monist

Dualists want to tell us there must be more than merely this mundane world. We must be able to tell them that this world is not mundane nor mere, and that what are separately called physical, mental, spiritual, material, are of one Nature.

(Dualism, of course, is the philosophical notion that reality is divided into two realms: one of meat, dirt, and atoms, the other of emotion, meaning, and mind-soul stuff.)

lootingschool

Rick Scott's School Plan for Scoundrels
http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/12/rick-scott-florida-education-jeb-bush

It's not just a hypothetical harm, as charter schools in many states have demonstrated. Charter schools get paid by the number of kids they enroll, and they are free from much of the bureaucracy Republicans like to bash so much. All that money mixed with all that freedom hasn't produced much in the way of an education boost: Charter schools perform no better and often much worse than traditional ones. But they have produced a bumper crop of fraudsters.

Do advocates of scrapping the public schools and invoking private school vouchers as panacea actually think that, were Germany and Japan to do the same thing, they would start kicking our asses at math and science even more?

These people don't value an educated populace as necessary to democracy. They don't value the basic human right to learn and understand the universe. They aren't really concerned with improving education at all, they just see public education as a lost opportunity to loot riches.

However effective or ineffective, public education at least carries a moral mission beyond increasing shareholder value.

Privatizing essential public infrastructure is devastating for the people of every country and polity it has ever been inflicted on.

granddesign

The Grand Design by Stephen W. Hawking

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a good explanation of general relativity and quantum theory for the layman. However, I can see it becoming the standard recommended text for a bunch of fuzzy-thinking newage religions accompanied by their misleading interpretations to show how "scientific" they are. Also, it may not be clear that Hawking in fact represents particular 'sides' of a few approaches and theories that remain in dispute.

I find myself wondering how much of the style is Hawking's and how much Mlodinow's. The cynical rule is that most of the work was done by the less-famous author. Still, it's kind of fun to imagine the text as being all in Hawking's computer-voice.

As I said, the explanations of gravity, quantum theory, and the standard model are very good, including curvature of space, multiple quantum histories contributing to measured results, and particle bestiaries, but M-Theory, the purported theme of the whole book that's supposed to unite them all, gets fairly brisk and vague explanation. They compare it to a set of overlapping maps that all agree where they overlap, but none of which could ever be extended to a single accurate map of the whole globe. They speak of 10^500 possible universes in quantum superstate, one of which we experience, and take the reader through the anthropomorphic principle to show the fact of our existence places restrictions/selections on which possible universes we can experience.

Unfortunately, that M-Theory is the final theory comes across more as a final assertion than as the logical conclusion of the whole book. As does the idea (however interesting) that the universe can emerge from nothing because on a universal scale, the negative energy of gravity precisely balances the positive energy of matter so that the whole energy of the universe is zero, which is also abruptly dropped on the reader at the end.

I'd recommend this as one of several layman's introductions to science, but not as one to stand alone for physics and cosmology.



View all my reviews

somenotinthis

A few years ago, someone on the right of the spectrum was in my e-mail saying that the idea of "we're all in this together" was the source of everything wrong with America, distorting people's ideas with socialist thoughts and unAmerican values (and depleting precious bodily fluids, no doubt.)
Several days ago, someone on the right of the spectrum was on the radio saying that because "we're all in this together," the most well-off people in America need to keep tax cuts that have cost the country billions. (Yeah, because tax rates are the single biggest problem facing all Americans today. Note that he didn't come out and say that the costs would require scaling back or cutting out essential services to the less well-off people in America.)

thisisapost

This blog is not dead, just neglected as per usual.
I'd composed an essay on the Park51 issue, which may not be timely anymore. I'll at least put it here, but parts of it can be worked into another essay I've been composing on First Amendment issues in general, which I plan to send to a few newspapers as well as put online. It works in honor of the upcoming 90th Anniversary of the ACLU's beginning, and in the spirit of "now that the election circus is over, real work can begin." Whatever change ought to be, it won't be achieved through elected officials, but by affecting and effecting the cognitive and moral landscape of society.

I've been maintaining the Utah Freethought Society's activity, however minimal, with the goal of promoting skepticism, science literacy, and open discussion. Our latest topic discussion of Israel/Palestine has attracted more interest than we've had in recent weeks, so I hope a good turnout comes of it. I've also met with the local Coffee Party a bit. They're planning an endrun push for the Disclose Act before the congressional changeover, Then the Utah bunch will try to help the local Fair Boundaries anti-gerrymandering push.

My ancient desktop has been choking on software and had network access problems. Not having the patience to fix it the right way, I'm running off a Crunchbang Statler live CD right now. I think I'll have the monetary flexibility to complete a new desktop soon, then the question of whether to include a Windows partition for the first time in a couple years will be upon me. I may do so just because I've been jonesing to run through the Thief series again, but there's little other reason to run Windows.

Meanwhile, some recent recent thoughts pulled from FB, though I've been trying to reduce my time spent there:

-----------------------------------------
Re: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/curriculum/2010/11/louisiana_panel_votes_in_favor.html

The matter isn't with evolution being a theory. No duh, so is gravity. The matter is that "intelligent design" isn't. (Nor any other prettified version of creationism)
"Theory" is as good as it gets in real science, and ID plain hasn't done the work to qualify as such. It isn't an explanatory model, just a handwave, and it makes no predictions for what future discoveries might be on the horizon, what future tests might yield new knowledge. It's a worthless security blanket for those unwilling to reconcile their faith with the empirical realities of the world.

-----------------------------------------
Re: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/20/cindy-mccain-noh8-photo-m_n_430004.html

Cindy McCain actually provoked a lot of ire in conservative circles for this; claims she shouldn't go against her husband and that it was a "hateful" attack on conservative Christians and their values.
Of course in 15 years or so when nearly every U.S. State has gay marriage and adoption, conservative politicians of the future will point to her as proof that equal rights for gays was always a conservative goal.

-----------------------------------------

valuesidentitygraham

Some links I've read in the last week:

It goes against our nature; but the left has to start asserting its own values

Keep Your Identity Small

Common Cause Report (pdf download)

This echoes what George Lakoff has written about morality in politics from a cognitive science background. I've been thinking similarly about identity, and the values issue is something I've been frustrated with many liberals and progressives over for awhile.

I try to avoid carrying labels into political discussion (though I do occasionally claim the word 'libertarian,' to avoid it becoming the exclusive territory of the sort of rightist Friedman/Hayek worshipper I used to be.) In politics, people don't vote their interests, they vote their identities. Mass political persuasion involves building myths and a lot of the myths lead people to accept certain terms and concepts as their identities, and certain rival concepts as threats to those identities. It used to be the in thing in right-leaning political talk was to bash "identity politics" (meaning concern with the relative problems and wellbeing of different demographic groups, ethnic, national, religious and sexual minorities, etc.), but conservatism itself is all about identity politics. Specifically, conservatism in the U.S. is about asserting and reinforcing ones' self-identity as a "real American," which in many ways requires one to shove out certain people, ideas, and tendencies out as not-really-American. ("Othering," as some social theory verbiage would have it.)

Progressive goals and the history of America's progress to gradually put the promise of the Declaration and Constitution into greater actual practice, depends on a common moral vision, the empathy for fellow conscious beings which underlies true morality. If you shirk from the the concept, if you say things like "oh, I don't like to use the word 'moral' or 'evil'," you hand victory to forces whose 'morality' is rooted in authoritarianism.

chomskyonpoint

A great discussion. Don't dismiss the tea party, the segment of America their rhetoric appeals to have legitimate grievances, but aren't organized or getting any real answers.
I was disappointed on the caller at the end of the hour, that Prof. Chomsky and Tom Ashbrook choose to tackle the anthropogenic climate change denial part of his question in their limited time, rather than his "the strong survive and that's the way nature is" comment. That underlying value system is a lot of the reason people want to reject climate change, because the problem is the unfettered advancement of the ruling class they dream of joining.

It's Herbert Spencer all over again, who actually coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" and whom many Darwin haters would find themselves in uncomfortable agreement with as he was all about saying the wealth of leading businessmen and ruling families was proof of their essential superiority, and that any program to ease the burden of the poor would only make America weaker. (He was writing such things even before Darwin's evolution work was published.)

The fallacy is on several points. Evolution is a blind and unconscious process, it doesn't prescribe what will work best for survival to reproduction. Evolution is an amoral process; there really is nothing to say that greater success in a Darwinian system is right or good or obligatory, it simply is. Darwinian systems are not competitions of brute strength; Darwin addressed this in Descent of Man, the anarchist Peter Kropotkin explored it in Mutual Aid as a counter to Spencer's popular social "Darwinism," and Richard Dawkins addresses it in The Selfish Gene. Cooperation and social behavior are highly viable strategies for reproduction and survival, and to the extent that genetic factors promote these behaviors, they will be selected for in the Darwinian equation.

Furthermore, the simple statement "the strong survive," ought to give anyone pause, especially as applied to justifying human social and economic arrangements. Our advance, such as it is, as a civilization is very much measured by the efforts we make to ensure it is not merely the strongest and fiercest of us to survive. Our moral advance depends upon putting raw survival and basic human happiness outside the realm of competition, turning competition where we use it into play rather than desperation. If we value anything at all, those values form the seed of a moral system. For all that our nature is torn with opportunistic cheater instincts, social and cooperative behavior are also a strong part of human nature, our natural endowment via the evolutionary process. It's not "the way of nature" to reject a prominent humanistic instinct in favor of a callous approach to individualism and a brigandic approach to capitalism.

http://www.onpointradio.org/2010/09/noam-chomsky-america

religiousandareligiousidentity

[I contributed this to the "Theism+ AND Atheism+" thread on rpg.net's Tangency (registration required to view), which even considering it's a gaming and fantasy site's "other topics" forum, has some of the best society/culture/politic kind of discussion I've seen online (which may say more about the sorry state of the web itself or my experience of it than it says about Tangency), and is remarkably polite and nice by internet standards. Like most of what I write here, it could use another round of editing, but here it is anyway.]

The word 'atheist' technically applies to me. I try to treat these kinds of labels as descriptors rather than an identity.
My family were what was commonly called "Jack" Mormons, though that church now recommends the term "less active." We were irregular attendees at the local ward (Mo-speak for "parish"), friendly with the neighbors, participants in several ward activities, generally within Mormon culture, but not particularly devout. (My parents have told me at one point in my childhood they withdrew us from church activity for awhile because I had seemed to be taking the church far too seriously.) Of my immediate family, my mom's the only one who could still be called religious, and that still in a culture and community sense rather than a belief sense, though she is a theist in some sense I haven't inquired into. The house had several books of science and of folklore (my dad's an engineer, mom's a social worker with a background in English), and things like space and volcanoes and poisonous snakes and heroic stories are awesome. I probably knew the Greek myths better than any of the Christian myths, possibly excepting the Christmas story. I still credit Carl Sagan's Cosmos as the definitive seed of my worldview. The universe is an amazing place.

I've been a part of the local nontheist community* for a number of years now. We've been growing into a proper community, now engaging in charity work, and trying to promote what I think of as a revitalization of the old Freethought movement of the late 19th/early 20th century.

My views come from both epistemological agnosticism and ideological antiauthoritarianism. Our knowledge of truth is limited, I don't trust revelation or authority as sources of knowledge, and the empirical methods developed by science have proved the best so far at refining something close to real knowledge. I see the pursuit of understanding what the universe is and why as sort of the point of all the deep cosmic stuff. Because community and charity and goodwill can be made anywhere humans choose to make them, they're not really the test of value of religious ideas.
The antiauthoritarianism comes in because I find the idea of a universe ruled from the top down both morally and aesthetically unpleasing. The idea that a sufficiently powerful cosmic being could be able to make morality be whatever that being commanded it to be is actually horrific, no different from a world of might makes right, yet it seems to be the only morality some religious people claim to understand. Aesthetically and morally, I love the idea of emergent complexity and self-organization from the bottom up, I love the idea that these principles arise in physics, biology, chemistry, even political and social organization. I think anything close to genuine morality has to be built on the empathy among beings experiencing the universe, not on the will of an entity commanding the universe.

I tend to think most religious people are in it for the community participation, rather than being firmly committed to doctrines. For all that Joseph Smith called the Catholic Church the whore of Babylon, those two churches are very similar in that they actually strive for a single global organization with leaders on high directing groups below, where most other religions in the world are more regional and modular. Meeting with ex-Mormons has shown me that the particular experience of Mormon culture varies from family to family. Mormon families differ in how much deference they believe must be paid to church authority, and I expect the same is true for Catholic families, but for those families who do follow, the authority structure of the church pushes a more singular experience, and emotional pressure to conform is very high. I know a lot of ex-Mormons worried about the social and emotional costs if their families find out about their doubts, and my antiauthoritarian sentiment leads me to regard that as a form of tyranny.

I think the Cosmological Argument (that to have something rather than nothing requires an intelligent cause) is persuasive to many people. There's probably a reason for something rather than nothing, but I don't think any kind of mind must necessarily be involved in that reason. That said, I can see deism, pantheism, and panentheism as somewhat kindred worldviews, and if someone convinced me one of those made more sense than naturalism, very little else of my worldview would need be altered. Deism, pantheism, and panentheism aren't inherently incompatible with what empirical methodological naturalism (science) has helped us know about the universe.

In terms of ultimate meaning and value, well, it's true that a godless universe doesn't offer meaning as a given, but I think something meaningful can be derived. Carl Sagan said, "we are a way for the universe to know itself." I think any attempt to find value in existence has to rest on that: our conscious experience of the universe. We're in this together and if we can learn to value our own experience of the universe, and recognize others' experience of the universe as equally valid and valuable, morality and meaning can be built on that. Bottoms up.

*(Including AoU, UFS, HoU, SHIFT, SHAFT, though the websites are probably less up-to-date than the respective facebook pages, lazy as we are.)

nodemocratsleft

The role of the Democratic Party is to persuade Republican partisans and the public in general that Democrats represent the left. Democrats are a centrist party (that is, pragmatic, bureaucratic, and oriented to discrete policy-by-policy and issue-by-issue behavior and decisions) with some token left-wing mascots. (No, the names regularly invoked in conservative "stop so-and-so from doing such-and-such" scare-mails aren't them.) As Howard Zinn noted, the tradition of the Democratic Party is to be somewhat more liberal than the Republican Party on domestic issues, but not too liberal, and not to differ meaningfully on foreign policy issues at all.

In this way, conservative voters are (perversely) comforted at having defined badguys to reflect off their own assumed goodguy badges. Capital-class insiders to the mechanics of power are served by both major parties, each party standing in periodically to take the blame when different aspects of the system as-is awaken a glimmer of dissatisfaction in the disinformed populace. In this way, resources and activism are diverted from any efforts to create actual representation and participation from the people.

People working within the Democratic organization often believe is is necessary (however unfortunate it may be) to move to the 'middle' to pick up more support. In doing so, they only help the opposition move American political discourse further to the right. There is no ideological 'middle.' A person may apply a progressive moral logic to one issue and a conservative moral logic on another, but there isn't anyone consistently and ideologically devoted to "somewhere in between" along most issues, unless you count simple apathy. To avoid openly embracing progressive moral causes while accommodating conservative issues gives people no encouragement to think progressively, and no disincentive to think conservatively. (See George Lakoff.) We all have both underlying moral logics in our heads, as they exist for dealing with different kinds of situations and relationships, but people's minds will most readily use the tools they've practiced, and evading your alleged values as extreme offers no practice in thinking and living them.

dontsweatthegodstuff

The concept of God is supposed to be a mind encompassing the Cosmos, but many religious people insist on a god limited to a particular sex, a particular name, a particular form (after the image of man), who prefers particular nations in war, particular athletes in sport, and particular pairings and positions in sex. They insist on a god as small as they are.

onjustice

I refuse to believe in natural justice. Justice is an artifact of human conception and human effort.

thepastforthedisinclined

What the History Channel want you to think is a complete and thorough understanding of the past:
Biblical Times ...> The American Revolution ...> World War II ...> Last Week

What the Republican Party want you to think is a complete and thorough understanding of the past:
Biblical Times ...> Jayeezus ...> The American Revolution, when are FourFathers set forth a new nation conceived in Christianity --exactly as modern American evangelical Protestants pretend it always has been, unchanged since Jayeezus personally wrote it down in English ...> World War II, when by gum, men were Real Men ...> The time when America was The Way It Ought To Be ...> The time when librul hippies set out to make it not The Way It Ought To Be ...> The Reagan Administration (sans context and complications) ...> The Clinton Administration, when saxophone-playing interns danced naked through the streets ...> The time when Jayeezus personally chose George W. Bush to be the President and anyone who questioned any of his policies was a traitor endangering The Troops ...> The time those crazy librul hippies thought Obama was their Messiah and began trying to bury us Real Americans in SekritMuslim cCommuNazi dictatorship plots ...> Last Week

What the Democratic Party want you to think is a complete and thorough understanding of the past:
Now ...> Last Week ...> Some particular time a Democrat looked good on television

groundcontroltothomaspaine

Thomas Paine was an interesting and critical figure in the origins of America and the development of modern ideals of freedom and democracy.

Glenn Beck thinks he understands Paine really well. Count it among the man's many not-so-charming delusions. I do eventually mean to read this thing, taking advantage of the local municipal socialist book-sharing program (library), though probably not the same one Beck went to to learn all government services are wicked and wrong. Hopefully it will turn out better than my attempt to read Ann Coulter.

John Perkins has a considerably better grasp of Paine. Perkins is descended from Paine and has learned some hard moral lessons on the nature of power and control. He knows that authoritarian control structures in capitalist business are no less odious than authoritarian control structures in government, that the two are often deeply intertwined and that this is NOT a result of government corrupting honest capitalism but of the corruption inherent in all desire to control and exploit for profit and power. Glenn Beck by contrast only remembers to detest authoritarian government if it fails to make the appropriate "conservative values" nonsense noise, and like most pseudo-libertarians, is inexplicably more angered by things government does FOR people than by things government does TO people. (Often this takes the form of detesting those labelled as weak or dependent, veneration of metaphorical Strength being a characteristic fascist value.)

Susan Jacoby also understands Paine quite well. Her excellent book embraces Paine's contribution to America's true moral foundations, and continued influence on all movements to bring about a better, freer world.

But the best source on Paine is Thomas Paine himself, in Common Sense, Rights of Man, Age of Reason, and numerous other writings, pamphlets, and letters, he explains quite clearly what he stands for. Apologists like to pretend it was a different or changed Thomas Paine who wrote Age of Reason, but the same "spirit," the same principles of freedom of mind and body for all and the free pursuit of truth unfettered by orthodoxy, authority, or dogma underlies all his writings. It's all public domain, so you can find it on Project Gutenberg and numerous university course text pages, or in several printed editions if you like. Though far from the first freethinker, he is among the finest.

differenceofdegreenotkind

A man says, "I have a gun and I will shoot you unless you paint your house red."

A terrorist message declares, "we have bombs we will detonate in your city unless you paint all your homes red."

An interstellar invasion fleet announces, "we can manipulate matter to the subatomic level, and we will tear apart your Sun unless you comply by painting all domiciles red."

A Being walks the earth in shining robes, with secrets beyond time behind his eyes, the words come into your mind, "I can make and unmake universes, I will inflict eternal torment, pain, suffering, and fire on all who do not swear that red is the only Holy color for the homes of the faithful."

unknownpoliclimate

I don't think people should get to call themselves "skeptics" when their "skepticism" is rooted not in genuine doubt but in a devoted faith in Party position statements and Bernays/Hayek/Friedman's wilful misinterpretation of Adam Smith. Yes, that sentence is about climate change.

Genuine skepticism is deep epistemological questioning into whether we could really know what we think we know, and whether others can really know what they claim to know. One must question oneself most of all. Simply asserting others are wrong, skepticism is not.

goooobullshit!(omgtits)

I saw Penn and Teller's "Bullshit!" today; a series I don't catch often, not having cable.

Though their defining best episodes generally came early in the series (esp. profanity in season 2), this one was pretty good. It managed to stop me a couple times when I was standing up to turn off the TV and do something else, I'll give it that.

Cheer. The problem the show addresses is that cheerleaders suffer far more injuries of all types than other common school athletic programs combined, and there aren't enough safety measures, spotters, and proper health and safety training among cheer instructors. This is related to the fact that cheer is not counted among 'competitive sports' in the Title IX program.

Here, P&T spend some time railing against feminism and government programs being the problem (before they've got around to detailing the safety issues) and then they spend the entire rest of the episode showing that in fact much of the problem comes from the involvement of the Varsity corporation, which through a long list of company initializations (not acronyms, fellow citizens) is involved in just about every part of every cheer program in the country, and is raking in tons of money from that.

The early vitriol against "feminism" seems out of place, but seeing as the rest of the program is filled with refreshing anti-corporatism, they probably felt it necessary. Otherwise they'd have had to denounce themselves as bleeding Bolsheviks or something. Also in that early part, they talked to someone from the Cato Institute in order to... talk to the Cato Institute? Really, for all the guy actually contributed to the topic, the only reason for including him seems to be to name-drop Cato. (Underwriting involved?)

Anyway, girls and young women across the country are suffering serious, sometimes crippling, occasionally lethal injuries at a rate much higher than even in ice hockey and soccer, while engaged in acts of athleticism that are more or less a mix of gymnastics, track, and dance. Things Penn and Teller don't quite get around to asking or explaining include pretty much anything related to what to do about it.

Is the one "grandmother-(or-whatever)-to-Title-IX" they briefly talked to the biggest obstacle? Just what would it take to get cheer included in Title IX? How exactly would that improve safety? Although they show Varsity stands to gain from cutting corners around the safety issue, and they say Varsity is involved with the decision to keep cheer out of Title IX, they leave many details of that involvement vague. Just what can people do to get better safety training, safe practice, spotters, etc. in school cheer programs? Will it require people to write Congress? To contact Title IX? Can it be improved State by State? Through school boards? Could improved awareness, organization, and involvement by parents at the local level bring schools together to form rival cheer programs with real safety and sports health measures in place that are not beholden to the Varsity corporation?

On all these things Penn and Teller both remain silent.

breastcancervaccine

Been hearing this over the last hour on the BBC.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8714085.stm

seisdemayo

I don't think it makes sense to argue "It's the law" or "they broke the law" when some of the major points under contention are "is the law just?" and "what ought to be the law?". It's also odd, though more disappointing than surprising, that people who claim to dislike big government and the threat of government tyranny are just fine with that government being extra strict toward someone they don't like. No, this isn't just about Arizona, or even just about immigration.

aninescapablebias

The fundamental ideological bias is ideology itself --the notion that believing the correct principles will lead to the correct conclusions. It's not unlike the basic function of scientific thinking --that knowing the underlying workings of nature will make one better able to understand and predict the specifics of the natural world. Also, easy comfort is found in one's perceived ability to impugn other's ideas by appeal to their specific failures on other issues. If the other guy's value system leads him to conclude that orphans should be loaded into giant hamster-wheel generators or all bridges should be one-way roads like God intended, it's tempting to think his entire value system is discredited by that conclusion. Just as tempting, but even shakier as a useful judgement, is taking one's incomplete strawman idea of what the other guy's value system is or must be, and trying to construct a thoroughly horrid conclusion from it in order to accomplish the above.

The opposite to the fundamental bias of ideology would be that no social or political questions are connected at all, that no underlying principle could possibly lead to better conclusions across multiple issues. I'm not convinced humans can actually think like this. I suspect anyone who might claim to be guided by such pragmatism would be simply unaware of their underlying ideological framework.

onblogging

James Edward Raggi's blog has a particular geek focus that may or may not interest the half-dozen viewers I get, but he's explained well the nature of blogging in general and the position bloggers find themselves in whether they know it or not.

http://lotfp.blogspot.com/2010/03/little-perspective-on-internet-and.html

Think I'll have to do a bit of policing in the comments.

Anything deemed to be spam, advertising, link shilling, or thinly-veiled excuses for the same will be removed.

adarkknight

How to use Joker in the next Batman movie:

The action rises, as Bats and the new villain vie against one another. There's aerial fistfights, underground vehicle chases, oh-so-serious brooding and shouting and looming, relationship troubles, all the usual fare. At some point, and you could probably get away with it more than once, someone's brilliant plan of the moment goes catastrophically wrong, hundreds of people are imperilled, fire and destruction reign. One expects this in an action movie anyway, but both the hero and villain are robbed of whatever goal they are trying to achieve. And in the wreckage, the Joker's card is found, maybe several, maybe hundreds raining down, with a handwritten message: "MISS ME?"

You could probably get away with making the Joker an offscreen bogeyman for at least two films, if pulled off right. Until a successor to Heath Ledger is found.

itscalledtheruleoflawpeople

The only problem with trying KSM and his allies in criminal courts (apart from the absurdity of using NYC itself, as Keith Knight pointed out, that leaves them no excuse for changing the venue of police brutality cases anymore) is that the practice of keeping them as military prisoners (under the bullshit term "enemy combatant" invented to evade Constitutional and treaty laws dealing with prisoners) has destroyed, corrupted, or never bothered to gather the lines of evidence that would make a criminal prosecution feasible. Said again THE POLICY OF TREATING TERRORISM AS A SINGULAR MILITARY FOE RATHER THAN A CRIMINAL ACT AND CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY IS THE SOURCE OF THE PROBLEM!

There is no Constitutional alternative to the criminal justice system. People calling for the military to simply take KSM, the Detroit bomber, and others and "try," convict, and punish them are calling for the end of the Constitution itself, the end of the Rule of Law, and the rise of martial law. Not that there's anything new in that. The Cheney administration spent most of the decade eagerly and openly dismantling as much of the Constitution as they could get their claws on, appealing to a mal-educated public's tough-guy-action-movie fantasies to expand central executive power. And a compliant complacent Congress and SCOTUS happily rolled over and let them do it. (Condoleezza Rice at one point actually invoked the popularity of "24" as proof the American people weren't interested in Constitutional restraints on the government anymore.)

Unfortunately, there's no easy unraveling of the prosecution problem now. What little evidence was gathered is dispersed among numerous uncoordinated government bodies, corrupted by entropic time, and tainted with questionable interrogation and imprisonment techniques. Even though KSM was caught not by a military operation, but by a joint international law enforcement operation, it's reached the point where the best hope for conviction by means that let America remain America rests on the likelihood that he wants persecution, martyrdom, and infamous credit for what he's done. Small favors. At least the Detroit bomber is a fresh case that's been handled through professional criminal investigation after the whole National Security angle failed to stop him.

checkinginwithanaphorism

The word 'freedom' is robbed of all meaning when it is used to refer to private dominion.