The City of Cambridge will be issuing marriage licenses at the City Clerk’s Office on Monday at the stroke of midnight. The City Clerk’s Office is in the City Hall, at 795 Mass Ave. I intend to be there with champagne, if I can convince any like-minded celebrants to come with. Anyone?
Category: Politics
Regarding prisons in Iraq:
“When the duke occupied the Romagna he found it under the rule of weak masters, who rather plundered their subjects than ruled them, and gave them more cause for disunion than for union, so that the country was full of robbery, quarrels, and every kind of violence; and so, wishing to bring back peace and obedience to authority, he considered it necessary to give it a good governor. Thereupon he promoted Messer Ramiro d’Orco [de Lorqua], a swift and cruel man, to whom he gave the fullest power. This man in a short time restored peace and unity with the greatest success. Afterwards the duke considered that it was not advisable to confer such excessive authority, for he had no doubt but that he would become odious, so he set up a court of judgment in the country, under a most excellent president, wherein all cities had their advocates. And because he knew that the past severity had caused some hatred against himself, so, to clear himself in the minds of the people, and gain them entirely to himself, he desired to show that, if any cruelty had been practised, it had not originated with him, but in the natural sternness of the minister. Under this pretence he took Ramiro, and one morning caused him to be executed and left on the piazza at Cesena with the block and a bloody knife at his side. The barbarity of this spectacle caused the people to be at once satisfied and dismayed.”
Secretary Rumsfeld! Ware, ware the knives! Look to your own neck!
Kerry said today that his first choice as Secretary of Defense would be John McCain. Nice move — it’s less threatening to the Democratic base than McCain as VP, and it’s less damaging in 2008 when McCain runs for President in his own right. It also still brings a lot of the advantages that McCain as VP brings.
This could also be a trial balloon to move the McCain as VP idea forward. We’ll see how McCain reacts. Good move on Kerry’s part either way.
Want to see unedited photos directly from the cameras of American soldiers in Iraq? Check ‘em out, from the people who brought you Yet Another Friendster Clone and Am I Hot Or Not. Via Clay Shirky, who points out that information cannot be contained in the digital era.
t.rev is cranking out some excellent stuff in the comment thread below.
In a war, you have a large set of actors and a much larger set of actions taken by said actors. Some actions will be heroic, some will be atrocities, many will be just grim violence, and the vast majority will be mind-numbingly tedious.
Some actions will be essentially unobserved (no one will survive them), most will be observed by a handful, and a tiny fraction will be observed and communicated on a wider scale.
Each side in a war will have what you could call an ‘atrocity-averseness’ factor, which is going to be dependent on two things: the expected number of observers of a given atrocity, and the damage that a given perceived atrocity will cause to that side (in morale, diplomacy, etc.)
I would argue that the US has an extremely high atrocity-averseness factor, for reasons that I think are obvious (or deserve a different essay, anyway).
And he goes on from there. I don’t normally go “hey, look at the comment thread!” but a lot of what he’s saying about the impossibility of stamping out all atrocities are things I’d like to say, except he already said ‘em better.
Compare and contrast:
“Are we going too soft in Iraq? Some people think so. It seems that way to me, too, though I’m reluctant to make a judgment at this distance. But in my lifetime, at least, the United States has generally erred by not being violent enough, rather than by being too brutal.”
That’s Glenn Reynolds, April 30th, 2004.
“It was American soldiers serving as military police at Abu Ghraib who took these pictures. The investigation started when one soldier got them from a friend, and gave them to his commanders. 60 Minutes II has a dozen of these pictures, and there are many more – pictures that show Americans, men and women in military uniforms, posing with naked Iraqi prisoners.
“There are shots of the prisoners stacked in a pyramid, one with a slur written on his skin in English.
“In some, the male prisoners are positioned to simulate sex with each other. And in most of the pictures, the Americans are laughing, posing, pointing, or giving the camera a thumbs-up.”
That’s CBS News, April 29th, 2004.
Good timing, Glenn.
Remember: commemorating Pat Tillman and his death is OK. Commemorating soldiers who didn’t give up millions of dollars to fight is wrong.
Also, photographs of anonymous coffins are an invasion of privacy in some fashion that does not apply when you’re talking about former NFL players.
Finally, the people of America must be protected at all costs from the evil liberal media, which wishes to use the deaths of soldiers in Iraq for political gain. The people of America, sadly, are not capable of thinking for themselves. They are so damned emotional that the liberal media can play any tune it likes on their heartstrings.
If it’s so obvious that Ted Koppel is only reading the names of the dead for manipulative purposes, why wouldn’t the average voter notice? I mean, come on. Doesn’t anyone have any faith in Americans any more? (Rhetorical question.)
Nota bene: I think that Ted Koppel should read the names of the Afghanistan dead in a separate program; it only makes sense to include them in the Iraq broadcast if the two wars are linked, which they are not. I also believe that Pat Tillman is well worth honoring. So are the 130 or so soldiers who died in Iraq this month alone.
Arlen Specter won the Pennsylvania primary over Pat Toomey by a very narrow margin. This is a loss for the hard right wing of the Republican Party. It may or may not translate into a boost for the Democratic Senate candidate; 48% of those who voted against Specter said they wouldn’t vote for him in the general election, but a lot of those people are going to come back to the fold.
No telling if the hard right wing will feel betrayed by Bush, who endorsed Specter. Specter is not well-liked in some quarters, however.
Fifty years from now, the caricatures of Islamic extremism denoted by the term “Islamofascist” is going to look about as bad as the caricature of Japanese militarism displayed in this poster and this poster.
The parallel extends in all kinds of directions, in my book.
A while back I mentioned the anti-immigration attempt to take over the Sierra Club. Followup: the white supremacists lost. Good times.