Inside #Politics

Back in May 2011, I wrote a post that complained about the sad state of the Tumblr Politics tag; I wrote another in July 2011 because I thought there ought to be somewhere to feature more global political content. There’s been a whole lot more written about the tag over the past few days, largely because of one editor’s behavior, but I’ve avoided wading back in because a) I’d already expressed my thoughts and b) my readership outside of Tumblr is significant and has absolutely no use for such posts.

But now it seems there’s been a major shake-up, all of the tag’s editors have been thanked for their service … and I’ve been made an editor myself.

Despite my complaints about the tag, I should note that the idea of the Tumblr tags is certainly not in and of itself a bad idea; indeed, it could be a very good idea. As I wrote almost a year ago now:

For my part, I generally like the idea of tags. A good tag, used well, could foster a sense of community for people from very different backgrounds who all share a common interest. Indeed, I think they can provide a way to find new and interesting material to read and also introduce people to new authors they wouldn’t otherwise have found. I’ve begun to follow the Tumblr blogs of several people entirely as a result of the Politics tag; I also recognize that I’ve benefitted from the tag, as a few editors have chosen to feature my writing there with some regularity.

Looking at the new group of editors, I see some friends that I’ve made entirely from interacting via Tumblr (like Squashed and PoliticalProf, whose secret identities I promise only to reveal for a tidy sum) and even one of my real-life students, Justin Green (which means that the number of Politics editors from Nebraska is shockingly disproportionate; expect a lot of promoted content about corn, cattle, and the “I-Option” offense).

Of course, I’m also a bit sad that some of my other friends are no longer editing the tag. I think Ilya Gerner, Jeff Miller, Torie DeGhett, and Naum Trifanoff did some great work, all while a whole lot of people were yelling at them. I’m also sad to note that amongst the new slate of editors, you won’t find people of color, women, or anyone who lives outside the United States; I think that’s a very serious omission by the Tumblr staff, especially given the amount and the quality of political blogging on the Tumblr platform by people of color, women and non-Americans. There’s also not much ideological diversity. Say what you will about the previous slate of editors, at least you always knew you’d get a healthy dose of the Mises Institute with your morning coffee.

But here’s what I’ll say about my upcoming run as an editor:

I have the ability to promote up to ten posts each day. I’ll be looking to promote original content, reasoned argumentation, and a genuine mix of material from across the ideological spectrum; I also tend to like posts about human rights and posts about parts of world beyond America’s borders. You will always know that I promoted a particular post because I’ll “Like” it right before or right after I promote it. Some days, I’ll use all ten of my promotions and some days I won’t. I have a full-time job as a professor of political science and I have a family that I like very much … so you can be sure that I’ll miss some interesting posts that I would have ordinarily promoted.

Admittedly, I don’t follow very many Tumblr blogs because I like to read all of the things that are written by the people I follow, but I’m always open to suggestions for new blogs I really ought to be reading. Indeed, I’m very happy to hear from you about the workings of the tag, about the posts I’ve promoted, or with suggestions for things I ought to promote. Feel free to let me know about posts that you’ve written, so long as they conform to the standards I set out in the previous paragraph; I promise I’ll take a look as soon as I can. Use the Ask or the Fan Mail feature, send me a tweet, or find me on Facebook; I’m generally pretty accessible and, so long as you’re polite, very happy to hear from you.

The Law Is The Law

In response to my post this morning about the Dutch reporters who stand accused of violating the privacy of a Nazi war criminal by secretly taping an interview with him, my friend the Political Prof argues:

Looks like an illegal taping case, and while it’s probably stupid for the prosecutors to care, the law, as they say, is the law. Even for war criminals.

I think I want to push all of my chips in on this one and say that a fugitive from justice, one who has committed terrible atrocities, doesn’t get to make an argument about his privacy when he finally gets caught.

Before we proceed, I should say that I’m not in favor of stripping the war criminal of all of his rights. I think he should get a speedy and fair trial, he should be provided a lawyer if he needs one, he shouldn’t be eligible for the death penalty, he shouldn’t be abused while in custody, and so on. I even think that an illegally obtained recording should be inadmissible in court proceedings against him.

But using that recording to find and document that the old man in the nursing home is, indeed, the same fugitive war criminal who was convicted in absentia decades earlier after multiple failed extradition attempts … well … I don’t think I see that as an invasion of his privacy. After all, he’s already been convicted; he simply fled from justice and has been in hiding all this time.

The war criminal was under no obligation to speak to the reporters — who identified themselves as reporters at the outset — and was certainly under no obligation to disclose information about himself and his crimes. That said, it’s important to note that a) Germany has very strict laws about privacy and illicit recordings, and b) the Dutch journalists claimed that they were unaware that German laws differed from Dutch laws. “[U]nlike in the Netherlands, journalistic research in Germany does not take precedence over the right to privacy when no new information is revealed.”

That said, the case against the journalists has been dismissed.

And here’s what I think is the most interesting take-away:

The Association of German Journalists welcomed the end of the trial but said it would have preferred if the court had ruled that “investigating Nazi atrocities has priority over the right to privacy of the perpetrator”.

Those German journalists are right. As I wrote this morning, allowing war criminals — especially ones who have already been convicted and have freely confessed their crimes — to hide behind privacy laws amounts to “a right to act with impunity, which is completely nonsensical.”

Intervention in Syria?

In vetoing a Security Council resolution calling for Bashar al-Assad to step down in Syria, Russia and China have provided cover for the regime’s on-going brutal crackdown and, as such, criticism from the U.S., France, and a host of other countries and organizations was immediate and forceful.

So now what?

If the Security Council can’t even call for Assad to step down, it’s pretty clear that some more meaningful action isn’t forthcoming. Unless it comes from, for example, NATO. And some of the language we’re hearing today from Obama, Clinton, and Rice makes the possibility seem pretty realistic.

But the point of this post isn’t really to ask whether or not the U.S. — with NATO and the Arab Leagues as allies — will intervene militarily in Syria. Nor is the point to ask whether or not it ought to do so. If you want to know what I think, you can read some of my posts on Libya from last year (here and here, for example). Clinton has said, “military intervention has been absolutely ruled out and we have made that clear from the very beginning.”

But as I watched the social networking reactions to the Security Council proceedings, I started wondering about the reactions of progressives and (some) libertarians. From what I’ve seen from these groups, there’s condemnation of the Syrian crackdown and of the Russian and Chinese vetoes. But that condemnation doesn’t extend to a call for anyone to actually do anything. And that’s to be expected because these are groups who worry about what happens when people start thinking about acting rather than simply condemning. Indeed, I’m fairly confident that these strange bedfellows will resume their complaints about intervention as soon as planes are in the air; they’ll point out that the U.S. keeps targeting Muslims, they’ll insist that the U.S. has ulterior motives for its involvement, and they’ll point to all of the other places in the world in which the U.S. doesn’t intervene as proof for the first two arguments even as they demand that the U.S. stop dropping bombs on people entirely.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with those arguments, though it’s easy enough to disagree with them. The trouble is that it’s tough to want things you can’t have. In this case, it’s tough to want people to be able to choose their leaders and not to be murdered by their government while at the same not wanting to get too deeply involved when they can’t choose and when they’re being killed.

But let me be clear about this last point. I am well aware that, in the process of using force to help people in Syria, some of the people we intend to help will be harmed. This is the point on which my critics will hang their hats, as they did the last time we had this conversation. And so I’ll say again what I think is a pretty important point when it comes time to consider the costs and benefits of military intervention on behalf of people who are suffering under a murderous regime:

The choice we face is between people being killed and people being killed. I don’t want to sugar-coat that at all. In both instances, people die and it’s violent and bloody and awful. But in one instance — when we eschew intervention — the people who generally die violently are those who are attempting (and failing, due to inferior military capabilities) to throw off a tyrant. In those instances, it’s my position that to fall back on pacifism or isolationism because all warfare is awful or imperalistic or costly amounts to something of a moral failing insofar as it amounts to siding with the tyrant.

Choosing not to involve ourselves in what happens overseas doesn’t mean that people in Syria will suddenly be safe and happy and alive; it means that we can fool ourselves into thinking that we don’t have any blood on our hands because we didn’t directly harm anyone.

We can all be outraged with the choice that the Russians and the Chinese made today. And we surely ought to be outraged about what the Assad regime has been doing for months and months now. But if that outrage just means that we wag our fingers at Assad, the Russians, and the Chinese, rather than actually doing something about the terrible crimes being committed in Syria, then how outraged are we, really?