WHEN DIGICAMS ATTACK: Love the title.

WALTER OLSON is profiled in an interesting article. Via email, however, I learn that Olson has a minivan, not an SUV as the article states.

HUMAN SHIELDS, ICY ROADS, CLONING AND BUFFY: It’s another issue of Virginia Postrel Magazine.

Also, she has this fascinating article on “Neuroeconomics” in The New York Times. If it interests you, I recommend Robert Frank’s Passions Within Reason: The Strategic Role of the Emotions, which I think is far and away Frank’s best book, though hardly his most famous.

I GAVE BLOOD at the law school blood drive right before my Constitutional Law class. I’m not sure how good an idea that was. Giving blood never makes me dizzy or faint, but I was just a touch lightheaded — it was sort of like having downed a shot right before class. For all I know, it was an improvement. . . .

Aside from my secretary (who had donated just before me, and who kindly snapped this picture) and one male student, the crowd donating and waiting was entirely female. I don’t know if that’s representative or not, but it seems as if every time I donate on campus it’s that way.

Anyhow, there’s apparently a non-trivial blood shortage in most of the nation, and even those places with plenty on hand are having to send some of theirs elsewhere to make up the difference.

Part of the reason may be (as I blogged here and here back when InstaPundit was young) that they’re getting more and more picky about who they’ll take blood from. In particular, they seem extraordinarily worried about mad cow disease, with ever-more-stringent limits on blood donation by people who have spent time in the UK. Perhaps the reasons for that are better than I realize (which is a bit worrisome, if so), but I wonder how many lives it’s saving, versus lives potentially lost because of blood shortages. Has anyone looked into that lately?

In the meantime, I guess the rest of us in the ever-dwindling group of approved donors should roll up our sleeves. It’s virtually painless, and no big deal. Plus, I got a free cookie!

NATHAN NEWMAN has discovered something rather A.N.S.W.E.R.-like in the affirmative action protest organization. He has lots of links, too.

I SUSPECT THAT THIS JONAH GOLDBERG PIECE on McCarthyism will generate a lot of, er, discussion.

Kevin Drum has already responded.

UPDATE: Apparently, by linking this piece I’ve produced a flood of hatemail to Jonah Goldberg. I guess more of my readers are civil libertarian types.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Steve Verdon says that now Kevin Drum is subjecting me to neo-McCarthyism. Or something like that.

There are also replies up from Silent Running and Arthur Silber.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I read Kevin Drum’s post again and — though it really didn’t register with me the first time — I think it is kind of a cheap shot.

But I want to be clear where I stand here. I don’t hold any brief for McCarthy. He was a buffoon and a thug. But if McCarthyism was bad, it was because he accused innocent people, not because he pursued Communists. Communists were — and are — comparable to Nazis. Being one is as bad as being a Nazi. Supporting Communism is as bad as supporting Nazism. And calling Communists Communists isn’t McCarthyism — as Kevin Drum himself agrees.

And if you disagree, and think that Communists aren’t as bad as Nazis, well, that’s your opinion. But don’t expect me to be impressed, or to think that you hold any sort of moral high ground. So what part of my position is different from this passage in Kevin’s post?

I can’t pretend to speak for the entire liberal community, and certainly not for liberals of a generation before me, but I’m not sure anyone really denies that there were indeed communist spies in the United States back in the 50s. The problem with McCarthy — and McCarthyism — wasn’t that he uncovered lots of communist spies, but that he didn’t uncover many communist spies. While other, more careful investigators had some success, McCarthy himself was extraordinarily unproductive.

What McCarthy did do was accuse everyone under the sun of being a communist. If you had belonged to the communist party as a student in the 30s, you were a communist. If you belonged to the ACLU, you were a communist. If, like Fred Fischer, you belonged to the Lawyer’s Guild for a few months after you graduated from law school, you were tarred as a communist on national TV.

It’s not McCarthyism to accuse a communist of being a communist. It is McCarthyism to accuse someone of being a communist who has only a vague association with communist friends, groups, or ideas.

As I said in this post about A.N.S.W.E.R. that Kevin links disapprovingly:

It’s not McCarthyism to call people who are communists, communists. Communists, as devoted followers of murderous totalitarianism, deserve to be called to account every bit as much as their Nazi colleagues. And in the 21st century, they can hardly pretend to be ignorant of their ideology’s true nature.

Sounds to me like Kevin and I are on the same page — except that, somehow, he’s accusing me of McCarthyism. I guess it’s not McCarthyism to accurately charge 1950s Communists with Communism. It’s just McCarthyism to accurately charge 2003 Communists, like A.N.S.W.E.R., with Communism. That doesn’t make much sense to me.

SADDAM HUSSEIN: Media lord!

THERE’S MORE ON LOS ALAMOS SECURITY (OR THE LACK THEREOF) over at DefenseTech.

I SHOULD HAVE LINKED TO THE DIXIE FLATLINE BLOG before, but I kept forgetting to. But I think you’ll like it. Here’s an excerpt from his close reading of the G.I. Joe cartoon show:

This base, as befits America’s premier, top-secret military force, is amazing, and has a truly gigantic laser cannon mounted in the center of the main building. Extremely impressive, the cannon must be at least two hundred meters long, and can only move on a vertical axis. This illustrates one of the greatest problems with the Joe force. Formed and equipped under Reagan, it never wanted for funds, and accordingly it never had to be cost effective. Rather than use or modify existing weapons platforms and systems, the Joes were forever relying on custom designs, often introducing next-generation systems that, while quite novel and impressive, never quite justified the cost.

This Super Cannon is an excellent example of this problem. No other military organization in the world, then or now, has the ability to make a laser cannon that, to judge by its size, was capable of vaporizing entire city blocks. The Joes could, because money was truly no object, and the prestige of working in Joe R&D attracted the finest creative minds in the military world. But rather than place the weapon in a traversing mount, they chose a static position. All Cobra would need to do is move likely targets out of the Super-Cannon’s firing line. Perhaps there were technical limitations of which we are unaware that required the static position, but on the face of it, it seems a terrible design decision.

There’s more in a similar vein.

CONDI RICE AS A CANDIDATE FOR GOVERNOR in California? Interesting.

PROTESTERS WITH BLOODY HANDS:

The demonstrations are thereby making war more — not less — likely.

All this should be no great surprise, considering the ignominious history of peace protests over the last century. The record is fairly clear: When the demands of protesters have been met, more bloodshed has resulted; when strong leaders have resisted the lure of appeasement, peace has usually broken out.

If you want peace too much, or too visibly, prepare for war.

HERE’S AN ARTICLE ON LAW-BLOGGING from the ABA Journal. Howard Bashman is prominently featured, with a picture. Funny, he looks nothing like I’d imagined.

BLOGS AT HARVARD: Here’s an interview with Dave Winer about his new role as Blogger-in-Residence.

SCOTT GANZ has an idea for a “pledge drive across warbloggerdom.” Sounds good to me.

RUSSELL WORKING is reporting from Turkey via blog. Lots of interesting stuff, but this passage really grabbed my eye:

There is a reason for the intensity of reaction to an American in Europe. It can be summed up in a cartoon that ran in Greek paper To Ethnos. A befuddled chairman of the board—he is Greece’s prime minister and EU president Costas Simitis—sits before a company board reading from a report: “Dear Shareholders: It’s my impression you still have reservations about the prospects of the company.”

Meanwhile, his board members are scurrying about, finding ways to kill themselves: rigging up nooses, leaping out of windows, firing guns through their heads. On the wall is the name of the corporation, which Greece happens to head during this six-month period: The European Union.

My advice: sell.

DONALD SENSING WRITES THAT Afghanistan was a Southerners’ war. Iraq, on the other hand, will be a Northerners’ war.

He’s also got a transcript of Bush’s speech.

ROGER BOURNIVAL reports that bogus-casualty-figure purveyer Marc Herold has a book coming out — and promotional literature has inflated the death toll again!

AN INSIGHTFUL COMMENT on the demise of Salon and many other dot-coms:

The biggest thing that killed the dot-com boom was the exorbitant cost structure the companies put in place, especially in real estate.

Let’s look at the major epicenters of dot-com activity: Boston, Manhattan, San Francisco, and Seattle. What do those cities have in common? Some of the highest rents in the country (as well as inflated costs of living, which required higher salaries).

The great benefit the Internet was supposed to bring was the complete de-emphasis of physical location. Salon could have found a home in, say, Springfield, Mass., where rents are cheap, there’s a strong supply of intellectuals (the Five Colleges in Hampshire County), New York and Boston are close at hand, and the cost-of-living is lower.

The fact that sites which avoided getting the priciest digs (I’m looking at you, Kuro5hin) have survived and maybe even thrived is a testament to the folly of Salon, Inside, Slate, and all the other online media startups.

InstaPundit, of course, survives largely via low overhead.

AGAINST THE AXIS OF EVIL, AND THE AXIS OF WEASELS: The Axis of Hygiene.

I’M INTERVIEWED (right next to William Gibson!) over on the SuicideGirls site.

PRESIDENT BUSH IS PUSHING DEMOCRACY IN IRAQ:

Bringing stability and unity to a free Iraq will not be easy. Yet that is no excuse to leave the Iraqi regime’s torture chambers and poison labs in operation. Any future the Iraqi people choose for themselves will be better than the nightmare world that Saddam Hussein has chosen for them. . . .

Rebuilding Iraq will require a sustained commitment from many nations, including our own: We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary, and not a day more. America has made and kept this kind of commitment before — in the peace that followed a world war. After defeating enemies, we did not leave behind occupying armies, we left constitutions and parliaments. We established an atmosphere of safety, in which responsible, reform-minded local leaders could build lasting institutions of freedom. In societies that once bred fascism and militarism, liberty found a permanent home.

Of course, as this article notes,

The U.S. president’s words also could send a chill down the spines of some of the nondemocratic leaders in the region.

Some?

MARK KLEIMAN WANTS TO KNOW if I condemn this prosecution and conviction of British Muslim cleric Abdullah el-Faisal, for “soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred.”

The answer is, I don’t know, because I’m not sure what he was convicted of. Solicitation of murder usually means (in the United States, anyway) trying to have a specific person killed — that’s how I read the story when I commented, earlier, on the striking fact that the judge decided to exclude Hindus and Jews from the jury. (I thought it was something like this solicitation of murder prosecution).

Kleiman seems to think that this is purely a “hate speech” prosecution. I’m against those. Is that what this case is about? I don’t know; the story’s certainly consistent with Kleiman’s reading, but it’s not clear.

This story from the Times, however, says:

In his lectures, which included titles such as No Peace with the Jews and Them versus Us, the cleric exhorted audiences to take up acts of terrorism, including the use of chemical and nuclear weapons. He also tried to recruit British schoolboys to terrorist training camps.

In the United States, under the First Amendment, you could only convict if you could convince a court that these statements were intended to produce, and were likely to produce, imminent unlawful activity. From these facts, it’s entirely possible that these statements would meet the test. Indeed, recruiting schoolboys to terrorist training camps would seem to fall outside any reasonable zone of free speech, wouldn’t it? That’s not just speech, it’s illegal activity in itself. After all, “your money or your life” is speech, but it’s not protected by the First Amendment. Neither is recruiting terrorists. (As distinct from abstract advocacy of terrorism.)

And, as Kleiman surely knows, the First Amendment doesn’t apply in Britain. But, leaving the Constitution aside, do I think that it’s wrong, morally or (in a more general, common-law-ish sense) legally, to punish someone for that kind of conduct? Uh, no. Recruiting schoolboys as terrorists seems to me to be classic criminal conspiracy.

It’s possible, of course, that these stories give the wrong idea of the facts, but Kleiman didn’t state what facts he thought made this case particularly troubling, so I can’t say more than I have.

UPDATE: British solicitor Martin Pratt emails:

El-Faisal was convicted of three counts of Soliciting to Commit Murder under The Offences Against the Person Act 1861 and three counts of Incitement to Racial Hatred under The Public Order Act 1986.

From your explanation, it seems that in order to obtain a conviction for solicitation to commit murder the requisite elements are pretty similar to those in the United States.

Incitement to Racial hatred on the other hand, as you say, is a hate speech crime and I am pretty sure would not be compatible with the First Amendment. Under the 1986 Act if a person –

* Uses words or behaviour /displays written material, which are

* threatening/abusive/insulting, with

* intent/likely to stir up racial hatred

Then upon indictment he may receive a prison sentence not exceeding 2 years.

For the purposes of the Act, racial hatred is defined as –

“Racial hatred means that hatred against a group of persons in Great Britain defined by reference to colour, race, nationality (including citizenship) or ethnic or national origins”.

The Tory legacy to the criminal justice system is not glorious, and this is one example of their over attention to headline pleasing sentencing guidelines and under attention to properly defining what exactly an offence consists of. Prosecutions under this offence are rare as no-one (so far as I am aware, I have not practiced criminal law since my articles, this all comes from half remembered law school lectures) has yet managed to define “hatred” which is pretty fundamental to the offence.

However, offences under the 1861 Act are far more serious and Solicitation to Commit Murder can carry a life sentence which I would imagine the judge will be considering. Of course in England and Wales, once the jury has convicted, it is for the judge to determine sentence.

So there you are.

YES, I KNOW: Another day of limited posting. I’ve had seemingly endless faculty meetings, committee meetings, etc. — as well as my regular classes. More later, but this whole week may be on the light side. That’s frustrating, because I’ve got a big back burner of posts I’d like to get to, but that I don’t have time to write. But hey — this is a blog. It’s not like it’s my actual job.

HERE’S A BLOG that you really ought to be reading.

REPORT FROM AFGHANISTAN: Things aren’t so bad:

Many of those perceived troubles are real and worrisome, and nobody would mistake Kabul for a prosperous and peaceful city. Sections are still in ruins, and many of the 600,000 returning refugees who have flooded the city live precariously on the margins. Islamic militants remain determined to destabilize and oust the Karzai government through violence, and periodic attacks continue. There is also concern that the flashier developments could offend conservative Afghan attitudes and create a dangerously wide divide between the relatively rich and the very poor.

But whatever the risks, the Kabul of today is almost unrecognizable as the austere city ruled not long ago by the Taliban — or as the place where warring Islamic militias demolished neighborhood after neighborhood, or where Soviets presided over a rebellious socialist state. . . .

In a city that had a handful of shopworn eating places two years ago, a new Chinese or Italian or American hamburger restaurant opens almost weekly, as well as kebab shops by the score. Small hotels have sprung up, and a $40 million Hyatt is on the way. The food bazaars are bustling and there are downtown blocks filled almost entirely with bridal shops. Rebuilt homes are rising from the ruins, and every little storefront seems to be stuffed with bathtubs or fans or with men building and carving things to be sold.

There’s a lot that should still be done — but remember, we didn’t start the Marshall Plan until after World War II was thoroughly over. This war is still underway.