Majikthise

Bush tells war widow he's "not going to have a philosophical debate over politics"

War widows take note, when the president deigns to give you a private audience, know your place. Your job is to be hugged, and that's it.

Be warned that you must not, under any circumstances, take advantage of your face time with the prez to ask serious intellectual questions.

"He said, `Terrorists killed three thousand people, we had to go to war.'" Halley continued to me. "I said, `Well, who put the Taliban into power? The United States did.' He said, `I'm not going to have a philosphical debate over politics.'

Obviously, if the Big Man wanted an abstract moral discourse, he would have gone to your husband's funeral and listened to the pastor.

Remember, grieving widows, even if the president gets you alone in a room, it's not about you, or your "arguments" about the duties Christians who commit nearly unforgivable sins but who retain the power to mitigate harms to innocents, if only they can transcend their bitter egos and walk in the footsteps of Jesus.

You're hugmeat. Got it?

Big Media Werewolf: Neil in TAP

Neil the Ethical Werewolf savages Ramesh Ponnuru's 'Party of Death' in The American Prospect.

Mansfield pwned by Nussbaum, cries

alphabet of manliness, originally uploaded by ybboey.

Martha Nussbaum demolishes Harvey Mansfield's Manliness. (Subscription required)

Scott Lemieux has the goods for those of us who refuse to pay for The New Republic.

The domestic spying opinion

Publius calls a federal judge's recent opinion on the illegality of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program a legal atrocity and Scott Lemieux describes the legal reasoning behind the opinion as defective.

Publius thinks it's inappropriate that the opinion is based on the judge's interpretation of the Constitution and the FISA law, plus a set of undisputed claims about the nature of the government's secret spying program (known in the opinion as "TSP", short for "the secret program").

Note that the government invoked national security privilege to avoid confirming or denying that it spied on the people trying to sue it.

Publius considers it outrageous that, "The Court — in its infinite wisdom — decided prior to any discovery that it had seen enough facts to determine that none of them are necessary to any viable defense that may or may not be raised."

Publius knows way more about the law than I ever will, but as a matter of logic, I think he's off-base.

In order to appreciate the structure of the opinion, it is important to consider the order in which the government's challenges would have to be addresed. In this case, the first question raised by the government was whether these particular plaintiffs had standing to sue the government for violating their legal and constitutional rights by TSP. People can't just sue over laws or programs they dislike. In order to have standing to sue, you have to convince a court that you have been directly impacted by the law or policy you're launching the lawsuit against.

In this case, the plaintiffs are a coalition of lawyers, journalists, scholars, and activists who regularly communicate internationally with those whom the government considers to be members of al Qaeda, members of groups affiliated with al Qaeda, or agents of al Qaeda or its affiliates. According to the president and other senior officials, TSP is a warrantless wiretapping program directed against people in the USA who call or email that kind of suspicious person.

The plaintiffs believe that the government has monitored their calls. However, more importantly, they claim that they belong to a class of people whom the government asserts the right to spy on. These two claims are distinct, the second being far more important than the first.

The plaintiffs argue that the program infringes on their constitutional rights because the government's assertion of the right to spy on them hampers their ability to conduct certain constitutionally-protected kinds of business.

For example, the lawyers say they can't effectively represent their overseas clients because they cannot offer their clients privileged communications, and the journalists say they can't report the news because their sources are no longer willing to talk them on the phone or through email. Many of the plaintiffs also have to spend extra time and money traveling to meet their contacts in person because they know that their telephone lines and emails aren't secure. The government disputes none of this.

Therefore, the plaintiffs argued, their First Amendment rights too free speech and freedom of association are violated by the existence of the secret program. Ultimately, the court agreed sided with them.

Recall that the government refused to confirm or deny that it spied on any of the plaintiffs. Government lawyers say they can't reveal their domestic espionage targets without compromising national security. Naturally, that's very convenient for the government, because at first glance, the plaintiffs' right to sue depends on their ability to establish that they were spied on.

So, here's why the judge dragged in the First Amendment issue before specifically addressing the Fourth Amendment issues: If the government had admitted to spying on the plaintiffs, the suit could simply have been about the plaintiffs' rights under the Fourth Amendment and FISA. Alternatively, if the government denied spying on these people, the case could then have advanced to the discovery phase, in which each side would have had the right to collect evidence to settle the factual dispute before the court.

During the discovery phase, the plaintiffs would ordinarily have had the right to demand government documents, internal emails, and other evidence that they were, in fact, the victims of domestic spying.

However, due to to the sensitive national security issues involved in this case, the plaintiffs even promised upfront not to ask anything that wasn't already public information. They said they were prepared to rest their case on the public statements that the president and senior members of the United States government had made regarding TSP. But that wasn't good enough for the government.

Note that the government did not dispute that potential for spying interfered with the plaintiffs' businesses. Nor did it dispute that the plaintiffs' concerns for their clients and their own interests were  well-placed, given the scope of TSP. Obviously, the government didn't accuse the president of lying about the scope of TSP.

Rather, the government maintained that the plaintiffs' inconvenience was merely due to their own anxiety about being spied on, which it argued was merely subjective and not "constitutionally congnizable."

In general, a hypothetical risk isn't enough to give someone standing to sue. Since the government invoked privilege to preempt any inquiries about whether the plaintiffs were in fact being monitored through TSP, the risk of surveillance might seem to be hypothetical--because, as far as the court was concerned, there was no admissible proof that the people suing the government were actually monitored. That might have been enough to derail the suit altogether.

However, the judge concluded correctly that the warrantless wiretapping program isn't a hypothetical risk for these plaintiffs. The plaintiffs aren't claiming that they were injured because the government spied on them. Rahter, they claim they have been injured because TSP places them in a category of persons who are no longer secure from unreasonable search and seizure. The government does not contest that the plaintiffs are being intimidated and/or inconvenienced in their work, nor does it dispute that they are fair game for domestic spying, nor does it contest that there is a direct causal connection between being insecure from unreasonable search and seizure and being less effective in one's constitutionally-protected duties as a lawyer, journalist, or activist.

Most importantly, the government didn't contest the scope of the domestic spying program, as described repeatedly by the president and senior officials.

Therefore, as far as the court is concerned, it's a mutually acknowledged fact that these plaintiffs have been marked by the state with a big red "FEDS, LISTEN HERE" sign, and that this branding makes it harder for them to do their jobs.

Now, you might argue that this inconvenience isn't a violation of the plaintiffs' constitutional rights. To me, the biggest question is whether these interferences actually violate the plaintiffs' right to free speech. That's a technical issue that I'll set aside for the moment.

However, I submit that all the relevant factual issues are known, and therefore that Publius's central objection is unpersuasive. The issue is whether the government has the right to spy on people who belong to certain groups without warrants, and in contravention of FISA.

Clearly the government has no general right to spy on people without warrants as a matter of law. The Fourth Amendment and FISA are sufficient to invalidate this program.

Note that the government has only offered legal defenses of the president's power to spy on people without warrants. These are constitutional arguments, not factual claims. The relevant fact is that the United States at war, a dubious assertion, but not one contested in this case, AFIAK. 

This lawsuit is about the existence of a program with a certain undisputed scope. The specific facts, which the government declines to discuss, are not relevant. The case must rest on the stated justification for the program, not hypothetical extraneous circumstances that the government might not be able to reveal.

The Fourth Amendment and FISA violations are the backbone of this opinion. Some critics have argued that raising the First Amendment issue is a distraction from the main issue. However, the discussion about the plaintiffs' First Amendment rights serves a vital role in the larger decision-- to establish the plaintiffs' standing to sue.

You can argue that any constitutional rule has exceptions in theory but this opinion doesn't hinge on the facts of any specific case. We know because government chose to preempt any discussion about the merits of any specific accusation of spying. There are no specific secret circumstances that would authorize the government to create a program like the one they acknowledge for the reasons they cite. As far as the government is concerned, their authority stems from the U.S. being at war, a circumstance which allegedly authorizes the president to disregard the law and the constitution at will.

These are not secret facts. No details about who is or isn't being targeted by this program are relevant. Theoretically, any individual might be a legitimate target for sci-fi-level bizzarofacts that we can only imagine, but this lawsuit is about the legitimacy of a program that targets a defined class of people for publicly disclosed reasons.

This case is about the existence of a program with an undisputed scope that is impinging upon the security of the plaintiffs in an undisputed way--in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights and federal law. The fact that some plaintiffs are also having their First Amendment rights violated in virtue of their inability to guarantee attorney-client privilege or report the news is their foot in the door for this lawsuit.

Medical research on prisoners

You know what prisoners need? More medical experiments, says the Institute of Medicine.

A new report by the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science recommends relaxing the rules for medical research on prisoners--allegedly for the prisoners' own good. [NYT]

Currently, researchers may only experiment on prisoners if those studies pose "minimal risk" to the inmates.

The IOM report contains some sound recommendations: Protection for parolees and probationers as well as inmates, uniform ethical standards for all prison research, and, a public database of research in prisons.

To discourage the exploitation of prisoners as an accessible population, the report suggests that prisoners should be allowed to comprise no more than half of the subjects in any given study. This recommendation strikes me as well-intentioned, but unlikely to be effective. In this era of mega-trials, there would still be a strong temptation to exploit prisoners as an easy way to double one's sample size.

The most disturbing recommendation of the report is to shift from "category-based" ethical rules to a "cost-benefit" standard. The current regulations only allow experiments with minimal risk to prisoners. The IOM report recommends changing the standard to allow riskier experiments if the benefits outweigh the risks.

The report notes that research on children uses a cost-benefit standard. The authors argue that similar standards should apply to prisoners. The cost-benefit standard allows experimenters to seek parental consent for experiments where the potential benefit for the child subjects outweighs the potential risk.

Prisoners are in a fundamentally different position from children whose parents are making medical decisions for them.

The IOM suggests that an ethics review board should weigh costs and benefits for prisoners. Presumably, the board would first decide whether the potential benefits of a proposed project outweighed the risks, and then individual inmates would be given the option of enrolling in the approved trial. (Only the summary version of the report is publicly available for free. Maybe the full-text version offers more details about the ethics approval and informed consent process.)

It is unclear whether prisoners can give informed consent to participate in potentially risky research. They are, after all, under the control of the penal system. Even if there are no explicit incentives to participate, inmates may still interpret a request to participate as an implied order. It is unethical to create a situation in which prisoners may sign on to a risky research project out of fear of reprisal (well-founded, or not). Prisoners often lack access to basic medical care and may be pressured into accepting experimental treatments because they can't obtain standard medical care.

Then there's the thorny issue of payment. On the one hand, free research subjects are frequently paid for their participation. If free subjects are getting paid, prisoners deserve the going rate. However, paying prisoners raises its own ethical complications. Risky medical experiments might be disproportionately attractive to people who have no other opportunities to make money.

Unlike children, prisoners are social outcasts. The institutional review board is not a loving parent who weighs the costs and benefits for individuals. Even the most thorough and conscientious committee would be making calculations on behalf large numbers of strangers from a marginalized group. The decisions of the review boards may be colored by society's disdain for prisoners. I doubt these committees will be as solicitous of the well-being of inmates as individual parents are about the welfare of their sick children.

Perhaps even more alarming is the redefinition of "benefit" in the proposed cost-benefit analysis. The IM recommends that review boards take into account not only potential benefits for the people being studied, but also prisoners as a class:

To provide extra protections in the area of biomedical research, which likely carries the greatest risks for subjects, the only benefits that should be considered are the benefits to the subjects themselves. There may be social/behavioral and epidemiological studies, however, that carry very low risks for the prisoner subjects but little or no personal benefit. In this case, if risks are very low and important knowledge or benefits may accrue for prisoners as a class, the research may be considered ethically acceptable if all of the ethical safeguards recommended by the Committee are in place. (p3)

By expanding the concept of "benefit" to include prisoners as a class, the proposed guidelines undercut the ethical rationale of the cost-benefit analysis. Virtually any research program on prisoners' health is a potential benefit to prisoners at large. Morally, the important question is whether the benefits to the particular prisoner offset the risks that he or she is taking on.*

[Update: Jeralyn has more on the IOM's guinea pig iniative.]

*[Update 2: Reader Andy posted a link to the 43-page summary of the IOM's report, which, unlike the 4-page summary that I cited earlier, proposes different standards for high-risk and low-risk research. High-risk studies, such as those involving drugs, surgery, or psychotherapy would base the cost-benefit analysis solely on the likely outcomes for the (average?) individual. Whereas, very low-risk studies, such as epidemiological research, would only have to establish a likely benefit for prisoners as a group. (p11)

Even if the cost-benefit analysis is conducted entirely on the individual level, there are huge ethical problems with shifting the standard from minimal risk to cost-benefit analysis. As I understand the plan, review boards decide whether a particular intervention is sufficiently beneficial for the average individual participant, and then prisoners are asked if they want to participate.

All ethical human research requires true informed consent--even when third parties expect the intervention to be overwhelmingly beneficial. Prisoners simply can't give informed consent in the same sense as free citizens. Simply being locked up and isolated makes a person less able to make informed choices. Therefore, I find that the IOM's recommendations are dubious at best. Prisoners should not be presented with the "decision" to participate in potentially risky experiments. The potential for coercion and abuse is simply too high.]

Massive white collar crime and the death penalty

Here's a question for people who deny that the modern American death penalty is a violation of the Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

Suppose that the State of Texas passed a law to make truly massive Enron-level corporate fraud punishable by death. Could that law be constitutional? Or would executing property criminals be considered cruel and unusual punishment?

Executing Enron executives may sound extreme, but lets consider for a moment the true scale of the wrongdoing by Ken Lay and his cronies at Enron. I would argue that if you support the death penalty at all, you should support capital punishment for the top-level Enron execs.

I don't support the death penalty, but if I did, Kenny Boy would have been first in line. Ken Lay did far more harm than the average murderer, or even the average terrorist. He left thousands of people destitute, including workers whose pensions evaporated and students whose college savings disappeared. How many people will die in poverty because of Lay? How many students lost the opportunity to go to college because of the Enron swindle? How many lives were shortened because the innocent employees of Enron and Arthur Andersen lost their jobs and health benefits?

On the larger scale, Lay's crimes also undermined trust in the stock market. His influence peddling damaged the integrity of American government. Enron money helped the Republicans take the White House. It's not for nothing that Kenny Boy got to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.

Let's not forget that Enron inflicted deliberate power outages in order to extort money from the energy consumers of California. Did anyone die as a result? If you kill someone in the process of holding up a liquor store in a death-penalty state, you're liable to be executed for your crime, even if you didn't intend to kill the victim.

If the severity of the punishment is supposed to be proportionate to the severity of the crime, Ken Lay did enough harm for capital sentence, several times over.

In practice, applying the concept of felony murder wouldn't work for massive white collar crime because there's too much diffusion of responsibility. Unless the state were prepared to execute a very large number of equally complicit people, it would be unfair to single Ken Lay out for death because a pedestrian got run over during an illegal power outage, or because a patient on a respirator died when the power went off during one of Enron's extortion attempts.

However, I don't see why people who already support the death penalty for "the worst of the worst" shouldn't include truly massive and unremediable white collar frauds as among the worst possible offenses.

My purpose here isn't to argue for the expansion of the death penalty. In fact, I'm an abolitionist. However, I'm curious about the implications the concept of evolving standards of decency for reviving capital punishment for extremely harmful property crimes.

Most contemporary Americans have a strong intuition that capital punishment should be reserved for cold-blooded killers. The idea that the state might execute someone for a theft or a swindle, no matter how large, strikes them as barbaric. Punishing petty theft by death is a classic example of a punishment that might have been acceptable to the community in its day, but which has become cruel and unusual in light of our evolving standards.

So, the question for discussion is this: If you deny that the death penalty in America today is cruel and unusual, what would you say about the right of a state to expand the death penalty to include those convicted of massive property crimes that caused extreme harms to large numbers of individuals and to society as a whole?

Why Jerome Armstrong's political astrology might matter

I can't decide whether I care about Jerome Armstrong's political astrology hobby or not. In order to make up my mind, I'd have to know the answers to the following questions:

a) Did Jerome ever take political astrology seriously? If astrology was just a party game for Jerome, on the level of a Quizilla quiz or a ouija board, then it's a non-issue.

b) Assuming Jerome ever took this stuff seriously, does he still consider astrology to be a valid tool for making strategic political decisions? If Jerome now believes that astrology is complete bunk, then his earlier interest in astrology is a total non-issue, even if he used to buy it. Actually, I'd give him extra points for critical thinking and good judgement if he gave astrology a try and abandoned it because it didn't work, or because he realized it was utterly implausible.

c) Are any of Jerome's current strategic beliefs derived from, or influenced by astrology? Specifically, does Jerome say or do anything today that he WOULDN'T if had it not been for the "evidence" he saw in astrology. I added that rider because, for some people, so-called divination techniques like astrology and prayer are really ways to step back and focus on the big picture, internally. For them, praying doesn't impair their judgement or introduce any new crazy ideas beyond what they believed before they started praying.

We secularists can interpret prayer and meditation as modes of deliberation in which people give themselves permission to take their emotions, their ethics, and their background knowledge into account to reach a considered judgement. Unless God actually talks to people, the "answer" to a sane person's prayer is just where he or she nets out intellectually and emotionally after thinking things over. We heathens call that a "gut check" or a "long walk in the snow", or whatever. If that's what astrology is for Jerome, then his hobby is a non-issue.

d) Does Jerome intend to use astrology as a predictive political methodology in the future? In his work as consultant for Presidential hopeful Mark Warner, for example?

I think that it is a big deal if Jerome still believes in astrology and still uses this crackpot belief system to inform strategic political decisions. Why? Because Jerome's a pro, and astrology is bogus. Reading star charts is no way to make a serious decision about anything.

A lot of people have argued that the notion that the stars determine your destiny isn't intrinsically weirder than the concept of a virgin birth, or the doctrine of the Trinity. In one sense, they're right. There are a lot of crazy-ass beliefs out there that we're culturally prohibited from making fun of.

We've all got some irrational and/or ill-founded beliefs. For example, I'm sympathetic to the theory that humans evolved from aquatic apes. I can't prove it, or even make an especially compelling case for it, but it doesn't usually affect my work. So, I hope you won't hold it against me, even if it strikes you as odd.

However, there's a critical difference between astrology and mainstream religion: If you knew that a political consultant used the Bible to time his ad buys (a la Bible Code) you'd probably be very concerned. Why? Because you know that The Bible Code is totally bogus. Sure maybe for your hypothetical consultant, the code is just an exercise that he uses to get his own thoughts in order. In which case, it's a non-issue. However, if he's actually using the code to make strategic political decisions, you would have every right to be concerned.

It's not enough to say that astrology is just Jerome's hobby without specifying what influence it has on his real-life politics. Some hobbies are totally compartmentalized, but not others. Depends on the
hobby and the person.

Suppose Jerome were a WW2 buff. Maybe he doesn't explicitly mention WW2 on the job or formally introduce any historical methods into his political analysis, but it's still possible that his hobby has a direct or indirect influence on his work. It's hard to imagine that an in-depth study of the military strategy and tactics probably does have some impact on a political consultant's approach to his or her work. Recreational scholarship of WW2 would probably be a good thing for a consultant. But wouldn't you worry if you knew that a WW2 buff/consultant had a hobby website about how the Maginot Line was strategically brilliant object lesson for the Iowa primary?

So, bottom line: If Jerome says that astrology is a bogus tool for predicting politics, or if he insists that astrology has zero influence on his political thinking today, and promises not to resort to it in the future, then I'm totally cool with his hobby. Otherwise, Jerome's astrology is an issue of concern to me.

That said, Jerome's a professional strategist and a leader of the netroots movement. If he admits that some of his strategic decisions have been influenced by methodology that I consider to be completely specious, I'm going to be extra-skeptical about his future prognostications.

I'll admit that as a moonbat lefty Democrat-outside-the-mainstream who believes that Russ Feingold can be the next president of the United States, I felt a little schadenfreude when the netroots' hard-headed, realistic, center right Blogfather turned out to be a closet astrologer. It was the same feeling I had as a ten-year-old when I heard about The Reagans' astrologer. The things grownups believe!

Still, it's important to keep this disclosure in perspective. I generally didn't agree with Armstrong before I learned about the astrology, but I've always admired his achievements as an organizer an organizer and a fundraiser. He did more for Howard Dean than Joe Trippi, and for that I'll always be grateful. I'm sure Jerome's achievements are despite his astrological predilections, not because of them, but I'm not prepared to write him off entirely because he has some incredibly stupid beliefs.

Returning to realpolitik... Is Jerome's astrological past a political liability?

Garance of TAPPED predicts that, "[Jerome's] reputation will not, I'm afraid, ever fully recover (the flaky astrology stuff being worse than the SEC settlement from a pure politics perspective)."

Frankly, I doubt that this revelation will hurt Armstrong or the netroots in the long term. I'm prepared to accept empirical evidence either way. Yeah, Jerome's astrology talk pisses me off--but file that reaction in the same category as my aquatic ape theory--heartfelt but not 100% defensible.

So, in lieu of a conclusion, I'll give the last word on Jerome Armstrong's beliefs about astrology to Jerome:

Another Update [2006-6-25 14:13:39 by Jerome Armstrong]: Oh yea, on the astrological stuff. I have done the new age type things over the years—life’s never boring that way. Down that line, I dabbled with planets and predictions in the most abstract manner, as one of several different predictive mathematical disciplines, when coming out of finances and into politics during my early blogging days (nobody is surprised that remembers the early 2001 days here), and since then have completely tapered out of it over time. So yea, the cons got me on this one being a little out of the ordinary… It has nothing to do with what I consult with in online political strategy. But hey, like JP Morgan once said, “millionaires don’t use astrology, billionaires do!” I hope to see those wingnuts that are obsessed with every little thing I do at the next bikram yoga or vipassana meditation session in DC-- but fair warning that I believe we evolved from monkeys!

Aquatic monkeys?

Beyond freedom, dignity, and missing keys

Amy Sutherland used animal training techniques to break her husband of irritating habits. I say, good for her. She could have gotten the same advice from a behaviorally-oriented psychotherapist: praise good behavior, reward closer approximations of desired behavior, ignore bad behavior, never punish, and provide positive alternatives that are incompatible with the behavior you're trying to discourage.

Sutherland's husband got into a pattern of losing his keys and throwing tantrums. She learned to ignore this behavior. She realized that she had been reinforcing her husband's helplessness and his emotional outbursts by paying attention to his tantrums, even when the attention took the form of telling him not to freak out about his keys.

Some people think it's degrading or manipulative to use operant conditioning on other people. I disagree. A pattern of ineffective nagging is far more degrading for all concerned. If a nagging pattern develops, that's evidence that rational persuasion has been tried and failed. Nagging takes hold when the nagee realizes that the nagger is right, but won't change.

Hat tip to Amanda

Ethics, professional ethics, and bloggers

When is it okay for a journalist to expose a pseudonymous blogger, if ever?

Earlier, I argued that journalists should refrain from outing bloggers unless they have a compelling reason to do so. In that post, I mentioned the unfortunate case of Armando, a former front-page poster at DailyKos who was forced to quit blogging when the National Review Online revealed his real name and the fact that he worked for a law firm that represented Wal-Mart and other large corporate clients. I agree with Janet from Adventures in Ethics and Science--if you blog under a an obvious pseudonym, your readers have to accept the fact that you aren't revealing anything about yourself and take that into account when deciding how much they should trust you.

I argued that Armando was a quasi-legitimate target for outing because his identity was newsworthy. By "newsworthy", I meant that the story was sufficiently interesting that a disinterested editor would publish it as news. What constitutes news varies depending on the publication and its audience. Personally, I don't care what Armando does for a living. The story wasn't newsworthy to me, to most progressive bloggers, or to the average American.

To the readers of the NRO, however, this was a real scoop. NRO writers are hired to dig up this kind of dirt. Note that I'm not holding up Armando's outing as stellar journalism, or even as a clear-cut case of the public's need to know. Like I said, I'm sorry it happened. I don't think the news value of the item outweighed the cost of the disclosure. Mostly, I broached his specific case because it was a hot topic at YearlyKos and the impetus the specific conversation that I wrote about last time.

Some people have argued that the NRO was entitled to out Armando because he failed to disclose conflicts of interest that the public had a right to know about. I disagree. Armando didn't have an obligation to disclose his employment status when he was blogging at DailyKos. As Janet points out at Adventures in Ethics and Science, the readers of an obviously pseudonymous blogger must accept that the writer is withholding all personal info, and weigh his or her statements accordingly.

However, the details of his employment became a matter of legitimate curiosity because Armando was a famous and influential blogger who became a public figure. Let's face it, a writer and political activist who commands an audience larger than that of most daily newspapers is a subject of legitimate public interest.

It is kind of interesting that a Wal-Mart lawyer is blogging for DailyKos, whose annual conference was partly underwritten by a union group passing out "Wake Up Wal-Mart" flyers. It's probably also interesting to some people that I'm a liberal blogger who has written ads for drugs including Viagra, EpiPen, and Avapro. In the comments, Armando asked whether I might be under some obligation to disclose these facts, according to my standards. I don't think I have an obligation to volunteer this information, but I can't demand that nobody ever look into it. If someone wanted to write an article about how interesting or ironic or weird it is that a pharma writer takes time out to write about liberal politics, I couldn't very well complain.

I think the ethical standards are slightly different for bloggers than they are for journalists employed by the established media. (Granted, this issue is complicated by the fact that some MSM outlets employ journalists to run blogs, and the fact that some independent bloggers self-identify as journalists. After all, Armando was outed by the National Review Online.)

Bloggers have a heightened obligation not to out other bloggers. As bloggers and blog-readers, we belong to a community with some shared norms and values. Even more than other media, blogs depend on each other. It's only possible for anyone to attract an audience as a blogger because they belong to a larger interdependent network. Bloggers who force other bloggers out of the blogosphere are depriving readers and fellow bloggers of a member of the community. Gratuitous outing also undermines the trust and cooperation that is essential for worthwhile discussion and political action. So, all things considered, it's fair that we ask each other to go out of our way to respect the privacy of our pseud-using colleagues.

By contrast, a professional journalist has no particular obligation to care about the community standards of the blogosphere or about the well-being of our extended community. Journalists are bound by their own code of professional ethics. These ethics forbid gratuitous or malicious outing, but not much else.

Maybe it's not nice to out a blogger for the sake of a story, but journalists disclose a lot of information that the principles involved would rather not have in the papers. As a news professional, a journalist's first responsibility is to tell stories of interest to his or her readers.

Obviously, there are rules about how journalists may ethically gather information. For example, journalists may not pay for information or deceive their sources. However, if a journalist can use journalistically legitimate means to determine the identity of a blogger, it's up to that reporter to decide whether to go public with that story.

Malice isn't an ethical journalistic motive, and ethical journalists don't abuse their position to just to settle scores. If a story would be accepted by the journalists' peers as newsworthy, I'm prepared to assume good faith on the part of the journalist. Granted, there are a lot of bad journalists and editors out there who have a warped idea of what's important, but I don't necessarily consider those warped priorities to be professionally unethical.

You might argue that professional ethics are a poor substitute for ethics. It's an unfortunate reality that the demands of your employment sometimes conflict with the course of action that would make the world the best place overall. Probably, the world would be a better place if pseudonymous bloggers were almost completely protected, but ultimately, reporters have no special obligation to respect the preferences of the blogosphere in that regard.

Reporters have an obligation not to out people for the hell of it, or for revenge, but they have no obligation to let the welfare of the progressive blogosphere stand in the way of a good story. As bloggers and citizen-journalists, we are held to a higher standard because we are part of a community. We benefit from the blogosphere and we therefore are called upon to make a few small sacrifices for the well-being of our community.

The fact that you're just doing your job doesn't necessarily let you off the hook in the larger moral sense. However, the same principle applies to people who do professionally ethical work for nefarious corporations. If they want a pass because they practice their profession within the law and the norms of the trade, they can't demand that journalists adhere to a higher ethical standard for their work.

What the hell is Goldstein talking about?

Holiday weekends are weird in the blogosphere. The more functional members of our community get day passes, while we hardened cases are left to run the asylum. So, what did we fight about while you guys were off barbecuing, jet skiing, petition circulatin', dissertation drafting, or working overtime? Philosophy of language!

I feel like I'm standing knee deep in empty beer cans and used condoms, trying to explain what the hell happened over the weekend.

It all started when Nate made fun of Jeff Goldstein for not knowing who painted the Mona Lisa.

Nate's target was footnote twenty of Goldstein's “You can't spell history without the ‘story’: History and Memory in the Fictive and Imaginary” (punctuation Goldstein's).

20. Would we, for instance, argue that MacBeth, printed in The Riverside Shakespeare, is a different text from MacBeth printed in a Penguin edition? Suppose that each is printed in a different typeface. The marks, under these circumstances, have been altered, but the signs, we assume, have remained the same. What allows us to make this claim for verbal texts? If I were, for instance, to move the Mona Lisa's eyes closer together, no one presumably would claim that I haven't altered the composition of the Mona Lisa in some way. What is it, then, that makes the verbal text different in this regard from the non-verbal or iconographical text? In both instances, intended marks have been altered. But the difference is that in the case of verbal texts, the marks themselves are not what we consider important. What we do consider important are the signs— the marks plus their signifieds. And what makes these marks signs to begin with is the intention to use them as such. My revision of the Mona Lisa certainly has a "meaning"—and it was clearly intentional. But my meaning is different from the meaning of the original composition, the meaning intended by its producer Michelangelo. [Emphasis added.]

Some of us a good laugh, including Jane Hamsher, Thersites, and eventually Atrios.

Nate's a mild-mannered philosophy blogger who was shocked when Jeff fired back with this. He was probably utterly perplexed when Goldstein accused Thersites of being drunk. (Don't worry Nate, that's SOP for Goldstein.)

I gather that things got really ugly after I went to bed. It's hard to piece together what happened overnight because of all the subsequent deletions and repostings, but it appears that Jeff or one of his commenters dug up a bunch of personal details about Thersites, his wife, and their kid and posted that information in a thread.

Evidently, an anonymous Goldstein supporter was so worked up that he told Thersites that his two-year-old had cocksucking lips. [Correction: Turns out the cocksucking insinuations preceded the meaning of meaning dustup. My bad. I'm told that while I left the house to see Al Gore's movie, JG reposted Thersites' personal info on his blog. His bad.]

On the morning after, Goldstein surveys the damage.

You probably thinking, wow, that must have been some footnote.

As far as that footnote goes, Jeff is making a pretty straightforward point: Written language is a shared code for expressing thoughts. Readers of English tacitly understand which variations are important to the meaning of sentences. For example, we know that word order is very important to meaning. "The cat is on the mat" means something very different than "The mat is on the cat." Whereas, the meaning of "The cat is on the mat." doesn't change if I reset it in Helvetica or Times New Roman. I can write it in red, double the point size, or sculpt the letters out of clay without changing the meaning of the sentence. It's still about some cat on some mat. Arguably, you can even translate that sentence into a different language without changing the meaning. "Le chat est sur le tapis."="The cat is on the mat." (These are all philosophically loaded assertions, but they're hardly implausible or unusual for philosophers or lay people.)

Codes have rules for distinguishing signal from noise. You can deliver the same message in Morse code with a telegraph, a kazoo, or bursts of yodeling. Someone who knows Morse code also knows that the differences in timbre don't carry any conventionalized differences in meaning. So, they'll get the same message as long as they can discern the information-bearing features of the transmission--the pattern of long and short pulses.

In the footnote, Jeff's point is that paintings don't consist of conventionally agreed-upon codes. So, all the properties of a painting are potentially relevant to its "meaning." He's sloppy to imply that the Mona Lisa has a meaning in the same sense that a declarative sentence does. However, I think that if you construe his point charitably, it's not crazy.

I don't want to tell the literary types their business, but isn't it also sloppy to say that different publisher's editions of Shakespeare's plays have the exact same meaning? Rival scholarly editions of Shakespeare aren't word-for-word duplicates of each other. These editions are shaped by editors' judgments about how to reconcile inconsistent contemporary manuscripts, which modern spelling system to impose (if any), and so on. A better example would have been the same manuscript printed in two different fonts.

Still, it would be a mistake to make too much of that footnote. It's actually the best part of the paper.

The gist of the paper as a whole is this: The only legitimate way to analyze literature is to figure out the author's original intent. I'm not a literary theory type, but Jeff's rule seems absurdly strict and arbitrary.

There are many interesting debates within the philosophy of language about the relationship between the speaker's intentions and the meanings of his or her utterances. However, these aren't really germane to Jeff's argument. He just likes to name drop.

I agree that it would be hard to have an interesting discussion about literature without the background assumption that the work had an author who had some intentions. Maybe s/he wanted to tell gripping story, represent reality, share fantasy, make readers laugh, express feelings, evoke emotions, explore the untapped potential of a genre, react to other works of art, advance a moral argument, get paid, get laid, etc., etc.

Some artists are more calculating than others. Creators have different levels of insight into their craft. Presumably, authors sometimes have intentions that they fail to convey. We know that some works are even more revealing than the author intended. For example, racist themes and assumptions crop up in many works of literature. We can ask whether the author intended to be racist (i.e., whether s/he meant the racially charged content as a putdown, or as a means of legitimizing the social hierarchy, or as propaganda, or whatever). However, even when there's no evidence of intent, can also ask what cultural presuppositions may have informed the author's attitudes, and how a popular work of art with racist themes might have legitimized or perpetuated certain stereotypes.

Jeff allows that the author's unconscious/subconscious intentions are also legitimate objects of literary study. It's hard enough to interpret conscious, overt speech acts. How are you supposed to rigorously reconstruct the unconscious/subconscious motives of an author from a text? Meaning is underdetermined at the best of times. What justification do you have for saying that an author had one unvoiced, unreflective "intention" rather than another? There are always going to be hordes of hypotheses that explain the available evidence equally well.

If you allow for subconscious and unconscious intentions, you allow for the multiplicity of interpretations that intent purists are seeking to avoid. If someone who's strict about authorial intent is willing to entertain theories about the subconscious motives of a creator (which presumably could be at odds with the conscious motives, or internally inconsistent), they're opening the door to all socially, politically, and psychodynamically informed criticism that they were trying to rule out by being authorial intent purists.

It is just a mistake to assume that every aspect of a novel or a play that a reader might imbue with meaning necessarily reflects a straightforwardly interpretable intent by the artist. Unlike the isolated sentences that philosophers of language tinker with, works of literature are aesthetic objects that can't be fruitfully analyzed simply by elucidating the truth conditions of the sentences they contain.

Ultimately, I don't see an a priori reason to assume that all interesting literary questions can be answered by appeal to the author's intentions. In most cases, just there isn't enough evidence. Even in cases where there's a lot of evidence, it's almost impossible to formulate precise hypotheses or test competing claims about an author's intent. So, unless we're prepared to give up on literary analysis altogether, we've got to explain how we can say interesting things about stories/texts without presupposing that we can know exactly what the author intended.

Notwithstanding the fair point raised in the footnote, Jeff's larger argument fails because literary texts are in fact more like paintings and less like the single-sentence examples that most analytic philosophers of language like to model. When you're grappling with a work in full, there is no single consensual storytelling code that enables a reader to distill the author's intent into a series of truth functional claims.

Literary analysis shouldn't be reduced to a guessing-game about what the author intended. You can't distill a single authoritative authorial position paper from a work of art.