工商法 » International Justice

Weep, Sad Freaks of the Nation

Rhodo Zeb — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 05:24:39 +0000

I just exist as a material thing.

I will stand with you. I must. Because…

Just because of the repression I experienced, don’t think that other people won’t do what I did. That’s not human nature,” Gao said. “If there’s one more of me or one less of me in the field, it doesn’t matter. These years we’ve heard that a lot of others are eager to try. I still want to talk with them and hope they can learn a lesson from me.

Yes, precisely correct. Not a coward, and not a failure, but instead, a hero. And yet the cowards dominate, the f*cking bastards.

I would say jail them or execute them. But I have some unfinished business of my own to contend with.

China needs more law, not less, I must always remember this. Thank god for the fighters, though they may fall in battle, may suffer, may fail.

China has just as strong a tradition of martyrdom as any culture on the face of this beautiful earth.

They fight for all of us. And we will support them.

At the Zenith, our Dead Dreams Awake

Rhodo Zeb — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:46:31 +0000

Good riddence to bad rubbish. A rotten end to a rotten year. The weather has been cold and rainy in Shanghai, rainy as it has been all year. And damn chilly.

Crates of secrets, pilling up by the day, trials and allegations notwithstanding. Cao. Leaders talking tough but reforming nothing. Torture on the menu across the board, more legitimized then ever.

Then again, torture has always been on the menu. Its just that we used to limit it to Latin and South America.

Funny how these things spread. One could write a book, so to speak.

That’s really about it. Hope 2010 will be better.

But Tyler Cowen says last year was a banner year for rule of law, so let’s analyze the next Tyler Cowen piece for additional clues to this trending issue. So that’s something.

Losing Ground – No Words

Rhodo Zeb — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 05:52:46 +0000

Well, I sort of missed out on the whole sum-up post to close out 09. It was an interesting year, that’s for sure.

What 2009 should be most remembered for, however, is quite simple: it was the year where the rule of law regressed and became more decadent and dishonest than ever before. And if you know anything about the history of for-profit incarceration (well, not to mention war) you may realize the serious fault-lines between public justice and private profit. At the most basic level, everyone knows there are people that can ‘lose your file’; the problem is how to build a system with lasting integrity.

2009 was a year where the crimes of the Bush Administration were swept under the rug, where Gonzo got screwed but torture-lover Yoo just went back to Berkeley to teach Admin law. Where we shouldn’t be ‘backward-looking’ much like the crooked cop doesn’t look back while his business partners are doing their work.

Millions of dollars got funneled around, millions in no bid contracts, millions lost and stolen and ‘mis-appropriated’. And somehow the ‘legal community’ is still back wrestling with the issue of criminal immunity for these contractors. Since when was the flexible, organic system I learned about in law school so incapable of calling a halt to honoring these mandatory arbitration clauses? Since when did a private contract trump criminal law?

We have to go back in the story, at least until Enron, to see how things have gone. There, massive fraud was carried out upon the government and individuals, and nothing was done about it. Couple people went to jail, and all those workers lost out on their pensions while shareholders got screwed, too.

Then of course we had our illegal president, whose people walked roughshod over legal principals and rule of law in favor of their plenary power concepts and fancy arguments. Unfortunately, they also had a good part of the judiciary as well, in the form of the Federalist Society, so there was little pushback…

Which concepts, of course, they abandoned the second they lost the executive branch, which is why usually we shouldn’t end up in this position unless we have a corroded system, because both parties are supposed to understand that they risk future abuse at the hands of the other party through the granting of such extraordinary power. Duh. Its not rocket science, some would even (irrationally, I might add) argue that such an outcome is impossible because it is too irrational, but anyway here we are.

The excessive abuses of the Bush Administration, while some may refrain from calling crimes, must be investigated fully, or Rule of Law will have been dealt a mortal blow by its most vocal supporter for decades.

How can US and international law be ignored, sneered at in fact, with no response?

Only a dead thing behaves this way…

In Death You Sing

Rhodo Zeb — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 16:39:59 +0000

The forces of tyranny simply do not understand. They will always overstep their bounds, again and again, until they destroy themselves. Such is the nature of their need for control, it must escalate until it consumes itself.

Ahmadinejad has lost his legitimacy, and the current leadership must bear the responsibility for these crimes as well, and so have effectively gutted their moral authority. These leaders will fall within a period of time, perhaps 18 months as a safe outer limit.

However the Iranian system of government need not, and may well not, be destroyed at the same time. The popular complaints that are leading people into the streets (and have been, now, for about half a year) do not seem to be religious in nature, and the tacit support of the mullahs will wane as the abuses of the power structure become myriad and well-known.

There are people, professional, serious people who are in the business of predicting the fall of foreign political systems, and they are wrong 99% of the time, and most of the stuff that comes out of their mouths is complete drivel. Even the popular protests we have seen in Iran do not mean the social structure will change enormously. Indeed, probably the normal way forward for a culture would be incremental change rather than upheaval, and that could still be possible.

The recent progress in Iran should be seen for what it is: a crumbling structure that has glommed onto the legitimate social system and is desperately trying to survive.

I actually conceived of this post and title when I read of one young man who was killed prior to the fighting in which 8 people were killed by security forces. The news report of this earlier incident mentioned that he was the son of a mullah of some seniority. And I thought that would be a good example of a margin analysis. Here, at least, is one family who can’t ignore the abuses of the government any longer.

You can see the character of an organization when they are under siege. What happened from the very beginning of the troubles? As soon as they started arresting people, there were reports of torture and brutality. The Basij seem to be almost uncontrolled in their abuses.

First Neda. Now this nameless boy is forgotten to time, subsumed within the better-connected young man killed a day or so later. How much farther can you soldier on, having committed so many crimes. When will the crimes rise to the level of past regimes?

Back then I wrote:

What I noticed as I dug into the Iranian situation was how many from within the power structure had already been arrested, even prior to the election. Every article mentioned a cleric or former high government official as being arrested or otherwise marginalized. Might I suggest this is not a pleasant environment?

Oh, did you think I was concerned about the lack of legal protections for the people in the streets? No, no, the real problem is that there are no legal restrictions preventing the government from arresting anyone they want, including former Prime Ministers and the like, their children, and pretty much anyone else they want. That is a real problem, and leads to a very unstable system.

No independent legal structure at all leads, inevitably, to the brutality we have at present. The pressure continues to mount. Can they just put everyone into jail and be done with it?

[Update] The Curv is on the case while The Man is slacking. Typical:

A US doctor and a development consultant visited Iran in May to study a primary healthcare system that has cut infant mortality by more than two-thirds since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

Then, in October, five top Iranian doctors, including a senior official at the health ministry in Tehran, were quietly brought to Mississippi to advise on how the system could be implemented there.

Its a system which is, in many ways, working. Even though a strong case could be made for total organizational failure within the mullahocracy, I doubt that Iranians feel that strongly.

The upheavals at present are going to make many predict massive change, and they will be wrong.

[Updated Update]

And the baritone Professorship comes in from the wings:

Nearly 90 professors at Tehran University have told Iran’s supreme leader that ongoing violence against protesters shows the weakness of the country’s leadership, a pro-reform Web site reported Monday, reflecting a growing willingness to risk careers and studies to challenge the ruling clerics.
…
The letter signed by the 88 instructors was issued as university students around Iran staged acts of defiance — including hunger strikes and exam boycotts — to protest reported arrests and intimidation by hard-line forces, according to witnesses and reformist Web sites.
…
The letter by the Tehran University professors — posted on the Greenroad Web site — called the attacks on opposition protesters a sign of weakness in the ruling system. It also urged Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to order arrests over the hard-line crackdown, which intensified after protesters began chanting slogans against the supreme leader.

Hearts Pumping Ink

Rhodo Zeb — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 16:14:15 +0000

Recently, in another context, a Chinese colleague reminded me that the West long used human rights as a club against China, for naked political gain, while conveniently defining the term so as to make themselves wholly blameless. The poor kids stuck in the barrios of major cities and ground up in our ‘justice’ system were never victims of the horrid human rights violations like in China, you know.

This indeed diminishes all who would take the same banner, but of course once the US started torturing the entire concept became meaningless, and indeed freedom, democracy, terrorism and torture are all today poorly defined, sloganesque cudgels with which one country or culture can beat another. The words almost mean nothing today. And these instruments of behavioral modification are becoming less and less effective.

Of course, as I believe I have mentioned, the US was sanctioning and teaching torture even back during the great days of Reagan, and all through the Clinton Admin.

So the hypocrisy of today is not actually worse than that of before, in one aspect at least.

Today’s hypocrisy is just a bit more…naked.

The problem is that the banner is important. But the argument has to be made all over again.

What is the best relationship between the state and the individual? We have our system in the West, but the crime and violence we put up with seems dangerous for China, with its large population.

Slowly build up; and break it down

Rhodo Zeb — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 15:09:25 +0000

I am glad the pirate issue has returned to the news, as I failed to get in a few points last time.

These ‘externalities’ as they were once called, i.e. pirates, are always less exogenous than they may appear. Crony corporatism, of course, provides the right conditions for this:

The UN special envoy for Somalia on Friday sounded the alarm about rampant illegal fishing and the dumping of toxic waste off the coast of the lawless African nation.

“Because there is no (effective) government, there is so much irregular fishing from European and Asian countries,” Ahmedou Ould Abdallah told reporters.

He said he had asked several international non-governmental organizations, including Global Witness, which works to break the links between natural resource exploitation, conflict, corruption, and human rights abuses worldwide, “to trace this illegal fishing, illegal dumping of waste.”

“It is a disaster off the Somali coast, a disaster (for) the Somali environment, the Somali population,” he added.

Ould Abdallah said the phenomenon helps fuel the endless civil war in Somalia as the illegal fishermen are paying corrupt Somali ministers or warlords for protection or to secure fake licenses.

When will we get off our soapboxes and regulate ourselves as well as we would regulate our competitors? Is all the human rights stuff really just trash talk? Where does it all end?

Where Will It All End?

Rhodo Zeb — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 16:49:52 +0000

Recently I have been thinking about outcomes. You know, behavioral outcomes and the reinforcement that naturally follows, and future behavior by other actor(s) that is influenced by the fate of earlier actors.

When we see someone get spanked (literally or figuratively), we oftentimes realize that we had better shape up, or we might get beat next, and of course the effect is (usually, mind you) even stronger when it is you that is getting beat down. Conversely, an environment of permissiveness is created when bad actions (whether implicitly or explicitly bad) are not punished or are encouraged, and this will naturally lead to an environment of permissiveness and wantonness, and to increasingly extreme behavior.

We saw this in Abu Ghraib, but from a legal standpoint we have little knowledge or even vocabulary to describe precisely where the point of culpability stands when ‘creating an environment of’ whatever is accomplished. This process is understood only as a slouch into insanity; there is no model of the pillars of civility and rationality that must be broken down to achieve such a horrible result.

Fortunately, according to the records we already have, I am quite sure a full and fair investigation will lead to criminal charges against top political figures utilizing existing law for creating such an environment with the knowledge if not actual intent that crimes would be committed there.

But this post is not about Cheney and the torturers at all. It about the cheerleaders of war, the Sullivans and Hitchens and McArdles and Friedmans, and all the others, down to the littlest ones over at Renew America or World Net Daily.

These are people who actively pleasured themselves with the prospects of violence and cruelty of war, with all of the attendant rape, pillage and murder fully realized (more than fully realized, probably) within their tiny skulls. These are people who were able to wrap anything in the entire world up within their need for power, even if it was just (in the case of some of the less well-compensated cheerleaders) power at a distance.

Now, I could go on and on as above, but that doesn’t seem to be particularly useful. Rather, I would like to focus on something that I think everyone left of center (which is a big portion of the US populace now) realizes: We have got a pox of these idiot war cheerleaders at present. There are just too many, I don’t know what adjective to use for the entire class, dumb or horribly mistaken or totally corrupt or worthless or slight psychotic, or whatever, but there are way way too many of them. Wrong. That’s it, people who are just wrong. And we should stop listening to people who have proven themselves to be just wrong. I don’t think that statement will shake the world.

I would suggest that if we are still reading the musings of Friedman and Sullivan and McArdle ten years from now, then I would expect almost nothing about our political culture to change within that time. We are framed by these people, we let their idiocies become the talking points of the day, and in many ways we let them choose the terms of debate. Even to have us all wasting time talking about the scratching of a butt.

That last part probably is more our fault than theirs, but their continued good-standing in our political discourse is effective death for any kind of real change. That must be realized. The reign of these people, as a class, must end before we will have any change in the political thinking of our nation.

Outcomes matter. People watch, and like the monkeys we all are, we (mostly) watch and learn. The next generation will find new smear merchants when the time comes, and they will operate without fear unless we change the nature of the game. Now.

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If you look at this group as a whole, you notice that many have been shuffled off to right-wing land once they prove a little too extreme for the rest of us. Malkin is an example of that, I don’t believe she is invited on any other networks other than Fox, where she knows how to do her job. On other channels she has proven unable to meet even the low standards for talking heads.

Hitchens, of course, has become a caricature of himself, and is no longer relevant.

But why do we still suffer others, such as McArdle and Sullivan? Why do we continue to let their idiotic theories and revisionist stories rebound around the innertubes? Why do we suffer these people anymore?

Kevin Drum links to Sullivan regularly, and even holds his tongue (barely) while reporting on a sick, pitiful revision of history, now that the Betsy McCaughey party seems over. Josh Marshall deems Sullivan’s site as TPM-approved. The Washington Independent, of all sites, links on its front page to Andrew Sullivan.

I am not going to go through the many failings of Andy Sullivan, as I assume those to be known. Attention-whoring, traitor-calling, and yet somehow still not toxic. Yet.

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I have been thinking about these hypocrits a lot recently, especially those who publicly support one set of morals while reveling in another, quite different set.

Take, oh, Andy Sullivan for example. Now, we all know he is a long time appeaser of the GOP and basically carries water for the Party. I am not going to go through the various evidence of that, this is no secret.

But it is instructive to look at how Andy’s personal life meshes, or fails to mesh, with his supposed political values and morals. Here is a gay man who publicly supports a party that hates him for his sexuality. A party that supports anti-gay bigotry, thinks of AIDS as god’s vengeance on homosexuals, and would not lift a finger to stop gay bashing. But it is ok, Sully doesn’t want to get married. So no pressure, you see. He is busy bringing about change from within the party. Heh.

But now that is not enough. Now Sully is proven to be a pot smoker. After years of blindly supporting a party which wished to, at all times, increase the penalties for pot possession. How many degrees of hypocrisy does the man actually have? I think this bastard has got multi-dimensional hypocrisies by now.

Isn’t that lovely? Sully gets to use the money he made shilling for the corporate GOP to hire a nice fancy lawyer to get him out of the drug charges he certainly never expected (someone of my stature, you understand) to face. Whew! Ok, all is well now, wow that was a rush, now wasn’t it!!

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The White House is right to go after Fox News and attempt to marginalize them. Sure, they can ‘report’ anything they want. But they cannot continue to command any measure of respect once they decide they can just make up their own facts.

The above link is a reader comment that David Kurtz posted. It seems somehow appropriate to this discussion:

The GOP depends upon their ability to make stuff up and inject it into the political consciousness. Their whole modus operandi is rooted in their ability to distort reality. And they’re able to do that because of talk radio and a couple of other media outlets…

Does the above not summarize Andrew Sullivan’s entire blogging career? There needs to be a reckoning in the blogosphere as well. Andrew Sullivan is a petty, lying, scummy little man. He should be relegated to the hard right sites like Michelle Malkin and programs where he can be ridiculed and rejected by his own ideological bed-mates.

We simply can’t afford his kind of mendacity any longer. Our political discourse is sick enough as it is. Purging our system is very much in order.

There was Business as Usual

Rhodo Zeb — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:43:22 +0000

There is no rule of law in Iran today. The forces in power are contemptuous of anything and anyone that stands in opposition, even to the smallest degree.

There is nothing religious about this, no religion could possibly sanction the behavior of the regime. They are without religion and without reason.

This is not over, not by a long shot.

The Icy Breeze is Shattered

Rhodo Zeb — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 03:14:15 +0000

Or will be, or was. From Iranian artist Icy:

[singlepic id=80 w=380 h=300 float=none]

My Thoughts are a Gas

Rhodo Zeb — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:31:36 +0000

A ‘civilized’ government doesn’t imprison people without evidence or fair trials, and develops and follows clear guidelines to ensure fairness and justice.

A ‘civilized’ government doesn’t beat up reporters and then lie about the incident.

A ‘civilized’ government punishes government actors who violate the law, by, for instance, beating up on reporters or failing to stop a large-scale fight as soon as practicable.

A ‘civilized’ government understands that there will always be failings and wrong actions, and therefore creates tough oversight bodies to quickly right wrongs.

If only such a ‘civilized’ government existed in this world…