"HOW ARE LOVE AND PITY RELATED?" Via... JWB?

FREEDOM OF [REDACTED] ACT:

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don't exist—even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what's known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal—part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice—would direct government agencies to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."

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HIGH HEELS ON A WINDOWSILL: THE DEFINITION OF REVOLUTIONARY SUCCESS: I haven't got much to say about Before Night Falls, Julian Schnabel's lush biopic about Cuban gay/dissident writer (the adjectives are interchangeable) Reinaldo Arenas. If you know the basic outlines of the guy's life, you know what to expect, really.

I will say that the one major objection I had at the start of the movie--why are they talking in heavily-accented English, rather than either Spanish or accentless English?--ultimately struck me as a really interesting choice. It started to make sense for me during the class in Russian, and then there was the scene with Arenas and the exiles speaking in French: Using heavy accents is a way to express the position of an island caught between America and the Soviet Union, with no sense that her own language is adequate to the political world of her times. The accents also, of course, make Cuba's global marginalization mirror the internal exile of the homosexual. If you don't speak Spanish you will miss some of the movie--although an English-speaker can probably guess the meaning of the mural of Castro, with the slogan, LA HISTORIA ME ABSOLVERA--but mostly I think the decision to make the movie in an inherently marginal and alienating accent was the right one.

The final moment of violence, well... if it really happened then so be it and I'm sorry. If it didn't, putting it in your movie seems to me like a gross concession to the American revulsion from suffering. I would say more but don't want to make it too obvious what happens; suffice it to say that I think the treatment of suffering-in-Cuba and suffering-in-America would have been much deeper and more complex had this thing not happened.

A LOT GOING ON AT BALKINIZATION. "Bin Laden's Greatest Legacy: The Surveillance State"; Deborah Pearlstein points out that even the merely strategic calculus on interrogation methods involves a lot more than just "Did we get a truthful answer to the question we happened to be asking this time?" (last paragraph); more on the role of torture in finding Bin Laden, with a bright glittering array of Newspeak euphemisms (second paragraph).

TODAY'S ACCOMPLISHMENTS: 1. Taking the GRE;
2. Finally, after years of frustration, understanding what "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" means.

I feel I can recuse myself from adult responsibilities for the rest of the evening.

IS THIS THE BEST SONG EVER RECORDED?

WORDS HAVE MEANING: Victor Morton's review of "Police, Adjective" gets the philosophical and theological heft of the movie. But I honestly wasn't perturbed by the "Long Attention-Span Theater" nature of the first 90% of scenes--partly because Morton's review had made me expect a climax, partly bc the tension between everyday tedium and extraordinary suspense is part of the point of the movie, and partly bc the main actor is just so great. Morton says there's too much film where he just slurps soup; I remember thinking that I could watch this specific hangdog working-class antihero slurp soup for hours without getting tired.

For me, the basic experience of the movie was: DEADENINGLY RAW HUMAN EXPERIENCE which is somehow still compelling to watch... do that for a really long time, and often it's funny but every time it's funny it's also cruel. The punctuation of laughter is used really well. ...and then suddenly HOLY CRAP DISTILLED SCENE OF POWER AND HUMILIATION AND (a)THEOLOGY.

So put up with any boredom in the first part--you really need it--because this Jack-in-the-Box coil really is winding up to something shocking and cruel and theologically grisly.

It's playing at the E Street Cinema.

IN RE: CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATION: A fun post about the linguistic-theory difficulties with a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode; but I was struck by this comment: "Perhaps more lawyers need to see this episode, for the Tamarian language is exactly what we sound like to laymen. We communicate with each other by shorthand references to complex legal doctrines that are, without a fairly full explanation of context, misleading when reduced to a short summary."

ETA: I also liked some of the comments defending the episode, especially this one, since Nietzsche's parable of language-formation falls close to my own view (though without the atheist's insistence that metaphorical meaning is arbitrary).

CONTEXTUALISM: Readers have questions about my epic American Constitutional Society panel post! You got questions, I got answers. (Or... I got replies. "Answers," not so much, this ain't Ann Landers, bud.)

reader #1 (I will add names if I get permission):

I'm a lawyer, and I saw your comment that you have "found the Sotomayor hearings a farcical exposure of the weaknesses of the 'originalist'/'just read the text' position." I wouldn't let the ham-handed, grandstanding questioning by the Republican Senators be an indication of the weaknesses of the originalism/textualism position, any more than the equally hapless grandstanding questioning of Justices Roberts and Alito by Democratic Senators should be an indication of the weaknesses of [...] other interpretive theories.

Yeah, in fact I basically agree with this. I tried to indicate in the post that I think the progressive/"democratic Constitutionalism" position has weaknesses which largely parallel those of the textualist/"originalist" position, and the latter position has strengths with which the progressives at the ACS are, in my view, productively grappling. (Most prominently, the text guys hammer on our desire not to be ruled by five philosopher-kings or costumed vigilantes; and our belief that words should be basically intelligible to most people. This latter may be naive, but it's not stupid, and it's not wrong.) But confirmation hearings, as my father might tell you, are basically the worst window into Constitutional interpretation.

reader #2 aka Willard Moore:

Why do you think it is an advantage to come from an academic and intellectual society, rather than from people with actual experience in practicing law? What do you mean when you say you are out of sympathy with the silent majority?

To the first question, I'm sorry--I hadn't meant to contrast academia with legal practice. I was intending to contrast academia with political office. The Reagan-era "Constitution in 2000" document came from within a sitting administration; the ACS guys have much more freedom, I think, to distance themselves in intellectually-fruitful ways from the Obama administration.

Second question: Oh you know, this was just my usual anti-bourgeois shtik, and largely not worth the time you spent wondering about it! My sympathies never go to the people who make the world work. I always want to be the monkey-wrencher. I always focus on the things the current culture gets wrong, where we all need a slappin' from the Church, instead of talking about ways we do things better than other possible civilizations. There are benefits to that approach but there are obvious drawbacks (especially of prideful contempt for one's fellow Americans), so I try to flag that tendency when I notice it.