78 thoughts on “Shrimp On A Treadmill! (Open Thread)”

  7. Shrimp on a mutha f**kin’ treadmill.
    In other news, Bush thinks Iraq “could be” Vietnam. Right-wing blogistan explodes.

  18. That stingray attack does seem gratuitous.
    I’m thinking now that shrimp isn’t just exercising. He’s ON THE MARCH!
    I certainly hope there are no grates of suspicious lobsters on ice in the hold of my next airline flight.
    The other night I was making mussels in a smoky tomato/white wine broth and there seem to be several missing. One glared at me.

  19. “crates” of lobsters.
    Plus, they should have to surrender their claws to Homeland Security officials garbed in large bibs and brandishing drawn butter.

  22. Yikes, Ugh. Yoo correctly points out that “The Constitution … declares that habeas corpus can be suspended ‘in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion’ when ‘the public Safety may require it'”, and doesn’t even bother explaining how that’s relevant to the current situation. I guess he assumes it’s obvious, but I’m not sure whether we’re in the middle of a rebellion or an invasion. Perhaps both.

  23. If one shrimp is faster than another, would it be fair to describe it as scampier?
    AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

  24. KCinDC – I thought the sentence after that was stunning, to wit, “Congress’s power is even greater when it is correcting the justices’ errors.”
    I really wish he’d mentioned this whole POTUS as King theory of his when he taught me Constitutional Law, instead he was too busy teaching out of Erwin Chemerinsky’s hornbook.

  27. Open thread! I have things I want to share.
    Speaking of things on treadmills, this YouTube video by Midwestern band OK Go is one of the cleverest, funniest videos I’ve seen in ages. 3 minutes, 7 seconds with the camera locked down for a continuous take of these four guys doing a sort of dance on and around eight treadmills.
    Sting has a new album out, and it’s very good and a distinct change of pace with him. Working with Yugoslavian lute player Edin Karamazov, he’s produced an album entirely of songs by John Dowland, whom I described to a couple friends as the Jim Steinman of the 16th century. Between songs, Sting reads excerpts from a long letter by Dowland petitioning for appointment as court musician to Elizabeth I. (He didn’t get the job.) If you buy it from the iTunes store, $11.99 gets you the album, plus a couple bonus tracks (one a Dowland-style arrangement of “Fields of Gold”, which I gather Sting performed on last week’s episode of Studio 60 on the Hollywood Strip), a PDF of the 16 pages of liner notes, and about 40 minutes of Sting and Karamazov talking about the songs, illustrating themes, and like that.
    This year’s Nobel Peace Prize went to Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, one of the really good ideas in Third World aid. It specializes in very small loans, down to a dozen or so dollars, and is particularly good about supporting women who need financial banking for small-scale business tasks. I’ve admired their work for years, and feel that they genuinely do promote peace in practical ways.
    This three-minute animation of a white blood cell’s molecular activity is purely astonishing. I wish it had captioning, but even so…wow.
    This has been your dose of cool news for the day. 🙂

  28. Now, excuse me while I hit my hand repeatedly with this hammer.
    What? Haven’t your read Mr. Cella’s wonderful pieces on how Islam is a wicked religion bent on eradicating us before? They show up in Bizarro land every couple weeks, with much backslapping in comments. It’s truly a sight to see.

  29. I like the use of “Christendom”, for that medieval feel, combined with condemnation of Islam for opposition to the “modern financial system” (so the reason Jews went into banking was because of Islamic opposition to usury — who knew?) and of course opposition to science (the folks in Christendom were of course very supportive of science, unlike those nasty Moors — I’m sure it’s a coincidence that words like algebra and alcohol and algorithm begin with al-).

  31. Haven’t your read Mr. Cella’s wonderful pieces on how Islam is a wicked religion bent on eradicating us before?
    There is only so much hammering a human hand can take, but yes. I just thought this was exceptionally Cella-i-cious, what, with the suggestion that if Don’t Do Something[tm], our children (good god, our children!) will face endless Islamic Legions cranked out by the great factories of the Rhineland. Also, the Trevino guest appearance.
    Bring. Back. The Inquisition*.
    *Not the go-to Monty Python

  32. Haven’t your read Mr. Cella’s wonderful pieces on how Islam is a wicked religion bent on eradicating us before?

    Eradicating us before what?

  33. Eradicating us before what?
    The Democrats, of course.
    (either that or I was wondering if spartikus had ever read them before)

  34. I am now hearing, in the speaker system of my mind, Morrissey singing “Shrimp on a treadmill, I know I know it’s serious”.

  35. i’ve learned to sneer at anyone who uses the word “dhimmitude”. to me, the word just screams “WARNING! Condescending jingoist twaddle ahead!”

  36. My open thread contribution, from Dymaxion World and Jim Henley, A Sci-Fi discussion of the importance of intention to moral guilt. (Hey depressed deep-think is all I do).
    Sci-Fi Roundup
    Discussion is derived from BSG and the Cylons, and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game. Relevance is of course to Bush and the Iraq War, and well everything else in the last six years.
    I don’t buy the “incompetence dodge” but I will play along today. But like the Cylon and Ender, in the worst oppression and even genocide, if Bush’s intentions were good but execution incompetent there is no guilt or responsibility for half a million dead and rising without end, a ME in The Pits for another generation, a wrecked American economy, a nuclear NK with incredible proliferation dangers, etc.
    “Bush’s intentions were good and heart was in the right place, he simply screwed it up. Everybody needs to forgive him and his party for incompetence since there was no malice.”
    Orson Scott Card ethics. I am not sure how a Kantian would respond. Honestly.
    Me I am approaching pagan. If the volcano erupts kill the chief and grab Delores de Rio or Tom Hanks for tossing. Intentions Schmentions, bad stuff is our fault.

  38. OK Go’s first viral video: A Million Ways. It’s another single take of intricate yet amateurish (in the best sense) choreography, but I think it’s a better song.
    These guys could SO rake in a lot of money developing their own line of exercise videos.

  39. Good intentions but incompetent vs. malice matters on Judgement Day. It shouldn’t play too big a role in deciding whether someone should be President.

  40. McManus: I don’t buy it, either. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
    I’m sure Lenin and Trotsky meant well, too.

  41. Good intentions without the humility to ensure that the action in question will have the desired effect aren’t IMO real good intentions. Put another way, arrogance trumps good intentions.

  42. if Bush’s intentions were good but execution incompetent there is no guilt or responsibility
    It’s not clear to me whether you are agreeing with this or not.
    I very much do not. One should not take on weighty responsibilities which one is not competent to assume. If I tried to take out someone’s appendix I would almost surely kill my patient. The fact that my intentions were good wouldn’t absolve me of the harm I caused by trying to do something I had no idea how to do.
    In addition, of course, when the execution problems become obvious over a period of time there is an obligation to recognize the blunders and take corrective steps.
    Of course it is possible to imagine “no-choice” scenarios – you are the only conscious person on the airplane and so on – but these are not relevant here.

  43. This should go on the Lancet thread, but since that’s disappeared into the archives, I’m going to take advantage of this open thread to post here, with apologies, and no links (and apologies for no links).
    I’ve now read carefully both the Lancet article and the press release (?) “The Human Cost of the War in Iraq,” as well as many (but by no means all) of the criticisms (and rebuttals of criticisms) of same on ObWi (all) and other blogs (less than all).
    It is my considered judgment that the Lancet piece is basically sound or, in a word demographers love, “robust.” I’m not a trained demographer, so I can’t vouch for some of the methodology and statistics, but that which I understand, I endorse. The research design seems intelligent (so this is what “intelligent design” looks like?!) and the assumptions made are reasonable, with appropriate caveats pre-attached. Once in a while I detect a wobble, e.g., I think that putting estimates of cumulative death totals on the same graph as those for annual death rates may be misleading (Figure 4 in the original), even if it’s explained in the press release (Figure 5) as being two different scales.
    It’s also a bit unfair in its presentation right at the end. In the study they acknowledge that no effort was made to distinguish combatant from non-combatant deaths, which seems quite reasonable in itself. Asking such a question would not only have been impolite and even dangerous, but essentially useless, since many parents would doubtless swear up and down that “MY son would never have joined an insurgent militia or criminal mob [or the Crips or Bloods, for that matter],” as parents do. (Anarch was certainly not part of any nerdo-anarchist conspiracy dedicated to drooling over pictures of Britney Spears and pulling the legs off of flies.) But you can’t then lead off your peroration with “In Iraq, as with other conflicts, civilians bear the consequences of warfare.” It’s true; it’s even a truism, if one supplies “some of” (rather than “most/all of”) before “the consequences”; but it’s misleading here.
    Having said that, I think that the substantial points stand up, and that we need to assume that a figure in the 400-900,000 range for excess mortality since the invasion is now the default value, pending the creation of an independent study that the authors – but not most of their critics – are calling for.
    Most of the objections to this figure seem rooted in incredulity, if not outright denial. Where this stems from political causes, I see no hope of changing anyone’s mind; those who think it can’t be true because it’s not in line with what the US government says are beyond my reach. But such incredulity is also to be found among those with no political bias on this point. It just seems like too much.
    I suspect that much of this disbelief is grounded in the fact that most of us (including myself) live in modern societies at peace, and thus have difficulty imagining just how different a pre-modern society at war operates. I, however, have the advantage of having spent years studying non-Western societies, including periods of war and revolution, and have even tried to do some historical demography of this topic.
    Twenty-first century Iraq is not, of course, the same as the nineteenth-century Philippines, but coming at the data and analysis from the “other side,” I find the data better than I’m used to, and the analysis more solidly grounded. More to the point, I have no difficulty in dismissing the basic critique that “If it were this bad, we would have known!,” whether based on government (health ministry) sources or journalistic accounts.
    No, we wouldn’t. The center (19th-century Manila, 21st-century Baghdad) literally has no idea about what’s happening in the provinces, most of the time. (They’re also not averse to lying about what they do know, but that’s not the central issue here.) Many critics have calculated how many violent deaths a day the Lancet figure would require, and have concluded that such mortality must have been captured by the government or the press, in outline if not in detail. That would be of course true in the UK today, or the US or Japan or other places where most of us live, but I see no reason to believe that it’s true in Anbar or Diyala (much less Batangas or Samar during the Philippine-American War).
    Iraq Body Count, in particular, seems not content with doing their own excellent, though limited, work – counting only those deaths verified by at least two English-language sources (!) – but has gone on to trash the Lancet study on very much the grounds described above, which is, in my view, both unsound and unseemly. They themselves are depicting, with some success, the tip of the iceberg; this does not entitle them to say that based on their study of the tip, they know how big the entire berg is. There is more in heaven and earth, Horatio, than is dreamed of in your English-language sources.
    So, as noted, I believe that the Lancet figures should be considered our default assumption about Iraq mortality, pending further and deeper studies by some independent authority. And I’m not holding my breath waiting for that.

  44. “Good intentions without the humility to ensure that the action in question will have the desired effect aren’t IMO real good intentions”
    yes. Somebody once said “if y’all ain’t willin’ the means to get the job done, then y’all *sho* ain’t willin’ the end, no matter what trash you talk about it.”
    or words to that effect.

  45. “It’s not clear to me whether you are agreeing with this or not.”
    There is a lot of “Devil’s advocacy” in the comment. I just found the connections interesting. I also, like a lot of people, find the Ender Saga interesting; and as a pretty hard-core leftist, probably need to take a hard look at issues the Cylons…whatever.
    …
    My personal position is that the top of this administration, perhaps excluding Bush, are serious followers of Leo Strauss and Carl Schmitt. There are a lot of people, including lawyers over at Balkinization, who agree with me, but without developing it as far as I do.
    “Although there have been divergent interpretations offered of this work, there is broad agreement that “The Concept of the Political” is an attempt to achieve state unity by defining the content of politics as opposition to a foreign “other,” and also through the preeminence of the state, which stands as a neutral force over potentially fractious civil society, whose various antagonisms must not be allowed to reach the level of the political, lest civil war result.” …Wiki on Schmitt, my emphasis
    IOW, the state must be engaged in constant “Cold War” in order to prevent Civil War, and other reasons. IOW, Bushco deliberately made the ME more dangerous and allowed NK to gain nuclear weapons. They will never ever admit it, maybe even among themselves.
    Now this may be a Weltenschaung I violently disapprove of and disagree with. But even here, I have a hard time using the word “malice” and “bad intentions”. They think they are doing the right thing. Their world is an incredibly ugly place. So is mine. In both millions die of violence with the regularity of clockwork and sunsets.
    But finally, I think Bushco is getting pretty much the world they wanted, with the ME in Chaos and America permanently threatened. Soon China and Russia may become military threats again. This would be a success. There was a whole lot of competence, and very little incompetence or mistakes.
    I take it so far as to think that they wanted to discredit and destroy the Army and Marines, so as to show their ineffectiveness. Deliberately held back body armor. The Army is tough to control, causes homeland dissension, expensive, etc. Air & Sea power is cheaper, easier, scarier. Check out the politics at Colorado Springs. The Air Force will remain loyal to the elite. Usually is in most oligarchies.
    Hey, Yomtov asked. 🙂

  46. “He leads in a way that the good Lord tells him is best for our country,” said Marine General Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
    …
    “We’re lucky as a nation that he continues to serve with such passion and such integrity and such determination and such brilliance,” said Stavridis, 51.
    As head of Southcom, Stavridis will be responsible for military cooperation with Latin American countries, and will be in charge of the Guantanamo US military base in Cuba where more than 400 “war on terror” detainees are being held.
    Their opinion of Rumsfeld.
    I’m convinced.

  47. As this is an open thread:
    Tacitus.org is defunct.
    Matt Yglesias links to his stint at tpm cafe which hasn’t been updated since August; he has his own site now.
    The people at Redstate scare me.
    The site could still use at least one more readable righty. As the ObWi Bar Assn tends strongly left (w/ one libertarian exception), any thoughts to inviting
    Prof. Bainbridge, who is apparently considering joining a group blog?

  48. uhh–I don’t think Bainbridge really adds any new perspective.
    I used to read him, but it turned out he was pretty much an anti-abortion bigot who was also a corporate apologist.
    He is almost always reliably in the pocket of the Republican party, except
    1) when Bush nominated Harriet Miers, because she wasn’t reliably anti-abortion and
    2) when he signed Sarbanes-Oxley, because it interferes with the freedom of corporations.
    Other than that, any posturing about independence from the Republican machine is pretty much pretense.
    As far as I can tell, we’ve already got that beat pretty well covered around these parts.

  51. (Anarch was certainly not part of any nerdo-anarchist conspiracy dedicated to drooling over pictures of Britney Spears…
    Uhhhhhhh….

  52. Kid, I believe CMatt wanted to know who you thought was covering the “almost always reliably in the pocket of the Republican party” beat here. That’s pretty far from describing anyone blogging on ObWi.
    That’s not to say that I believe ObWi needs to have anyone covering it.

  53. Francis: The site could still use at least one more readable righty.
    This site already has three highly readable righties: Von, Andrew, and Sebastian. Von is likely not to be posting much for the next while for obvious and sad reasons. But that still leaves two right-wing posters v. two left-wing posters, all four highly readable.

  54. Can anyone shed any light on exactly what the Justice Department did in the “notice” described here? Did they do something procedurally appropriate to raise the argument that the habeas cases should be dismissed, or did they do something weird to thumb their nose at the court? I’d assume the Justice Department would stick to the former, but the article almost reads as if it were the latter.

  55. dr. ngo: thanks; I agree, though with much less to back me up. — It seems to me that one of the underlying factors in the disaster in Iraq is that a lot of people living in the US, unfortunately including various decision-makers, completely underestimate how much we depend on an extremely complicated and (in certain ways) fragile network of organizations and restraints, which allow life to be what we call normal; and how difficult it is to replace that network once it is destroyed. (The only way I can even begin to wrap my mind around the incredible failures of planning by the DoD is to assume that they just didn’t think that restoring basic order and basic social functions would be an issue — that they’d be dealing with, basically, a country like the US minus the federal government, only a bit poorer and Muslim.) I think you’re right that a lot of the incredulity about the Lancet study comes from this as well.
    BobM: “”Bush’s intentions were good and heart was in the right place, he simply screwed it up. Everybody needs to forgive him and his party for incompetence since there was no malice.”
    Orson Scott Card ethics. I am not sure how a Kantian would respond. Honestly.”
    A Kantian would agree with (I think) togolosh and kid bitzer above: if your will is genuinely good, then the fact that you don’t get results doesn’t matter to the moral assessment of you. If, for instance, you do absolutely everything right, but an unexpected meteorite prevents your efforts from succeeding, that’s no skin off your moral nose.
    But good intentions aren’t a matter of saying “oh, I am trying to achieve something good!” They aren’t even a matter of sincerely believing it, or (in some vague sense) aiming at it. Really trying to achieve something good entails thinking hard about how to achieve it, bending your every effort to make it work, etc. It’s only if you do that and fail that results don’t matter.
    Longer hilzoy: my old post on Failures of Will.

  56. “Longer hilzoy: my old post on Failures of Will.”
    I though I remembered you going over this before.
    Part of what interested me was the Cylon/Ender connections. Bush didn’t have a plan(conventional wisdom);the Cylons have a bad plan.
    But Ender didn’t have a clue;was intentionally deceived. Billmon yesterday said he felt guilty about Iraq, for not doing enough.
    Ender felt guilty? Maybe just responsible. OS Card may have turned bad, but I do think he wrote a better novel than even he intended. I think the point, or one of the points of Ender’s Game is that what we admire in Ender, the very virtues and qualities he displays…competitiveness, leadership, decisiveness, confidence…are dangerous in themselves. Ender is a completely different character in Speaker For the Dead.
    John at Dymaxion said that no one over 20 should read Ender’s Game, because of its “power-fantasy-save-the-world” plotline. That misunderstands the irony of the book, which I think is about the tragedy of the warrior. Not so far from Homer.
    It was an open thread. 🙂

  57. when Bush nominated Harriet Miers, because she wasn’t reliably anti-abortion and

    Hmmm…well, I’m sure that Bainbridge must be an anti-abortion drum-banger, if you say so, but this post on where he stands on Miers barely gave it a mention.
    Curious, that.

  58. Slart, Bainbridge is a practicing Roman Catholic, IIRC. He once described his views as fusionism, a mix of economic libertarianism and social conservatism. I remember once at Crooked Timber contrasting him with Paul Cella, who was attracted to Chesterton’s Distributism as an economic plan.
    I read Bainbridge, and think he would bring his business law interest to the blog, to a degree it isn’t here. He also seems to have less interest in foreign policy than most of the writers. I don’t know if he would be interested.

  59. John at Dymaxion said that no one over 20 should read Ender’s Game, because of its “power-fantasy-save-the-world” plotline. That misunderstands the irony of the book, which I think is about the tragedy of the warrior.
    I agree that that’s a misunderstanding of Ender’s Game but interestingly I think it’s more a tragedy of being a child, and hence being completely unable to look for deeper meanings: “it’s just a game, which I must win”; “it’s just a test, at which I must excel”; or in general (and far worse) being literally unable to conceive of being deceived (betrayed?) by everyone around you. The later books don’t work for me precisely because Ender gains a level of awareness lacking in Ender’s Game and Card simply has no idea what to do with it.

  60. Jes: Sebastian posts rarely, and is a gay California libertarian. Andrew is (to me, considering his military background) surprisingly liberal on many issues.
    While I disagree with a lot of what Prof. B says, I think he is more eloquent and thoughtful on many issues than most conserva-bloggers.

  62. “it’s more a tragedy of being a child,”
    It is a tragedy of innocence, of training. I would compare it directly to Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket”, except I think Ender’s Game is better. But the protagonist’s final act in FMJ is just an extension of the unit cohesion he gained in basic training. Did FMJ show two failures of training, or two failures of men?
    No soldier really understands what he is trained for until he hits the battlefield;no officer until he gives a deadly order.
    You shoot at targets over and over and gain proficiency…and then one day see a man’s chest explode and say:”That is what it was all for.” Then you are a veteran.
    Card, by using a child and games, just maximally distracts from what is being done:creating the best possible killer. Does military training create necessary monsters? Well, that is the question, isn’t it? Ain’t many atheists in foxholes, and not many saints on the battlefield.
    Read today that EG is required reading at Quantico.

  63. This is embodied in Bob’s point, so apologies if this strikes anyone as repetitve, but what strikes me most about EG and Card is the idea that circumstances can be controlled, which probably accounts for Card’s turn in political views. A main component of EG is that somehow, military minds can, if they are able to overcome the fallibilities of human will, fashion a perfect strategy for overcoming the enemy. Of course, you’ve got this in most science fiction, because it is relatively easy to create an enemy who cannot be reasoned with and with whom negotiation is not possible. It’s not just Starship Troopers, it is War of the Worlds. That ability to erase half the equation of conflict, and emphasize the other half is the basic impulse behind the whole idea of Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, so this isn’t a fault with science fiction, but more with the sensibilities that are brought to science fiction. I think it is significant that Haldeman’s book The Forever War, which continues until [spoiler redacted] At any rate, the way out of the situation is something unplanned. The question of the military creating the perfect weapon is really a subheading to the notion that we can predict the future well enough to fine tune our actions.

  65. I apologize to all atheists everywhere, including myself, except that I don’t call myself an atheist, but unbeliever, and have never been in even a metaphorical foxhole.
    I could here get into my rant about the word “atheism” being uniquely oxymoronic, containing its own refutation. I don’t use it, even tho I did above, precisely because of its lack of content, and partly because I fear the fires of eternal damnation, but never mind about that.
    But I fear the mad Pharyngulists, kinda like Erinys fouling my Whattaburgers, so grovel in abject abjection.

  70. hmph.
    From my experience driving British cars, I had always heard that as
    “there are no atheists in Vauxhalls”.
    but maybe I misheard.

  71. “You know I was just funnin’ ya, bob, right?”
    Hard to tell anymore, Phil. I visit places where it would be serious. Note I said “many” in the first place. I tried to respond in good humour.
    I actually thought I would catch heat for my descriptions of soldiers in battle. I sweated that. “Monsters” or “killers” might be unfair, and I don’t mean to be unsympathetic, but it don’t seem natural or normal to shoot strangers, either. I think part of what EG is about is teachin us civvies a little of what it is like, if it is like anything, and if it can be communicated.

  72. Bob, if you would like a little more elbow room to set out your thoughts, I’d be happy to put it up at TiO.

  77. If South Dakota likes mob rule, liberals in South Dakota ought to get good at liking it better.
    Boo Radley was an effective liberal. He comes out at night.

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