Dude. We love torture and wish we could crush the testicles of small children personally, but our dirty hippie neighbors won't watch our houses for us when we go on vacation if we do. Prof. Yoo is our man!
And:
It is too bad that we can't follow the train of causality between Yoo's memo and establishing a novel torture regime in the United States. These things are so complicated and all he did was write a memo. If only there were some discipline, some field that deals with responsibility for crimes, how to weigh those and what the penalties should be. But since there isn't, we don't know what to do. I guess we'll just do nothing!
Ezra Klein addresses the "tenure defense", arguing that "tenure doesn't protect those with unpopular ideas, it just makes them harder to fire, and thus raises how unpopular an idea has to be before it merits termination." So, he hypothesizes, making dumb arguments about tax cuts for the rich being the awesomest stimulus plan ever, not worth our time. Advocating killing the Jews? See you later!
I dunno. I feel like realistically, that's how tenure works (c.f., Churchill, Ward). But only to some degree (I mean Tony Martin managed to make it into normal retirement last year). And ideally, tenure gets superseded not by really bad ideas, but by actual acts of scholarly or personal misconduct. Has Yoo met that threshold? I don't know.
3 comments:
So, he hypothesizes, making dumb arguments about tax cuts for the rich being the awesomest stimulus plan ever, not worth our time. Advocating killing the Jews? See you later!
That's a pretty viable standard I think, being that advocating silly economic arguments aren't nearly as bad as advocating the killing of Jews, or calling the victims of 9/11 "little Eichmanns," or being a holocaust denier. I can't remember, did Churchill ever get sacked?
P.S. Not to change the subject, but tag, you're it.
I'd say convincing our government that the Fourth Amendment doesn't apply in war time as a justification for systematic torture breaks both the scholarly and personal misconduct threshold. I mean, if you can say he made a good faith argument, then the scholarly threshold might hold at least, but war crimes are more than a step above a fistfight in the personal misconduct ladder, no?
Ok, that was less coherent than I intended. The Fourth Amendment thing was suggested alongside systematic torture, not as a reasoning for it. Too much wild ranting. Sorry bout that.
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