TOTALITARIANISM TODAY
Sunday, December 8, 2002
Berkman Center releases report on internet censorship in China.
Ben Edelman and Professor Zittrain of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law school released a list of blocked internet sites in China, as part of their ongoing effort to chronicle loss of media and internet freedom around the world. According to Edelman, the reasons and methodolgy for this study are as follows:
As in our prior testing of Saudi Arabia, there exists no publicly available master listof blocked sites. To assemble something approaching such a list, we have found ways to remotely test "twenty questions" style, asking about thousands of individual URLs, whether based upon a domain name or an IP address.
The China report details the results of their testing over 200,000 websites in the past eight months, out of which nearly 20,000 were found to be inaccessible.
Sunday, December 8, 2002
Delaware and the Standard Oil antitrust suit.
Given the PATRIOT Act's new line on tax havens, I thought these notes from a friend might be of interest. His corporations professor have the following explanation for the reason as to why Delaware got the be the dominant state for incorporation. Remember, these are notes, and therefore the style follows type.
Early corporations were all “Special purpose” for example canal building or the first and second banks of the United States. New York passed the first general incorporation statute in 1811, allowing incorporation through secretary office without explicit legislative authority. How did Delaware end up dominating the corporate law business. 20% of Delaware’s state revenue comes from incorporation fees etc.
Rockefeller drove competitors out of business first by efficiency gains form economies of scale an then, if that failed, from monopoly. It used to be that the major U.S. oil supply was in western Pennsylvania. Rockefeller avoided army service in civil war by nominating someone else to take his place. He worked through it and, after the war, bought up all the refineries in Cleveland and then in Ohio. But he couldn’t get the Pennsylvania ones. The economic problem was that his output restricting agreements with Penn producers, but the smaller refiners produced at maximum capacity (defection in economic terms).
Corporate law in Ohio did not allow an Ohio corporation to own the stock of “foreign” corporations in other states. Rockefeller could not get Ohio to change its law. Was the legislature defending consumers and small refiners. Standard Oil sets up a trust that could control stock in other firms. Small firms turn over their stock to the trustees who are in with Rockefeller. If the firms fail to restrict output, then trustees oust management and replace them. This form of monopolization through trust gave rise to the term anti-trust.
The Ohio Attorney General said that Standard Oil had no authority (its ultra vires) to enter into the trust arrangement (at 26 Broadway). Ohio courts eventually did order dissolution of the trust, but New Jersey allowed Standard Oil of New Jersey (a corporate holding company). Sullivan and Cromwell did the organization of the trust in NJ after New York refused.
New Jersey passed the first modern corporation statute. (So much for Federalism not promoting economic centralization.) A great number of organizations re-incorporate in NJ. In 1890 the Sherman Act is passed to get at Rockefeller. Strictly speaking, DOJ under Roosevelt was not a trustbusting agency but a holding company busting organization.
In 1911, USSC finally confirms the breakup of Standard Oil. But even now almost all the major oil companies are descendants of S.O. 1911 Pujo investigation. 1912 TR (and his Enron-esque financial scandals--Teapot Dome) vs. Wilson (Princeton University professor/pres.) fight it out in presidential race. Woodrow Wilson starts to amend NJ corporate law even before he is elected. Deleware, since 1899, had been imitating neighbor New Jersey hoping to fund the budget with corporate franchising.
When Wilson takes on NJ laws (leading to repeal), corporations realize that it is not a good plan to put all their incorporating eggs in one basket. But dependence of Delaware government on corporations (as mentioned aboved) makes it promising. It takes on most major corporations between 1912-14.
LSATisfied.
Half the fun of standardized tests is the night-before-big date jitteriness imposing itself on your sleep, waking up at the crack of dawn with not even the cocks for company, then setting aside money to buy indulgences for the long stream of blasphemous curses following you around the house as you search for that damned inconspicuous admission ticket. And then the privelege of trying to stay awake and alert during the soul-munching monologue administered like a shot of Novocaine by the usually bitter test proctor, who has spent his life living by the rules never admitting to himself how much he hates them.
At this point, not even anticipation does the trick-- you have to focus on the girl two aisles away who keeps looking down to make sure her breasts have not popped out of her test-taking outfit. Yes, Jen, we all feel your pain-- we know you wished you hadn't worn it. The only comfort we offer ourselves is that tiny speck of satisfaction which comes from knowing that we will do better than at least one person in the room.
And then, suddenly, finally, the test is front of me, and I shut the clutter of catastrophic predelictions out of my head. "It's me and you, baby," I whisper to the test, just as my pencil tip breaks from overexertion.
So what did I learn at the LSAT? For starters, I learned the mixing Pop Rocks with soda won't kill you; I did this during the break period, after calling an odd panolopy of people whom I knew better than to believe they might be impressed by my test-taking daredevil. I also learned that adults try to impose their moralistic interpretations of fairy-tales on children, who would be better off left to fancy for themselves.
And I learned some facts about the muralist movement in early 20th century Mexican art, as spearheaded by Diego Rivera and his compadres. Rivera was married to fellow artist, Frida Kahlo, who wrote the following about him in a letter to a close friend:
"You too know that all my eyes see, all I touch with myself, from any distance, is Diego."
Though Diego's sexual interests emerged as a matter of contention between the couple, he stayed with her until her death. In the film, "Frida", Salma Hayek plays a memorably seductive, disenchanted Frieda, who indulges in a sexual tryst with Trotsky before heading off to Paris for a female-to-female sex scene most would have a hard time forgetting. (Did I mention that Salma shines in this film? She does. She really does.)
So their art remained more revolutionary than their love? And the revolution Rivera heired, "muralism", added a formalistic freedom unrivaled in Mexican art, with long, smooth brushes and a technique intended to be clear from every perspective. No matter where you stood, seeing the mural should strike you in the same way, eliciting a similar gasp, a token appreciation.
So see the movie, skip the LSAT, and don't ever tell yourself that rules are worth following simply because they are called "rules". Set up a balancing test, and weigh your options. Shun the roles and the and the road-rules that turn blind obeisance to bitterness. Keep it tart. And oh-so-tangy.
Saturday, December 7, 2002
The Ptech problem and more pitfalls for the US business community
FBI and Customs agents raided a Massachusetts software company yesterday with dozens of government and Fortune 500 clients that is partly owned by a Saudi businessman who U.S. officials believe is a financier for the al-Qaida terrorism network. The company, Ptech, has recieved at least $3.3 million over four years from the US government, with clients including the FBI, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Air Force, the Naval Air Services Command, the Energy Department, the IRS, the Postal Service and the House of Representatives. It also has done work for NATO.
Ptech’s software, which provides organizations with a visual blueprint of how internal processes work, is used to help executives turn strategy into practice. Right now, investigators are trying to find out if Ptech software might have included “back doors” that would have allowed company employees to remotely access and download data from government and company computers.
Friday, December 6, 2002
Clash of civilizations refutations, or how to have a Happy Hanukah.
Stanley Kober wrote an excellent piece for The Globalist, arguing against Samuel P. Huntington's now-famous clash of civilizations theory. Kober agrues that the front lines are not drawn between Islam and the West. On his argument, we might arrive closer to the truth if we try to understand the similarities between Osama bin Laden and people like Hitler and Stalin.
Friday, December 6, 2002
Justice Department covers vaccine tracks.
From Harper's Weekly Review:
The Justice Department requested that documents relating to claims that the mercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal causes autism and other disorders be sealed; a spokesman said that the law creating a government fund to compensate people injured by vaccines gives the government control over such information and that the government was merely acting to preserve that right. Lawmakers, bureaucrats, and others in Washington, D.C., were all trying to figure out who was responsible for the inclusion of a measure in the Homeland Security bill that gave vaccine makers additional protection from lawsuits. People who believe that vaccines caused their children's autism were also somewhat curious.
In the same review, good news about civil society in America:
A bag of money fell off a security truck on Interstate 94 in St. Paul, Minnesota, scattering $50,000 all over the road; drivers stopped and picked up most of the money and turned it in. Zsa Zsa Gabor broke some bones in a car crash.
Friday, December 6, 2002
A few good pens.
Frightening description of the problems with the small-pox vaccine. Former Libertarian presidential candidate Harry Browne tells us why he "wants his country back. William Raspberry explains why the real threat doesn't come from Islam-- it comes from religious fundamentalism in general. If I had the time, I'd take issue with his "civic religion", though, as it falls prey to the same weaknesses of theocracy. Salon writer Cole Kadzin asks what happened to "terror sex". Will there be a terror baby-boom? Wouldn't life be grand if all bad evil things led to something as lovely as babies? Last but certainly not least, the story of why one concerned soccer mom wants Saddam taken out. Gee, they always seemed so sweet at car-pool.
Friday, December 6, 2002
The orifices and black holes of foreign policy.
You can't say I won't take a dare...
Friday, December 6, 2002
Lewis Lapham and I could not agree more.
"Whether sporting lapel pins in the shape of elephants or donkeys, the members of Congress dance to the tune of the same big but nervous money, the differences in their political views reduced to a choice between the grilled or potted shrimp."
Though I exempt Congressman Ron Paul from this categorization, for reasons the link makes self-evident.
Friday, December 6, 2002
Emil Cioran's virulent strain of Romanian pessimism.
Admittedly, I sometimes find him alluring, as those who study Romanian history know the role that fatalism and skepticism play in its policy. Cioran's History and Utopia opened doors in my 13-year-old mind, when I got to visit Romania for the first time. (Before that, while Ceausescu was still in power, it would have meant certain doom.) His simple theological opposition to Marxism bears repeating:
"By sanctifying History in order to discredit God, Marxism has merely rendered Him more peculiar and more haunting. You can stifle every impulse in humanity except the need for an absolute, which will survive the destruction of temples and even the disappearance of religion on earth".
But my favorite passage is one that deals with the most profound problem in postcommunist psychology (both economic and social). Is is true that people who live under communism are condemned to divided selves? Is the option of internal dissent the most ehtically viable one? These are questions that can be aptly applied to the present.
"For you who no longer possess it, freedom is everything; for us who do it, it is merely an illusion, because we know that we shall lose it and that, in any case, it is made to be lost. Hence, at the heart of our void, we cast our glances in all directions, without thereby neglecting the possibilities of salvation that reside within ourselves."
Take his skepticism less seriously than his concern for a rising anti-individualist trend in open societies. Consumer culture provides common ground where ideology fails. Must we necessarily embrace defeatism? I think not. But such questions haunt us more for what they suggest than for what they have the capacity to predict.
Friday, December 6, 2002
From Olga Broumas' Artemis
I am a woman committed to
a politics
of transliteration, the methodology
of a mind
stunned at the suddenly
possible shifts of meaning-- for which
like amnesiacs
in a world on fire, we must
find words
or burn.
Friday, December 6, 2002
Sealed with a Kissinger.
Kissinger the "right man for the job"? Since when does the job of an inquiry panel include insituting a regime of absolute secrecy? Oh, wait, never mind. I need another coffee.
Friday, December 6, 2002
Richard Pipes on Solzhenitsyn.
I like it that Richard Pipes reviews Solzhenitsyn's new book on the life of Jews in Russia for The New Republic. Pipes, much to Robert Conquest's chagrin, applies his knowledge of Russian history adeptly to the Jewish question. Pipes played an instrumental role in establishing the Institute for Polish-Jewish Studies in Boston, which aims to preserve the cultural heritage of Polish Jewry.
Pipes has been criticized for his "polemical" interpretations of Russian history by some who find the either-or of Cold War political dichotomies repellant. That said, his historical account of communism belongs on every transition scholar's bookshelf.
Regardless of how one feels about his obvious pro-Western bias, Pipes puts his finger on one of the main problems for transition in Russia. In an article discussing the institutional arrangements of private property as related to the Russian experience, Pipes adjoins:
"Some time ago, I concluded that the difference lay primarily in the weak and late development in Russia of private property, especially in agricultural land, which until the last century had provided the overwhelming bulk of its wealth."
There is no question that the management and protection of private property lacks institutional development in Russia. Contract and title law continue to pose problems, more so now as the courts are mired by corruption and the special-interest politics of organized crime. Pipes, however, observes the real problem for Russian transition, given the ridiculous policies of the Clinton administration and the Sachs-Summers-Harvard alliance, when he urges the US to leave Russia alone to work out its economic problems.
"The worst aspect of the current crisis is that it will discredit in the eyes of most Russians both democracy and capitalism. The two institutions -- the indispensable foundations of stability and prosperity -- appear to them today as nothing but a swindle. They were willing to put up with reduced consumption and the disappearance of social services because they saw them as temporary hardships."
As transitology loses its economic hue in debates, and the long process of revising history (or rather, reclaiming history) from the long years of communism begins, the Jewish perspective on these events will matter much more. Pipes has never been reluctant to engage this issue. As a public intellectual, he deserves commendation for his forthcoming approach to Russian studies.
Friday, December 6, 2002
What it takes to be a UN inspector.
Jerry Brito gives us the sad tale of a UN inspector declared "unfit" for the job due to his private sexual practices. A really good post.
Friday, December 6, 2002
Read Randall Kennedy.
In a article brought to my attention by a wise friend, Nicholas D. Kristof writes about the improving interracial love stats. Unlike Cornel West, I think interracial marriages are great no matter which way you slice it. HLS professor Randall Kennedy, author of the controversial book, Nigger, has written a lot about interracial relationships, but his most recent piece for Atlantic Monthly provides trememdous insight into "interracial intimacy".
The great but altogether predictable irony is that just as white opposition to white-black intimacy finally lessened, during the last third of the twentieth century, black opposition became vocal and aggressive. In college classrooms today, when discussions about the ethics of interracial dating and marriage arise, black students are frequently the ones most likely to voice disapproval.
Thursday, December 5, 2002
Darling, don't you go and cut your hair.
Keep it restless and rugged for the surveillance cameras you might encounter in New York city. If you live somewhere else and would like to know if you are being video-taped, visit the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Surveillance Monitor.
Thursday, December 5, 2002
Kochalka doodling.
Multi-faceted comic, musician, and man James Kochalka keeps me grinning and spinning when the lovely world of GRE and LSAT study guides wages guerilla warfare on my mind-body problem.
Thursday, December 5, 2002
Most like it hot.
In response to the prostitution debate (see yesterday's archives), my problem with prostitution doesn’t concern the masculine appreciation of it as much as it does the feminist-liberation talk which surrounds the business of selling your body for the pleasure of a man. Admittedly, if there were half as many male prostitutes as there are female prostitutes, I would be tempted to solicit (though not necessarily defend) them. This is partly because I know that if I did solicit a prostitute, I would do so as a means of having a sexual relationship in which no emotions were involved, and only my pleasure mattered. At no point in the game would I care about this person as an individual, as more than a means to my satisfied end.
If the hooker failed to please me, then I would fail to pay him. I won’t pay for a bad carwash, and I won’t fork over cash for bad head. Such are the rules of the services industry. His consent to let himself be used in this way, however, says more about him than it does about me. If I have money and opportunity, like most men, I will take what I can get—especially if it comes cheap and free of emotional hassle.
Prostitution is not “cut and dry”; it’s not black and white; it’s not this or that—it’s a complicated and fascinating market response to human sexuality and the rules or roles promulgated by convention. The fact that the economic aspect of sexual relations between a hooker and a john are clear and up-front does not mean that the only important or salient aspect of prostitution is an economic one. If cash-on-the-table were the whole story, then it wouldn’t even matter why some women choose to become prostitutes. On my view, this difference does matter—soliciting a prostitute that has tracks running up and down her arms and bruises all over her body says something about how little we value “certain types” of people—and how easy it might be for us to consider them less-than-human (which reinforces their own conceptions of themselves as such).
Granted, I feel strongly about the extent to which, in our day-to-day social lives, we act out our beliefs by reinforcing or discouraging certain behaviors. If I tell my girlfriends that, yes, their hair matters much more than the books they read, then I play a part in creating the kind of society, and propping up the stereotypes, I find so abhorrent. If I solicit a downtrodden, drug-addicted prostitute, I am paving the way for her to continue her self-destruction. If I play the simpering, giggly, subservient mademoiselle in my encounters with males, then I am encouraging the men in my life to think of women in this way. And if I sell my 50-year-old body for money and then try to argue that it assures my financial independence (as if I am not dependent on the desires of men as much as a house-wife might be, minus the affection or added care), then I am missing the devil lurking in the details.
Marriage is legalized, conventionalized prostitution. However, unlike prostitution, it offers more than just financial benefits—it provides friendship, comraderie, trust, intimacy, common ground, partnership, sex with someone who actually cares about pleasing you, etc. etc. It’s an attempt to move past your individual psychological hang-ups and see the world from another person’s perspective. Unlike prostitution, it encourages humans to become better humans by demanding more than pleasure and giving more than cash for the trouble.
Chablis’ choice to become a hooker may make economic sense, but it doesn’t exactly lift the spirit or make me want to pat her on the back and say, “Way to go, you rational economic actor, you!”. (Even from an economic perspective, one might argue that Chablis’ position is counterintuitive, as marriage and divorce are pretty profitable industries for women. Sad. Sad. Sad.) I can respect Chablis’ decision without respecting her as a person who has made wise decisions. I can defend her right to choose a lifestyle without endorsing that lifestyle, or arguing that it is a positive good. Libertarian views depend on such distinctions. I can also attempt to influence her or persuade her non-coercively by praising what I like about her and criticizing what I don’t condone. Having done all of this, I throw in my towel after one last remark.
I can’t be too opposed to prostitution because I want to get married even though I consider it a more sophisticated, fleshed-out model of the same thing. The generalized female in me wants nothing more than to pay for sex where and when I want it, end of story, end of interaction. The individual Alina in me wants something more intriguing, challenging, endearing, and exciting. Even though the cost of marriage exceeds the cost of a hooker, I’m putting it in my shopping-cart because the price-tag, in this case, doesn’t sum up the story.
