Archive for May 1st, 2004

About Those Huddled Masses

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

At the beginning of 2004, President Bush proposed a set of reforms to U.S. immigration policy that would have, among other things, allowed a number of workers currently inside the country illegally to attain a guest worker status for up to ten years. The proposal never really took off, as it was antithetical to the hard-line position on immigration taken by much of the President’s Republican base and other issues quickly caught the public’s attention. It’s a shame that we never had a really serious discussion of immigration policy, because it seems fairly certain that the current system isn’t working too well. The question is, how do we fix it?

The answer can not help but be complex, because immigration regulations implicate, or are implicated by, a host of other policies, from free trade to the minimum wage to tax policy and beyond. To say we’re going to talk about immigration is really to choose a particular vantage point from which to discuss this whole network of policies. Like any vantage point, it will emphasize some elements over others, but them’s the breaks.

Before getting into the details of policy, it might help to focus on the different philosophical approaches one takes to immigration. Is it something to be promoted, tolerated, or even discouraged? What expectations do we have for those that come to the country? What expectations should they have of us? Generally speaking, I tend to adopt something of a “more the merrierâ€? approach in principle. Given the nation’s history, and the image that we like to promote to the world, I think it’s important that we continue to welcome new people – and the new perspectives and talents they bring with them – to the country. And I’m generally uncomfortable with the notion that Americans – most of whom are here as a result of immigration – would decide to lock the door behind them and say, “We got here, you’re out of luck.â€? At the same time, I think it’s reasonable that we have some expectation that immigrants will assimilate and become a part of the civic life of the country, even if that requires giving up some cherished traditions or practices. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Public Policy

We Can’t Handle the Truth

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Three distinct cases from April and May concerning the current military operation in Iraq have raised questions about the control and dissemination of information in wartime conditions.

Item 1: The Pentagon has had a policy of not allowing any publicity for the return of soldiers’ bodies from Iraq and Afghanistan. In two separate recent incidents, those images finally became public. In one case, a contractor on a plane carrying the coffins home took a picture of the soldiers carefully attending the flag-draped coffins; she sent the image to a friend, who then sent it to the Seattle Times, which published it. In the second case, Russ Kick – who runs a site called The Memory Hole – filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to get copies of photos the Pentagon had taken of the coffins and their reception at Dover Air Force base; in what the Pentagon is now calling a mistake, he received the photos and posted them to the site. Both the Seattle Times and Memory Hole images soon spread to other newspapers, online news sources, and TV networks.

Item 2: Nightline decided to devote its May 1 program to reading the names and showing the pictures of the over 700 American soldiers killed in action in Iraq. Sinclair Broadcasting Group, which owns a handful of ABC affiliates and which has donated substantial money to the Republican party, charged that Nightline was trying to make the President look bad and refused to air the program.

Item 3: American soldiers serving as prison guards in Iraq – specifically in Abu Ghraib, formerly one of Saddam Hussein’s most notorious torture camps – took photos of themselves humiliating prisoners, including stripping them naked, attaching wires to their bodies and threatening them with electrocution, and forcing them into sexually suggestive positions. These photos were passed along to military police and eventually made their way to CBS. CBS sat on the photos for two weeks at the Army’s request before airing them as part of a special report on 60 Minutes II. It has since come out that an army report completed in February has identified over 50 incidents of abuse toward prisoners, that at least two prisoners were killed by their guards, and that there are dozens of ongoing investigations into the action of American military personnel and contractors. Read the remainder of this entry »

Filed in Culture and Media

Getting the Continental Drift

Posted May 1, 2004 By Dave Thomer

Many, although not all, of the essays I’ve written for this section of the site can be considered part of an overall narrative, starting with the historical tradition of Western philosophy and its roots in Plato and Descartes, moving to John Dewey and other American pragmatists’ effort to rethink the fundamental premises of that tradition, and then using that response as a catalyst for a new theory of individual development and civic organization. It is worth noting, however, that American pragmatism is not the only critical response to the Platonic/Cartesian tradition. A number of thinkers, mostly in France and Germany, have developed a number of positions loosely referred to as “continental philosophy,� which often take the critique in very different directions.

It’s worth noting that just as there are a number of pragmatists, many of whom disagree with each other often on significant details, continental philosophy is no monolith. Any generalization one tries to offer would have exceptions. For the most part, however, it is safe to say that continental philosophy embraces relativism and is skeptical of arguments that try to logically prove a universal truth. (Many continentals do believe in some kind of eternal absolute, but that such eternity is unknowable to human minds.) Continental thinkers often appear to heavily blend philosophy with other disciplines, which sometimes have the effect of making their prose more forbidding to those trying to pull out a straightforward set of premises and conclusions. Jacques Derrida, for example, has a very heavy element of literary criticism in his work; language structures and shapes thinking, and can thus become a filter that hides the truth from us, so one should try as much as possible to take apart the language and get past the structures it imposes on us.
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Filed in Philosophy