Obsidian Wings

Government Mandates And Moral Disagreement

--by Sebastian

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled to uphold the PPCA, a fruitful discussion about government mandates should be more possible without immediate worries of whether gettting it 'wrong' hurts your own side or helps the other side of whichever political divide you happen to be on.

I tend to buy into many of the libertarian arguments against mandates--that the government should generally minimize its decisions about how citizens live their lives.  But an anti-mandate stance has virtues even to those who don't agree with the libertarian critique. 

Government mandates tend to undermine the democratic balance between government action and conscientious objection.  In most modern democratic-style states, we allow for tolerance of moral disagreement by separating taxing and spending.  For the most part, everyone gets taxed and the money goes into a government pool.  That pool of money becomes the government's money.  There are then various government means for determining how that money is spent (direct acts of the legislature, funding through various agencies, etc.).  Nearly everyone has some disagreement with some of the choices made.  Sometimes that agreement has specific and strong moral dimensions (you may believe that the death penalty, or abortion, or crack vs. powder cocaine sentencing disparities are injustices).  You are certainly free to use the political process to attempt to change those government allocations.  But the process allows for some moral distance.  You disagree with how the government is spending its money.  You want to use politics to change how the government is spending its money.  But you aren't generally forced to participate in whatever it is that you object to more than the fact that you have been taxed, and the government later decided what to do with the tax money it collected.  Systemically this allows for diversity and tolerance for many of those who lose out in the political system.  You lost out on your opinion about the death penalty?  Fine, but we don't force you to pull the switch on a murderer. 

Government mandates raise the stakes because they don't allow for that distancing.  They force moral dissenters to choose between personally engaging in the activity in which they lost the political fight, or to defy the government and break the law by violating the mandate.  Even in non conscientious objector cases, government mandates force dissenters to directly participate in the activity that they just lost a political fight over.  It is something worth thinking about when there are non-mandate options. 

till the landslide brings it down

by fiddler

Following up on previous posts (here, here, here, here, and here):

HBGary Federal, Team Themis, Hunton & Williams and the US Chamber of Commerce:

• Aaron Barr, HBGary Federal CEO, who spearheaded the company's attempts to discover the identity of members of Anonymous and whose emails were exposed by Anonymous in return, resigned on Feb. 28. Barr said he wanted to spend more time with his family and recover his reputation. The article linked also points out poor security practices within the company, including a general disregard of the importance of using distinct and complex passwords -- perhaps something else Barr could work on in his spare time, now.

Self-Evident

Guest post by Amezuki, not by Gary Farber

You all know me by a different pseudonym, and I'll reintroduce myself properly later.

But in the meantime, a word from our Founders:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration of Independence stands, in my mind, as one of the greatest political documents in history.

Like our Constitution, it stands on the shoulders of many other exalted works, and my opinion is not in any way intended to denigrate those works--but what makes it stand out in my mind is not just the role it had in the birth of our nation, but in the simple, unequivocal and straightforward statements of first principles it contains.

Foremost among these is the well-known passage I quoted above. Its evocative power was such that Martin Luther King, one of the most eloquent speakers and users of language our nation has known, had no need to embellish it further when quoting it, save to correctly note that it was a promise our country had yet to fully honor. "All men are created equal."

Think about that for a moment. All men. You will notice a distinct lack of footnotes, equivocation, qualifications or exceptions to the word "all".

Newton's Third Law #4, the continuing story, with update

by fiddler

(Previous Newton's Third Law posts are here, here and here.)

Benjamin Spock de Vries says he is not Commander X, one of the 'leaders' of Anonymous whom Aaron Barr of HBGary supposedly found online. Apparently, Barr wrote several memos in which he connected Commander X's identity to de Vries, all of which are included among the memos leaked by Anonymous. This mistaken identification led to an oddly amusing exchange, when Barr contacted him during the attack on HBGary by Anonymous:

Newton's Third Law #1, 2nd UPDATE , 5:30 p.m. EST

by fiddler

Last Saturday, an article in the Financial Times featured Aaron Barr of cybersecurity firm HB Gary Federal, boasting that he had discovered the identities of key members of the hacking collective that calls itself Anonymous.

Any cybersecurity firm worth its salt should realize that this action would result in a reaction, and should create protocols and take precautions to avoid them.

Hmm. Apparently not.

In short order, Anonymous hacked them, printed "Fail" across Barr's photo, wrote him a scathing letter to accompany it, and released a compilation of 40,000+ of the company's files and memos to the public. Some of these concerned a presentation prepared for Bank of America last December on how the bank could protect itself against Wikileaks.

One of HB Gary Federal's bright ideas? Target Salon columnist Glenn Greenwald, who is also a New York Times best-selling author and attorney. Why? On the grounds that because Greenwald wants to make sure Bradley Manning isn't being mistreated and Manning is accused of leaking files to Anonymous, Greenwald therefore must be part of Anonymous.

Wrong.

 

 

One Way To Connect

by Gary Farber

ONE WAY TO CONNECT can be this:

This is America:

This is something we can do:

To Beat Back Poverty, Pay the Poor:

The city of Rio de Janeiro is infamous for the fact that one can look out from a precarious shack on a hill in a miserable favela and see practically into the window of a luxury high-rise condominium. Parts of Brazil look like southern California. Parts of it look like Haiti. Many countries display great wealth side by side with great poverty. But until recently, Brazil was the most unequal country in the world

Everything connects:

He Was A Freelance Writer. He Had It Made.

"He was Joe Mayer, freelance writer. He had it made."

-- Charles Bukowski

A friend of mine needs your help.  I'm asking you to help him. 

Not because you know him, though you may.

Not because you like him, or his opinions, because you may not.

Not because he's special, though he is.  (We all are.)

But because he needs the help.

And everyone who needs help should be helped.

Who is Roy?

I can only tell you some things I know. 

Speak To The Kitty: NEW OBWI EMAIL ADDRESS And Open Thread

by Gary Farber

Longtime and valued commenter Uncle Kvetch asked an extremely important question here.

[...] While it was nice seeing a united front of commenters taking on avedis' all-too-familiar mix of dick-waving bravado and abject sexual terror, I do find myself wondering just what constitutes "beyond the pale" when it comes to homophobic remarks around here. I'm not referring to ban-worthy offenses, as the posting rules are clear enough. But I have to say that when the inevitable necrophilia/bestiality comparisons were dragged out and numerous commenters just kept on presuming good faith on avedis' part...well, it makes me wonder.

The answer is that the "New Banning Rules" were last updated, as you can see, by longtime front-pager Edward at 10:25 AM on January 26, 2005.

They include this:

One writer (but only one) from the other side of the fence must agree to the ban for it to move forward (Von can vote as either side of the fence as he wishes). For the record, currently Charles Bird, Andrew, and Sebastian Holsclaw are on the right; Von is in the center; and Hilzoy is on the left.;-) Yes, that's unbalanced...we're working on it.*

This has been discussed many many many times in comments since 2005, by various people.  Many emails to the kitty address have been sent since 2005.

The "New Banning Rules" remain as posted until someone with the ability and authority to post new rules does so.  Wording has been suggested. 

The Posting Rules were last updated 1/19/2007, with a further undated update by an unknown to me user of "SuperUser."  I can guess, but so can you.

Again, much email has been sent to the kitty address since then, and there have been various discussions in comments about this since that time.

The Posting Rules remain as posted until someone with the ability and authority to post new rules does so.

None of this will change until the co-bloggers communicate with each other about it, and appropriate action taken by the appropriate parties with the ability to do so.  As has always been the case. 

As of Wednesday, December 29th, the address to email the kitty has been: ObWings At gmail Dot com

Send Obsidian Wings related email there.

Did the fathers of modern obstetrics murder more women than Jack the Ripper?

By Lindsay Beyerstein

Latoya Peterson of Jezebel spotted this disconcerting story in Sunday's Guardian:

They are giants of medicine, pioneers of the care that women receive during childbirth and were the founding fathers of obstetrics. The names of William Hunter and William Smellie still inspire respect among today's doctors, more than 250 years since they made their contributions to healthcare. Such were the duo's reputations as outstanding physicians that the clienteles of their private practices included the rich and famous of mid-18th-century London.

But were they also serial killers? New research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine (JRSM) claims that they were. A detailed historical study accuses the doctors of soliciting the killing of dozens of women, many in the latter stages of pregnancy, to dissect their corpses. [Guardian]

This story has all the makings of an anti-science urban legend. Regardless of the quality of the underlying research, this story is going to get embellished in the retelling and used to bash scientific medicine. So, it seems important to refocus the debate on the facts as quickly as possible. The allegations are already being mentioned in the same breath as documented atrocities like the Tuskegee syphilis study, and Dr. Joseph Mengele's infamous concentration camp experiments.

I checked out Don C. Shelton's original paper. It's a very good read. Shelton raises interesting questions about exactly where these two doctors got their anatomical specimens. He shamelessly overstates his case, however. Shelton flatly asserts that Hunter and Smellie were "responsible" for the murders of more women than Jack the Ripper.

The subjects of Smellie and Hunter's anatomy books were women who died in childbirth, or during their final month of pregnancy. Shelton's argument is that there simply weren't enough heavily pregnant and birthing women dying of natural causes in mid-18th-century London to account for the thirty-plus cadavers that Smellie and Hunter examined to write their respective anatomical classics.

Based on a review of their atlases, Shelton says that the two anatomists came up with a total of 20 cadavers between 1750 and 1754; and that Hunter somehow located another dozen between 1766 and 1774. That works out to four or five such bodies a year for the first stretch and fewer than two a year for the second period.

Shelton concludes that the doctors must have had these women murdered-to-order, a practice known as burking. The term burking is an allusion to the murderers Burke and Hare who smothered their victims in Edinburgh between 1837 and 1838 and delivered them to Dr. Robert Knox, a private anatomy lecturer. Shelton acknowledges that there is no research on burking in the mid-18th century and he doesn't cite any documented cases of burking during that era.

There is no question anatomists of Smellie and Hunter's day got their cadavers from grave robbers. That's how it was done in those dark and superstitious days.

Shelton's case boils down to two rather plausible, but non-dispositive claims: i) relatively few women died in their 9th month of pregnancy or during childbirth to begin with, and, ii) it's unlikely that ordinary grave robbers would have been able to zero in on these cases.

Grave robbers tended to exhume corpses at random, Shelton explains. Or else they targeted the unclaimed bodies of people who died in poorhouses. But he notes that most of those who died in poorhouses were old and sick, not otherwise healthy pregnant women.

Death rates for infectious disease were very high in mid-18th-century London, but Shelton claims that pregnant women would have accounted for small percentage of the death toll. As he points out, they're a subset of the general population and a relatively young and healthy one at that.

Shelton cites statistics to show that the childbed death rate in the mid-18th-century was less than 2%. Based on the birth and death rates and the population of London at the time, he estimates that there would have been about 200 childbed deaths per year in the city. (Childbed death includes fatalities during labor and during the first few days postpartum.)

Shelton argues that women who died in their 9th month of pregnancy would have been rarer still. He speculates that very pregnant cadavers would have been extremely rare because a significant percentage women who suffered lethal illnesses or accidents in their 9th month would have miscarried before they died.

Even at their most productive, the two doctors were only seeing about five of their target subjects a year, on average. Five out of 200 doesn't seem that incredible.

The author also maintains that it would have been very difficult for grave robbers to find these rare specimens: Death notices were rarely published in those days and corpses usually went directly from home to the graveyard without a detour through a funeral home or some other central location that thieves could monitor.

Personally, if I were an 18th-century anatomist who needed a steady supply of "special" cadavers, I'd start bribing vicars. If you pay for the new church roof, I'm sure it's amazing what you can find out about who's buried where.

So, the paper gives us good reason to doubt that Smellie and Hunter got all their cadavers through the standard grave-robbing channels. But that's hardly proof that the two men commissioned mass murder for hire.

Smellie and Hunter were famous obstetricians. They worked with pregnant and birthing women. In an era where most childbirth was handled at home, they probably served a disproportionately sick patient population.

Let's not forget that primitive obstetrics was really dangerous--no doubt in part because because science was still sketchy on pregnant female anatomy. If anyone was well-situated to tip off grave robbers about dead pregnant women, or take liberties with their corpses, it would have been 18th-century obstetricians.

As the author points out, Smellie and Hunter were rich and well-connected men. He implies that they could have gotten away with murder. On the other hand, if they could have gotten away with murder, they presumably had enough privilege to get what they wanted by less drastic, if socially unacceptable means. 

Shelton claims the following passage, written in 1818, is a smoking gun. The author was describing a plate in Smellie's atlas that features twins:

“Dr MacKenzie being then an assistant to the late Dr Smellie, the procuring and dissecting this woman without Dr Smellie’s knowledge, was the cause of a separation between them, for the leading steps to such a discovery could not be kept a secret."

Smellie died in 1763 and 55 years later, some guy claimed that an associate of Smellie's obtained the corpse by unspecified (but presumably sketchy) means without Smellie's knowledge. This is supposed to be a smoking gun? Really?

Shelton gives us no reason to assume that Smellie and Hunter were monsters. Why immediately jump to the conclusion that they were murderers? There have been killers in the name of science and medicine, but they've always been a tiny minority among scientists and for that matter, a very small subset of murderers. Shelton's wild allegation seems absurd unless you buy into some nasty stereotypes about doctors and scientists.

He makes no attempt to rule out less brutal schemes by which they might have improved their odds relative to common grave-robbers. Could they have performed unauthorized autopsies on pregnant patients who died of natural causes? Bribed the families of the deceased? Stolen the bodies of their own indigent patients? If a body was returned to the family with an incision in the abdomen, the obstetricians could always claim it was a cesarean section.

Were all their subjects even dead? Presumably they could have learned from examining and treating live women. It's a mundane possibility, but who's to say these guys didn't exaggerate the number of corpses they actually looked at? Academic dishonesty is more common than murder.

Obviously, I'm speculating here, but so is Shelton. He makes probabilistic arguments, so I'll make one too: If same end can be achieved through subterfuge or serial murder, most people will opt for subterfuge. Dead pregnant women are rare, but mass murderers are rarer still. Of course, tall tales of body snatchers, natural and supernatural, are as common as dirt.

Shelton is right to question how these doctors got their cadavers, but he simply does not have enough evidence to conclude that these pioneers of modern obstetrics killed more women than Jack the Ripper. This paper is just going to give the science-bashers unearned ammunition.

Just Wars and Detainees

by Robert Mackey

A post I did a few days ago on the argument for manned nuclear bombers, much like any freewheeling discussion on most blogs, soon turned to an interesting cul-de-sac of discussion on the nature of warfare, those whose job it is to both fight and conduct warfare (two quite different things), and what defined a combatant and non-combatant.  I'd like to address the latter and will discuss the former over the next few days.  Comments are always welcome!

The idea of just war, as most of you are well aware, began in the early Christian Era in the West, by old St. Augustine.  No need to ride that old pony for much, other than to note that the idea of war for something other than greed is a relatively new concept in human history.  Of course, like any other good idea, all it takes are a few greedy men to find the loop holes and discover new and interesting ways of making a pacifistic religion into a tool for conflict (see the Crusades and the Thirty Years War for details).

My doctoral work, along with my first book, The UnCivil War, focused several chapters on the outgrowth of the just war concept--the treatment of captured prisoners of war.  In my case studies, I found that officers in the Union Army ran into a very large, and very difficult problem at the beginning of the conflict:  What do you do with captured 'unlawful combatants?'  Federal troops were capturing guerrillas who ostensibly were part of the defense forces of the Confederacy, but did not possess uniforms, flags, and other accouterments of conventional armies, and tended to fight using the method of the irregular warrior--ambush, hit-and-run raids, and waylaying small groups of stragglers--all of which were anathema to the Union Army leadership.  If this sounds familiar to anyone who has happened to keep track of world events since 2001, good for you--it is literally the same problem and issue.  How do you define a combatant and a non-combatant?

The solution was found in Lieber's Code, published in the Union Army as General Orders Number 100, in 1863.  Francis Lieber was the most famous jurist of his time, and in a letter to General Henry W. Halleck, outlined the concepts of the legality of war, the status of combatants, and the responsibility of a capturing nation to provide for prisoners.  Lieber was a Unionist and saw that the Civil War was an illegal war, in the fact that that the Confederate States had no right to secede.  Yet, he did not allow that factor to determine the combatant status of the 'detainees.'  In fact, he pressured Halleck (and President Lincoln) to treat captured Confederate soldiers as prisoners of war, when under international law and practice of the time they could have been legally executed as rebels.  For those of you who dismiss such activities, I'd like to point out the punishments given out to Irish rebels in the uprisings of the same era, by the much more 'civilized' British government, not to mention the British reaction to the Indian Mutiny. 

General Orders 100 basically formed the basis of the law of land warfare, and later the Hague and Geneva Conventions.  It defined different categories of armed combatants--from legal combatants (uniformed soldiers), legal non-combatants, and a new category of irregular soldiers, the partisan.  For those of you who remember old newsreels (or watch the History Channel), you can see partisans operating under the Free French in during the liberation of Paris in 1944.  The wearing of an armband depicting the Cross of Loraine and the Tricolor, and the carrying of arms openly, meant that this person was a legal combatant, and eligible for treatment as a POW.  Strangely, even some German units recognized this (while others, such as the Waffen SS, would shoot anyone if given the chance, even uniformed Allied POWs, such as the hundreds of captured Americans executed at Malmedy in 1944) and treated them as POWs.  The result of Lieber's Code, the idea that a person captured on the battlefield has the right to be protected, brought to an end the ancient practice of enslaving or murdering your captives.  This, as much as the concept of Just War, brought  some semblance of sanity to the conduct of that most insane human activity, warfare.

Of course, the Bush Administration happily ignored nearly 200 years of jurisprudence on the subject and invented an new category, the "illegal combatant," to allow them to hold "detainees" at GTMO indefinitely.  As an aside, I was on the Joint Chiefs of Staff during that time, and gave a copy of my book to one of the Office of Secretary of Defense lawyers working the issue.  I don't think it did any good, but we all do what we can at times.

What does any of this do the concept of Just War? 

The idea of Just War was based on Christian theology, aimed at ending conflict between Christian states in Europe.  Fighting the unbeliever, the infidel, or the sectarian was quite all right under that concept.  The rise of liberalism, secularism and popular democracy brought into question the very idea of legal conflict.  Men, not gods or their priests, suddenly had the ability and the responsibility to make rational judgments on the idea of what is right or wrong in regards to warfare.  While nationalism and imperialism did (and still does) much to encourage conflict between states, rational human beings took a great step forward to maturity by saying "we will not execute those who surrender."

As Guantanamo Bay closes down, let us not forget that these 'detainees' are one of two things--they are either prisoners of war, combatants taken in arms against the United States and its allies, or they are criminals under international law, guilty of crimes against not only the Coalition Forces, but against the nation where they were captured or even against the international community as a whole.  If they are the former (POWs) then they must be protected under the Geneva Convention.  This means they cannot be tried for 'war crimes' conducted while under arms.  They cannot be paraded for public view and humiliation. They cannot be denied their religious practices. They cannot be interrogated after processing and internment. Lastly, they must have a process for repatriation back to their nation of origin.

If they are determined to be criminals--what has been the basic argument of both the Bush and Obama administrations--they must have their day in court.  If the crime was against US forces, they must be given the entire body of US laws to protect their individual rights. A right of trial by jury. The right to face their accusers. The responsibility of the government to present clear evidence.  The right to appeal and to have adequate counsel.  If the crime was committed against or in another country, then that country has the right to try them, just like we would do with any normal crime (e.g., extradition).  If the crime was against the international community, then use the Hague Court for the trial.

Regardless, the concept of Lieber's Code still holds true--the capturing nation must guarantee the safety and protection of the captured combatant at all costs.  It is the very basis of international law and treaty, and the release of a suspected 'terrorist' is nothing in comparison to the long term loss of one of the few successful safeguards against the horrors of war.