In Days of Yore People Used To Ponder the Deep Philosphical Questions

...communicants in the congregation were asking themselves not only "What must I do to be saved?" but also "Shall I move to Ohio?"

-- Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History
of the Early Republic, 1789 - 1815, p. 605

Wasn't the Whole Point of Letting Lieberman Keep His Committee Chair (&c) So That He'd Caucus With the Democrats on Domestic Legislation?

And now Lieberman is saying he will or might (reports differ somewhat) filibuster the health care bill because of the public option.

When Lieberman ignored the results of his party's primary, and ran as a "Connecticut for Lieberman" candidate against the Democrat, and won, he was allowed to keep his Committee Chair & other perks because we might need his vote some day. (For that matter, most of the establishment democrats (including, to his shame, Obama) failed to campaign for the actual Democrat -- campaigning that might have turned the tide and gotten a real Democrat into this crucial seat -- for the same reason.)

When Lieberman endorsed - and campaigned for - the Republican candidate in the Presidential election, he was allowed to keep his Committee Chair & other perks because we might need his vote some day.

Surely "some day" is now. This is the signature piece of domestic legislation that Obama has been working on, that the Democratic caucus has been working on, that progressives in the U.S. have been struggling for since Harry Truman.

All we need Lieberman to do is not filibuster it. He can vote against it. But we need him to allow a vote by the Senate.

If he won't do that, on this... then it seems to me that there is nothing left to wait for. Toss him out of the caucus. Strip his committee chairmanship and seniority. Do everything you can.

I trust the Democrats to do the right thing here like I trust the Red Sox to prevail in the postseason, but it seems to me this is the time to pull out all the stops. After this, there is nothing left to save the firepower for. (And, if he won't be with us on this -- to this limited extent -- he never will.)

Small Asymmetries are an Essential Element of All Great Works of Art

Both introduced and bade goodnight:
Room
Red balloon
Picture of the cow jumping over the moon
Three bears sitting on chairs
Two kittens
Pair of mittens
Little toy house
Young mouse
Comb
Brush
Bowl full of mush
Quiet old lady whispering "hush"

Bade goodnight but not introduced:
Moon
Light
Clocks
Socks
Nobody
Stars
Air
Noises everywhere

Introduced but not bade goodnight:
Telephone

Quote of the Day

If you’re graduating from college this spring, you’ll be sitting around at the age of thirty-five still suffering from the fact that Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Ben Nelson, and Kent Conrad decided to make the stimulus bill stingier in order to better bolster their credentials as preening centrists.

-- Matt Yglesias, "Graduating During a Recession Has Big, Long-Lasting Negative Consequences"

Refuting the Strongest Argument Against Afghanistan Escalation

Via, Johann Hari makes strong counter-arguments against three basic arguments for Afghanistan escalation. Here is his rebuttal of what he (and I) think is the strongest of the three:

By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women. This, for me, is the meatiest argument – and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any Afghan president – Karzai, or his opponents – will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Click through to read his answer to the other two arguments, the notions that "We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us," and that withdrawing from Afghanistan will reinvigorate Al-Qaida.

As the ghost in the haunted house says to the stupid people who stay anyway in an uncountable number of horror movies: GET OUT.

Quote of the Day

OZ: Didn't figure you for missing school.
WILLOW: You think I'm boring.
OZ: I'd call that a radical interpretation of the text.

-- Joss Whedon, Doppelgangland (Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3.16)

There is the Potential For Some Seriously !@#$%ed Up Slash Fiction Here

Rule 34 of the internet: "If you can imagine it, there is porn of it."

Rule 34 in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure "...governs the process of discovery, in particular, the production of electronic and tangible evidence as well as the circumstances under which one party to a lawsuit may enter the land of another party for inspection "or other purposes.""

"Other purposes"? Oh my. Anyone for some Rule 34 p0rn?*

(Rule 34 google search brought to you by Gerry Canavan's reminding me of this news about Marge Simpson. GC links to the actual pictures; click through if you're curious. Not that NSFW, really, but definitely NS. Oh, and that link at the head of this paragraph? Goes to the image search. As Scott Eric Kaufman wrote in a different yet equally apt context, "Just remember those are the only eyes God gave you and some images can't be stabbed out of them no matter how hard you try." Sort of covers this whole subject, actually.)

Unrelated postscript: I really wish blogger's spellcheck would recognize the word 'internet'. I mean, really.

___________________
* Of course, going by the former Rule 34, we can deduce that this already exists somewhere. My brain hurts.

Random Question Inspired By My iPod's Shuffle Feature

When John Lennon thrice sings, in "A Day in the Life" (from Sgt. Pepper -- and not any of those fancy re-mixes either, just the good old-fashioned CD release from 1987), "I read the news today, oh boy", how are we to understand those last two words? Is it a simple groan, or is it sarcastic glee? What struck me is how both meanings would fit equally well with the rest of the song -- the worldweary overwhelm of Lennon's newsreading.

Indeed, I can't quite make up my mind whether there is in fact any difference between those two options, or whether something said with sufficiently sarcastic glee might as well be a groan.

Perhaps one way to capture the difference -- if there really is one -- would be two possible punctuations of the line:

I read the news today (oh boy)
I read the news today -- oh boy!

Any thoughts?

Must-read of the Day: Bacevich on Afghanistan

Via Glenn Greenwald, Andrew J. Bacevich writes an op-ed for the Boston Globe about the stakes in Afghanistan:

If the president approves the McChrystal plan he will implicitly:

• Anoint counterinsurgency - protracted campaigns of armed nation-building - as the new American way of war.
• Embrace George W. Bush’s concept of open-ended war as the essential response to violent jihadism (even if the Obama White House has jettisoned the label “global war on terror’’).
• Affirm that military might will remain the principal instrument for exercising American global leadership, as has been the case for decades.

Implementing the McChrystal plan will perpetuate the longstanding fundamentals of US national security policy: maintaining a global military presence, configuring US forces for global power projection, and employing those forces to intervene on a global basis. The McChrystal plan modestly updates these fundamentals to account for the lessons of 9/11 and Iraq, cultural awareness and sensitivity nudging aside advanced technology as the signature of American military power, for example. Yet at its core, the McChrystal plan aims to avert change. Its purpose - despite 9/11 and despite the failures of Iraq - is to preserve the status quo....

If the president assents to McChrystal’s request, he will void his promise of change at least so far as national security policy is concerned.... As the fighting drags on from one year to the next, the engagement of US forces in armed nation-building projects in distant lands will become the new normalcy. Americans of all ages will come to accept war as a perpetual condition, as young Americans already do. That “keeping Americans safe’’ obliges the United States to seek, maintain, and exploit unambiguous military supremacy will become utterly uncontroversial.

I think this puts into words my sense of why I am for deescalation and withdrawal from Afghanistan, as quickly as possible. I don't want the U.S. to be an empire. I want to see us move away from our globe-spanning network of military bases, our quick reliance on the threat of war (and, all too often, on war) as our "number one instrument of diplomacy". I want us not to spend huge sums of money on making weapons. I don't want us engaged in any number of military actions not in response to a direct threat. I want us, in other words, to stand down -- militarily -- unless it's really necessary.

And since no one has articulated why Afghanistan is really necessary -- certainly not from the point of view of American interests, and certainly not in a way consonant with the resources it is taking (and will take) -- we should get out.

Of course, this is a focus on what Afghanistan will mean to us, and to the planet more broadly, and not to the people most directly affected, i.e. those of Afghanistan. This is because I know a fair bit about the U.S., and some about the globe, but very little about Afghanistan. I also think that Americans should make their decisions on these matter on the joint bases of what is best for us, i.e. Americans, and for the planet as a whole, rather than in the interests of any other country -- about which, in any event, we are generally quite ill-equipped to judge. -- Still, I admit that there may be an argument for staying that is made genuinely and convincingly on their behalf -- although given recent politics any such arguments should be, in my view, guilty until proven innocent of being mere pretense for neoconservative (or neoliberal) war mongering and empire building. Imperialists always claim (at least in the modern age) to be acting in the interests of their imperial subjects, but those subjects, oddly enough, rarely see it that way.

So, in the meantime, I'm for trying to wrest America back from its status as an empire and back towards its status as a democratic republic.

Alas, there isn't really a political party that supports this position (the closest you can come is Ron Paul -- and he's odious on lots of other grounds). Our current political debate is more or less divided between insane imperialism (Republicans who want to go to war at the drop of a hat) and sane but still quite imperial imperialism ("centrist" Democrats) -- and Obama is definitely the latter. During the campaign he had mixed messages on this point -- he was able to win because of the space for an anti-Iraq candidate that Hillary Clinton's support of the war had opened up, and the foreign policy people supporting him tended to be Iraq skeptics and otherwise on the somewhat less militaristic side of the spectrum -- but then he brought the hawks on board, appointed Hillary Clinton his Sec of State, and pushed ahead with all the wars and executive power that comes with them. Hoping for much else was fairly far-fetched -- but I hoped for better than we've gotten, and not, I think, for no reason.

Do read the entirety of Bacevich's op-ed. It's a strong articulation of a crucial point -- maybe the crucial point -- in the Afghanistan debate.

Although I must admit I can't bring myself to be as hopeful as Bacevich about there being any possibility other than a decision for more war and the national security state, government of, by and for the military-industrial-political complex. (For more on the "political" angle here, see Greenwald.) I find it almost impossible to imagine the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate choosing anything other than more war -- at the very least, than a continuance of the American empire in all its fetid splendor.

RIP Leila Abu-Saba

Philip Weiss is reporting that Leila Abu-Saba, who blogged at Dove's Eye View, has died (she had been battling cancer for several years). I never got to meet Leila, but she and I exchanged a number of emails -- I'd begun reading her blog at the time of Israel's 2006 war against Lebanon, and she in turn was quite supportive about the various pieces I wrote about the war at the time. I definitely thought of her as a friend, in that odd shadow way that one is friends with people online that we never get to meet.

She was a passionate advocate for peace, and a fine writer. I am terribly sorry to hear of her untimely death, and my thoughts are with her husband and children.

Rest in peace, Leila. Your voice will be greatly missed.

Update: If anyone out there in the ether finds a link to an obituary about Leila, or (particularly) somewhere where I could write a condolence note to her family, I would be very grateful if you would leave a note in the comments. Thanks.

Second Update: Memorial page, at which people can leave memories or condolences, here. Thanks to Julie Feinstein Adams for leaving the web site in comments.

Quotes on the Obama Nobel

"Too tired to work anyway" edition:

• Too long to quote, but I think that Glenn Greenwald has the most balanced, reasonable take.

More briefly:

The especially weird thing about Obama receiving an award for not being GW Bush is that he hasn't actually been doing a very good job of it. As others have pointed out, he's continuing both of Bush's wars, adopting Bush's "surge" tactic for Afghanistan, covering up Bush's torture regime, and continuing Bush's domestic wiretapping.

-- Avram at Making Light

Surely it ought to be a basic criterion for winning a peace prize that you shouldn’t be currently fighting a war, or at the very least that you shouldn’t be increasing your commitment to a war you’re already fighting?

-- D Squared at Crooked Timber

I'd rather Obama had won it after Congress agreed to substantial cuts in greenhouse gases comparable to what Europe is proposing, after he brought Palestinians and Israelis together to accept a two-state solution, after he got the United States out of Afghanistan and reduced the nuclear arm's threat between Pakistan and India, or after he was well on the way to eliminating the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. Any one of these would have been worthy of global praise.... Giving the Peace Prize to the president before any of these goals has been attained only underscores the paradox of Obama at this early stage of his presidency. He has demonstrated mastery in both delivering powerful rhetoric and providing the nation and the world with fresh and important ways of understanding current challenges. But he has not yet delivered. To the contrary, he often seems to hold back from the fight -- temporizing, delaying, or compromising so much that the rhetoric and insight he offers seem strangely disconnected from what he actually does. Yet there's time. He may yet prove to be one of the best presidents this nation has ever had -- worthy not only of the Peace Prize but of every global accolade he could possibly summon. Just not yet.

-- Robert Reich

Some Analysts Warn Obama's Nobel Peace Prize Complicates War Efforts

-- Headline at Fox News Website (via via)

The Nobel Announcement Was Somewhat Unexpected

In keeping with the theme of the day, I found this delightful story at A Tiny Revolution:

Years ago, a rug cleaner in LA got an early-morning phone call from Stockholm to inform him that he'd won the Nobel Prize in chemistry. Oops, wrong number. The lucky man ended up on the Tonight Show: "I was surprised. I mean, I know I do a darn good job cleaning carpets. I can tell you which chemicals work best for ketchup stains, red wine spills, etc. But the Nobel Prize? I thought, maybe that's a bit excessive." There was an honest man.

I was trying to figure out if Bernard Chazelle was simply making that up, but a bit of googling turned up this independent version of the story:

In the predawn darkness of 16 October 1987, the phone rang in the Altadena, California, bedroom of Donald Cram, owner of a rug-cleaning business. In a fluting voice, an unknown caller congratulated the sleepy Cram on winning the Nobel Prize. Thinking he recognized the voice of a pal known for practical joking, Cram hung up. But the man with the strange accent called back and insisted that Cram's work on molecular structure had indeed taken science's top honor. That's when the former chemistry major groggily realized that his frustrated caller wanted the Los Angeles area's other Donald Cram, the one who taught at the University of California, (UC) Los Angeles, and had an unlisted phone number. [Link added]

...so perhaps it's true after all.

For what?

Honestly, I just saw this headline on Washington Monthly and thought that he must be linking to the Onion or something.

I mean, I think Obama's rhetoric on nuclear reduction is good and all, but he hasn't done much yet.

My first instinct is that giving the prize prospectively -- or, as I've already seen a few people suggest, for not being George Bush and/or John McCain -- lessens the value of the prize more than helps Obama or peace. But who knows.

If the prize is being given for not having a lunatic in charge, shouldn't the recipient have been the American electorate rather than Obama?

(Josh Marshall makes a valiant attempt at defending the "not GW/JM" award here. Update: Steve Benen adds to what Marshall said here.)

Weird.

Update: It's a sad day when I find the snark at the National Review's blog on the mark: "...what about Physics and Chemistry? Are we just going to ignore the president's contributions there?"

Update 2: My precise reaction -- that this reads like it was from the Onion -- has been shared by a large number of others. Which leads to the following idea: wouldn't it be funny -- a sort of meta-joke, as well as a news commentary -- if The Onion simply published this story straight? Just buy the rights to the AP version or something and run it as if it was an Onion story. It would be a good joke on the story, I think, as well as a nod to the Onion's own role in our cultural consciousness...

Funny Enough That It's Worth Posting Almost a Week Late

Anyway, it's before Shavuot, so it's still timely. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Swiped from somewhere, but I totally forget where. Sorry.

Happy Shavuot to all those who are celebrating it tonight.

Quote of the Day: How Small Everything Has Grown

I have never been back to Crossgates. In a way it is only within the last decade that I have really thought over my schooldays, vividly though their memory has haunted me. Nowadays, I believe, it would make very little impression on me to see the place again, if it still exists. And if I went inside and smelled again the inky, dusty smell of the big schoolroom, the rosiny smell of the chapel, the stagnant smell of the swimming bath and the cold reek of the lavatories, I think I should only feel what one invariably feels in revisiting any scene of childhood: How small everything has grown, and how terrible is the deterioration in myself!

-- George Orwell, "Such, Such Were the Joys...", Final Paragraph

Some Arguments Are Self-Refuting: Roman Polanski Edition

Robert Harris, from his op-ed in today's NY Times defending Roman Polanski:

Of course what happened cannot be excused, either legally or ethically.

Right. The crime -- which Harris, as is all-too-common among Polanski's defenders, never mentions -- is that Roman Polanski raped a child. Rape, as has been noted, in three separate ways -- rape because she was too young to consent, rape because she was drugged and unable to consent, and rape because she said no. Polanski plea-bargained to the first of the three in order to avoid trial on the entire set; but it all, y'know, happened. Any one of the three would make it rape.*

So this "cannot be excused" -- including legally. Inexcusable.

Which renders the rest of Harris's op-ed utterly moot. If something cannot be excused, then all the excuses offered in practically every other sentence of the op-ed are besides the point.

(In addition to the Salon story linked above -- which I think is the "if you're only going to read one" for this particular issue -- I also recommend this and this, both via these posts, which also contain more sensible points and relevant links.)

I am frankly really shocked at the number of people coming forward to defend a man who has admitted the drugging and raping of a 13-year-old-girl. I kinda thought the underlying facts of this case would scare people off. But there are an awful lot of defenders out there.

Of course, I shouldn't be shocked by the number of filmmakers and writers coming forward to defend Polanski; being a great artist has no relation to being a decent person -- exhibit A here being Polanski himself. But I am shocked nevertheless.

(The basic point in regards to the art/morality connection in this case was well put by Scott Lemieux: "...evaluations of Polanski's art should be kept distinct from his crimes, but this cuts both ways -- the fact that he's produced great art shouldn't give him immunity for a severe violent crime.")

And yeah, like a number of others, the obvious connection which occurs to me here is to the war-criminals in the Bush administration. A rapist shouldn't serve his sentence because he's an important filmmaker, or it was decades ago, or it would politicize art; orderers of torture shouldn't be prosecuted because they were important politicians, or we need to look forward not back, or it would politicize politics. Being unable to return to or leave the U.S. (respectively) and having their reputations sullied are sufficient punishment -- at least for those sorts of people.

Now, I believe in grey areas, and that the law is hardly always just. But I would like to think that torture and rape are two of the areas which we can pretty much all agree are, well, inexcusable.

Yet two large crowds have come forward to defend the perpetrators of these crimes. Half of each crowd would be offended to be compared to the other; another large chunk are simultaneous members of both camps. But the common thread here is that people who aren't just the little people should be allowed to get away with torture and rape.

Because being an artist, or being a high-ranking Republican politician, or simply being a member of the well-connected set, are licences to commit any crimes. Even those.

How can people think this way? What leads people to defend these things?

It's Chinatown.

________________
* I admit there are grey areas in statutory rape laws -- two kids having consensual sex being the prime example here -- where the law and morality are at odds. Even absent the other factors, this -- a 40-year-old man with a 13-year-old girl -- isn't close. With the other factors, bringing it up would be a joke if it weren't so damn evil.

Update to footnote: Two links to over-thought, excessively analyzed, pretentiously-academic-about-common-subject posts that any reader of this blog should like (you can tell from my adjectives that I'm jealous as hell and wish I'd written 'em). Firstly, this explanation of why the grand jury testimony is important to consider even though it's one-sided and one should normally be wary of such things for precisely that reason; and secondly -- and while they're both good if you read only one read this one -- this post about the meaning of statutory rape, which talks about Wittgenstein, famous cognitive psychology experiments and the sort of intellectual slippage that might cause (some of) Polanski's defenders to defend someone who has committed so vile a crime. Who knew that the route to understanding Polanski's seemingly clueless moral defenders was through Wittgenstein and violations of gricean maxims?

Dollhouse: The Good Parts Version (a guide)

"When she was good,
She was very, very good,
And when she was bad she was horrid...."

The first episode of the second season of Joss Whedon's tv show Dollhouse aired tonight, although I haven't seen it yet, because it doesn't go up on hulu until tomorrow sometime (and we don't get broadcast tv).

But in case anyone wants to catch up on Season 1 before watching Season 2 I thought I'd outline for you the good parts version. Because, far more than any Whedon show to date, Dollhouse is really uneven.

Hell, even Whedon & the rest of the Dollhouse crew admitted as much in talking up episode 6, saying that that was when they finally got it right -- stopped telling the self-contained and silly stories of the week (possibly pushed on them by the network executives in a highly misguided attempt to make the show accessible rather than good) and started to tell their overall story.

Now, to be clear, I wouldn't particularly recommend Dollhouse to anyone who isn't already a Whedon fan. Why watch the quite flawed Dollhouse when you can go and watch the sublime Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog? -- shows that, while not without flaws, are overall the best TV made this side of The Wire. But if you are already a fan of those shows -- or if for whatever reason you don't want to watch them but want to try Dollhouse -- here's how to do it.

Almost the entire narrative arc of the 13-episode Season 1 was contained in 6 episodes. You can definitely tune in to the first of these episodes and get caught up right away. And if you just watch those 6, you'll be watching a very solid, interesting, thought-provoking show. Those 6 are:

1.06 - Man on the Street
1.08 - Needs
1.09 - A Spy in the House of Love
1.11 - Briar Rose
1.12 - Omega
1.13 - Epitaph One

Now I'm not saying you won't miss anything watching only those six. To the degree that there was anything good about the bad episodes of Dollhouse, it was the dribs and drabs of the overall story sprinkled about among otherwise mediocre-to-bad stories of the week. But those six are definitely the best, contain the vast portion of the central story -- and certainly are perfectly understandable on their own.

As of right now, four of those six episodes -- all but the first and the last -- are available on hulu for free. But they take down all but the most recent episodes, so tomorrow when they post the first episode of season two they might take down "Needs". Update: Season one is no longer on hulu, but you can by the show for a couple of bucks an episode at itunes or Amazon, or can rent/buy/netflix them on DVD.

("Epitaph One" isn't on hulu because, for various reasons that are too complicated to go into, it was never aired on U.S. tv, although it was or will be aired in most foreign markets; but it is probably the best episode of Season 1 (although it would make no sense without the other five listed) and should definitely not be skipped.)

I think five of those six episodes are very, very good. The one exception is "Omega", the end of the two-parter that was the conclusion as the show aired on U.S. tv. It's good, although in a number of ways it was a bit disappointing. Still worth watching since it is key to the overall story -- and, again, it's pretty good.

So if you haven't watched Dollhouse, and want to try it, watch those six.

The other seven... well, they vary from quite bad episodes with only a few good touches here and there to flawed episodes that have some genuinely good stuff mixed in with the failures. By common consensus, the first five episodes were simply a bad start to the series; the two later ones I am suggesting skipping were the more stand-alone-ish of the good half of the season. If you want to watch a few more episodes, then the ones I would suggest adding in first are those two -- 1.7, "Echoes" and 1.10 "Haunted". Not great, but both have some good stuff in them. If you want to try one of the five misfire episodes that began the show, I think the best of them was 1.4, "Grey Hour", which had some genuinely nice touches. But don't try it first; start with 1.6, "Man on the Street", to see what the show can do when it's good -- and if you're anything less than utterly committed to it (in which case this entire post doesn't really apply to you, does it) then stick to the six above.

As for season two -- who knows. So far the few reviews I've seen have been mostly positive if not overwhelming. If they can stick to the promise of episodes 6, 8, 9, 11 & 12, it should be a very fun show to watch. If they can match the promise of episode 13, "Epitaph One" -- and the only negative comments I've seen from reviewers of it have been expressed fears that they can do anything to match the promises and expectations set up in that fabulous hour of television -- it will be an amazingly fabulous show -- worthy of the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. (If not -- well, we'll always have Sunnydale.)

So if you've liked stuff that Whedon's done in the past -- try Dollhouse. It's good, when it's good. But stick to the path. You know what happens to characters who ignore that advice in stories, and it ain't ever pretty.

(PS: I haven't seen the unaired pilot, included on the dvd, which was scrapped for parts which ended up in many of the later shows in the season. But a number of things I've seen indicate that it started the show out at the level of these six -- only to have Whedon, possibly at the urging of Fox executives, back down to the level of the first five before crawling back up. But it's not apparently good to watch except as an outtake, since it went in a different direction than they ultimately went -- it's not part of the same story. Ah well.)

Update for Season Two (first half):

Of the ten episodes (out of 13 total) that have aired as of this writing (December 19, 2009), no less than seven would fit unproblematically onto the list above, i.e. every episode from #4 ("Belonging") on. Starting with episode four they got their act together and have made a solid show (i.e. it took them just long enough to get them canceled -- or, perhaps, it was the fact of cancellation that made them focus and tell the good central story they have to tell and not waste time with silly stand-alones.)

The second and third episodes of the season are solid stand-alones, comparable to the later-season stand-alones of season one -- i.e. good but skipabble. #3, "Belle Chose", is better than #2, "Instinct", if you're only going to see one. But if you're sticking with the main plot, skip both.

The season opener ("Vows") is complicated: unlike any of the season one episodes, it mixes some key (and awesome) overarching plot material with a pretty blah story-of-the-week plot; basically, the B-plot belongs solidly on this list, while the A-plot belongs solidly on the skip-it list. If you want to watch the B-plot, the way to do it is to hone in on any scene with Amy Acker ("Dr. Claire Saunders") while fast-forwarding past any scene with Eliza Dushku ("Echo") -- with the possible exception of the last ten minutes or so. Otherwise, just watch the whole thing and remember I warned you.

So the current, updated list is:

1.06 - Man on the Street
1.08 - Needs
1.09 - A Spy in the House of Love
1.11 - Briar Rose
1.12 - Omega
1.13 - Epitaph One
2.01 - Vows (*B-plot only*)
2.04 - Belonging
2.05 - The Public Eye
2.06 - The Left Hand
2.07 - Meet Jane Doe
2.08 - A Love Supreme
2.09 - Stop-Loss
2.10 - The Attic

On Kirby, Marvel, Copyright and Moral Claims: Scattered Thoughts

Thoughts on the copyright reclamation by the heirs of Jack Kirby, sparked by this post by Alan David Duane.

(In reading the below, remember I'm neither a lawyer nor a policymaker nor even one who has read the relevant legal documents; I'm going by a (semi-informed, but distinctly) layman's readings of the news stories about them. If that doesn't interest you, bail now.)

1)

The heirs of Jack Kirby have filed a notice of copyright reclamation in the case of superheroes he had a hand in creating for Marvel in the early 1960's, characters such as the Fantastic Four, the Hulk, and even Spiderman (who was created by Steve Ditko more than Jack Kirby).

2)

It's important to remember what's going on here. Kirby's heirs aren't suing anyone -- at least not yet. They are filing a notice of reclamation. They are able to do this because of the odd nature of our current lengthy copyright system.

Until 1976, copyrights were good for 56 years -- an automatic 28 with a single optional renewal. In 1976, Congress extended that period -- first to 75 and then later to 95 years (oversimplifying but in essence). This was not only prospective, applying to works copyrighted in 1976 and later, but retroactive, applying to old works too.

But this created an odd situation for those who had sold their copyrights prior to 1976. What they'd sold was copyright as it existed then, i.e. the 56 year term. What to do about the extensions for sold copyrights? Should they belong to the original owner (on the grounds that they only sold the existing copyright of 56 years and not any more), or should they belong to the new purchaser (on the grounds that the purchaser bought the copyright and the extension doesn't affect that)?

(Note that this is also a different legal situation than the one involving DC/Superman/Jerry Siegel's heirs.)

3)

This entire debate is distorted by a broader misconception in our culture about the relation of worth and wealth to merit and effort.

It is a strong cultural myth in our society -- an essential undergirding of one of the two major political philosophies of this country, and an almost-as-important one for the other -- that people who get rich deserved it. They worked hard, or had a good idea, and therefore they made it. Conservatives tend to (implicitly) assume this is the end of the story: if you work hard and/or are smart, you'll get rich; if you're poor, it's your own damn fault. Liberals, in contrast, recognize unfairness and randomness to a degree, so they tend to say that people can work hard and stay poor. But neither side tends to see the fact that wealth is at least a much a matter of chance and luck as it is of merit or effort.

The reason we don't like to see that, of course, is that it upends the supporting intellectual assumptions of most of our society: if the rich are simply lucky, then the enormous favor they receive is unearned and unfair.*

This is never more true than when we are talking about intellectual property.

I'm not (repeat, not) saying that artistic merit has no relation to how well a work does. But it's been extensively argued on theoretical grounds, amply seen throughout history and shown in controlled laboratory studies that merit is, at best, a necessary but not sufficient factor. Harry Potter may have been a good series of children's books -- but there are a lot of other books that are equally good (as I've had children's librarians say to me); J. K. Rowling may have been good, but she was mostly very, very lucky.

However true this is of the success of original works, how much more strongly true is it of intellectual properties** which have success in derivative works!

This distorts our discussion in numerous ways. In part it leads to people saying things like

I won't argue with anyone who tells me Herb Trimpe is unlikely to return to Marvel and create a blockbuster, breakthrough character that generates millions of dollars, no matter what sort of compensation deal is in place.

...which implies that the talent and effort of Herb Trimpe (who was the first man to draw (although he did not create) Wolverine) was a major role in Wolverine's becoming a breakthrough character. This is not because of what Herb Trimpe did or didn't do.*** It's because time and chance -- and broad social forces such as create a market for characters such as Wolverine -- and, above all, fashion are what made Wolverine worth what he's worth today.

The fight that will follow over the ownership of the Fantastic Four isn't quite like a fight over a lottery ticket; but it's far, far closer than anyone is granting in this discussion.

4)

There is a third party to every legal battle over intellectual property, one which has neither lawyers nor lobbyists on its side. Thanks to the recent intellectual growth of the copyleft movement, it has some advocates; but their position is largely based on reason and fairness and the public good, and is therefore extremely weak. But it is the most important party nonetheless.

I speak, of course, of the public.

Intellectual property -- a misnomer, really, since there is no thing to be owned -- is a government-enforced monopoly restricting freedom of speech. It restricts your ability to say what you want to say, in person or print or on film or in comics -- if what you want to say is, for example, "I was the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the windowpane; I was [REMAINDER DELETED DUE TO DMCA TAKEDOWN NOTICE]" It equally, and even more indefensibly, to your ability to tell an original story -- if that story is about, for example, Superman or Spiderman.

There are reasons for so limiting speech -- which is why the power to do so is explicitly granted in the Constitution -- but given that it is limiting very basic human rights, the power is moral only insofar as it is necessary to accomplish its stated ends. (Whether or not it is legal is a separate matter.)

5)

The moral case for creators' rights is both essential and irrelevant to the Kirby-copyright issue.

It's irrelevant because neither party has a very good moral (as opposed to legal) claim. On one side we have Kirby's biological heirs; on the other, the corporate descendents of the companies he worked for. Neither set of people had much to do with the effort or talent put into these characters; they are fighting for an inheritance, and like any fight for inheritance they are fighting for things they may have title to but don't in any moral sense particularly deserve.

But it's essential because it was only because of the (perceived) moral rights of creators that copyright was extended in the first place.

If the case before Congress had been that companies wished to extend their intellectual monopolies to make more money from them, then even that bribery-pliant group of sellouts would have a hard time justifying such a vote. So it was all talked up in terms of the struggling, lonely dreamer, hoping to turn his or her talent into a win for his or her heirs.

This was a fiction, of course -- as much of a fiction as the notion that estate taxes hit small farmers rather than wealthy businessmen, and a fiction of the same kind, i.e. a propagandistic one designed to hide the true beneficiaries of public policy. But in terms of the copyright extensions passed in the 1970's, and then again in the 1990's, and then again whenever Mickey Mouse next threatens to go out of copyright, it's an essential one. Without this fiction, the extra value that came from the copyright for years 57 - 95 of an intellectual property simply wouldn't exist -- or would, rather, be held by the public and not by anyone in particular.

This is why you can't say of copyrights what you'd say of, for example, real estate. If you sell a house in a poor neighborhood, and then it becomes trendy, and the owner therefore (through luck) becomes rich, you can't complain that you didn't know its worth when you sold it. But no one seriously doubts (pragmatically if not morally) the perpetual property rights to real estate.****

Whereas the purchasers of these monopolies, which have become valuable only due to chance (and the efforts of thousands, morally and artistically indistinguishable from similar efforts which led nowhere), have any chance of extending them at the expense of the public only by appealing to the moral claim of their creators.

Marvel wants to argue that, for the good of people like Jack Kirby, it must have the right to hold a monopoly on his creations -- against, in this case, his actual heirs. They need the appeal to Kirby's rights to win the broader public debate, and need to squash that same appeal to win the narrow legal one.

The myth that wealth is earned is necessary to make us think that the financial windfall is significantly due to Kirby's talent in the first place, and that this fight over a lottery ticket is a fight over who really deserves it -- blinding us to the real answer, no one.

7)

Artists can't threaten to withhold their next breakthrough character from big companies if they're not fairly compensated, because they have almost no say in whether they can create one. They put their effort and talent into what they make; but what makes it valuable is fashion, and the efforts of others, and luck, and a host of other factors.

Companies have extended copyright based on a myth of the individual creator -- who they are trying to screw over at every other moment so as to make money for themselves.

Of course artists should be fairly compensated for their work -- and there is, as I have said, a very strong pragmatic argument for copyright, one I don't disagree with (assuming that said copyright is, as provided by the U.S. constitution, "for limited terms"). But the vast wealth at stake here is irrelevant to that right, since it is all-but-irrelevant to that success.

And of course companies should be able to get funding to make (say) movies, and then profit from those endeavors. But they want more than that; they want to maintain a public monopoly on the ability to tell stories about certain characters who, for whatever reason, have caught the public's imagination, so that not only can they make and profit from stories about their characters, but so that they can ensure that theirs are the only stories about those characters that are there to be told.

8)

Since I'm not a lawyer or policymaker, but simply a citizen with opinions on public policy, I can say that I support neither Kirby's heirs nor DC/Marvel. I think that, 56 years after their creation, all works should be in the public domain. The supreme court, alas, disagrees -- which seems to mean little more than their unwillingness to open the can of worms of recognizing that our current Congressional system is so poisoned by legalized bribery that no judgments of Congress (or the President, or really the Courts) can be understood as representing the public interest save incidentally. They said it was Congress's call to make -- which would have been a reasonable argument if Congress wasn't bought and paid for by the stakeholders on one side of this particular issue.

But the Congress was bought and paid for, and the Court was unwilling to enforce the rights of the public. So what we are left with is a debate over who should get to steal from the public the winnings of a lottery.

9)

To anyone not convinced by all of the above:

I have one more argument for my position. It's a knock-down, irrefutable, overwhelming argument, such that if you heard it you could not even begin to imagine disagreeing with me. It would, in fact, revolutionize your thinking on every aspect of this issue.

But since this set of concepts can, as it happens, only be expressed in metaphorical terms as an X-Men story, I'm not legally allowed to share it with you until the X-Men go into the public domain.

Until then, you'll just have to trust me.

Update: Now cross-posted at Alas, a blog. Thanks, Amp!

_______________

* Incidentally, the consequence of this argument isn't necessarily a socialist economy, which I wouldn't actually favor; there are extremely strong pragmatic grounds for favoring the retention of a capitalist system and, as part of that, a robust set of property rights. It's just that such a system should be supplemented by a far stronger redistributory state (in a tax-for-social-goods-sense) than is true of the U.S. today; and also (and this is almost as important) that the public culture and debate should recognize the preponderance of luck in the outcomes of economic lives.

** What a vile phrase.

*** Although in fact I think that Wolverine's blockbuster status has far more to do with Chris Claremont, and to a slightly lesser extent Frank Miller, than it does Herb Trimpe or Wolverine's creators -- although Claremont and Miller have even less legal claim than do Wolverine's originators.

**** Except the bible, of course, which wanted everything reset to zero every fifty years to ensure justice (Leviticus 25:13). What socialist commie pinko wrote that, eh?

Quote of the Day

RENAULT: And what in heaven's name brought you to Casablanca?
RICK: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
RENAULT: Waters? What waters? We're in the desert.
RICK (shrugging): I was misinformed.

-- Casablanca (1942)
(Screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein and Howard Koch)

Poem of the Day: Not Waving But Drowning

Not Waving But Drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

-- Stevie Smith (1902 - 1971)