.S. military?

Here’s Sebastian Holsclaw at Obsidian Wings:

When we withdraw, it seems there are no plans to give asylum to the Iraqis who have helped us. [...] It would be an incredibly stupid policy to just let those people loose to be the first hunted down and killed by both sides of the likely civil war aftermath. Even if for some reason we didn’t feel some sort of moral responsibility to them (which to be clear we should) it makes good practical sense. We’ve done all sorts of damage to any reputation for military competence, but that doesn’t mean we should go out of our way to show that if you directly help us, we are likely to abandon you to an ugly death when we leave.

And the British perspective from Daniel Davies at Crooked Timber:

Iraqi interpreters used by the British Army and CPA South have already been hunted down by death squads. [...] There really is no way of keeping these people safe while they are in Iraq, and they need to be kept safe. Quite apart from what one would call a “debt of honour” (the phrase is somewhat pompous, but accurately describes the situation), it never makes sense to get a reputation for abandoning one’s friends. Therefore, the Iraqi staff used by the British in Iraq need to be given asylum in the UK, along with their families.

This is not the current policy of the UK. The Home Office has simply suggested that Iraqis put at risk by their work for the British “register with the appropriate UN refugee agency”, joining the mountain of 2 million-plus refugees….

The title of this post is taken from the Spike Lee film of the same name. It’s often hard to figure out the right thing to do, and good intentions don’t protect you from unintended consequences. But evidence is overwhelming that Iraqis who have worked for the U.S. are and will continue to be singled out and slaughtered.

The U.S. has admitted a bare 133 Iraqi refugees so far this year. That’s not even close to the 7,000 that our government already promised to admit, let alone the thousands more who have worked for us. While there are no good reasons for the delay, one thing is guaranteed to end it: Public pressure. Talk to your friends, write to your local paper, and call your Congressperson.

(If you think this is premature, take a look at Gary Farber’s timeline of how fast the situation deteriorated in the last three and a half weeks of the Vietnam War. And while you’re at it, read his most recent post on this topic.)