G did a comment on ‘The downside of torture’ that needs to be out here in the daylight, so here it is. OB.

What is perhaps most appalling about this is that prosecuting torture has become nothing more than another tawdry political game. Barack Obama is, among other things, not just a Harvard Law graduate but an actual Constitutional scholar. He knows what an appalling clusterfuck the Bush Administration made of the Constitution with its denial of habeas corpus, secret prisons, torture, and all that. He knows what the morally and legally required path must be. But he is rather scrupulously avoiding that path.

Worse, Obama’s administration has in almost all terrorism-related court cases pushed the absurdly counter-Constitutional secrecy policies … Read the rest

Philippe Sands said on ‘Fresh Air’ that Judge Garzon attempted to prosecute a couple of people that the Bush administration had tortured and that the case collapsed because the evidence, being the product of torture, was not admissable in court. Sands said this is one reason Garzon has started a criminal investigation of some of Bush’s team: they (allegedly) not only violated international law, they also made it impossible for other courts to prosecute the objects of the torture.

He also discussed the irony of the fact that Chuckie Taylor was convicted in a US court for crimes he committed in Liberia; that was possible because the crimes he committed were violations of international law. States that have signed such … Read the rest

I saw a horrible thing on tv last night, in a PBS show about the Kalahari. There are flamingos that nest in in an area of the Kalahari which slowly dries out during the nesting season, with the result that the chicks have to walk a hundred miles through the desert to get to water. They have to walk. A hundred miles. Through a desert. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds. They’re small, they’re feeble, it’s burning hot. It takes weeks.

250,000 leave; some years not one chick makes it.

Good planning! Wouldn’t you think the adults would manage to think ‘gee, maybe we should find a better place to nest’? Or that, failing to think that, they would … Read the rest

Oh all right – I quit too soon. It’s too annoying to leave.

[A]ttacking them in broad and often hilarious strokes…allows him to develop an extended interpretive summary of what he describes as mainstream Christian doctrine, a subject about which (as he repeatedly reminds us) the Ditchkins duo, along with the Western intellectual elite in general, knows almost nothing. Eagleton’s terminology is deliberately provocative, and some Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs, colored as it clearly is by the Catholic “liberation theology” of his youth, to be mainstream at all.

Well exactly – a great many Christians won’t find his account of their beliefs to be mainstream at all. So in what sense is he justified in pitching … Read the rest

Terry Eagleton has at least one fan anyway.

Eagleton…is determined not to commit the same elementary errors he ascribes to such foes as biologist Richard Dawkins and political journalist Christopher Hitchens. (Those two, collectively dubbed “Ditchkins” by Eagleton, are the self-appointed leaders of public atheism and the authors of bestselling books on the subject, Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Hitchens’ “God Is Not Great.”)

He gets it right by saying Eagleton ascribes these elementary errors, but then he promptly labels Dawkins and Hitchens ‘foes’ – why are they foes? Because Eagleton doesn’t like what they’ve written. That doesn’t really make them his foes, it just makes them people he is quarreling with. ‘Foes’ is more ascribing. And then, what is … Read the rest