Day: March 27, 2001

That IBM-Holocaust Book

ArsTechnica recently linked to one of the better (though short) reviews of Edwin Black’s IBM and the Holocaust. Reviewing the book for The New York Times‘s, Gabriel Schoenfeld wwrites of the book,

The key question, in any case, is not whether I.B.M. sold Germany its equipment but whether, as alleged, it made the Final Solution part of its ”mission” and whether its relationship with Germany in any way ”energized” or significantly ”enhanced” Hitler’s efforts to destroy world Jewry. On the first point, Black never even attempts to substantiate his accusation — a scandalous omission considering the gravity of the charge. As for the second, his shaky evidence leads him to oscillate between two completely irreconcilable positions.

On the one hand, Black argues that I.B.M., through its German subsidiary, ”designed, executed and supplied the indispensable technological assistance Hitler’s Third Reich needed to accomplish what had never been done before — the automation of human destruction.” On the other hand, he maladroitly hedges, noting that even if Germany had completely lacked I.B.M.’s efficiency-enhancing tools, ”the Holocaust would have proceeded — and often did proceed — with simple bullets, death marches and massacres based on pen and paper persecution.” But if that is so, in what sense were the punch cards and the tabulating machines ”indispensable”?

Intolerance Run Rampant

This is really unbelievable. Apparently the Pennsylvania State University’s chapter of Young Americans for Freedom had its constitution and mission statement censured by the PSU student government. According to the student government, the YAF constitution and mission statement were discriminatory.

How were they discriminatory? Both referred to upholding “God-given free will, whence derives the right to be free from the restrictions of arbitrary force.” According to the student government, that wording reflected a “devotion to god” which was discriminatory. As a result, YAF was told to either change the wording or it would not longer be allowed as a student group.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education worked with the YAF and a university committee overruled the student government (for more information see FIRE’s press release about the incident).

Unfortunately, there seems to be a growing ambivalence to and even ignorance of the fundamental role that protection of free speech plays in civil society. The Christian Science Monitor reported some depressing news today on that front. It reports that in a recent study, 75 percent of teachers knew the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of speech, but less than 25 percent of teachers could name the other rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.

And, of course, administrators outright rejected the notion that high school students could be trusted with free speech. Less than a third said that students at public high schools should be allowed to report on controversial issues for their student newspapers without explicit permission from the administration.

NAACP Should Shut Up

Near the end of the 2000 political season, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People ran a controversial advertisement implying that George W. Bush was responsible for the murder of James Byrd. The ads features Byrd’s daughter, Renee Mullins, doing a voice over saying that after seeing Bush oppose hate crime laws, “It was like my father was killed all over again.”

Conservatives were outraged by the ad, they need not worry much longer, because ultra-liberal Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone (Minnesota) has a solution — he wants to make that ad illegal.

The NAACP, like many such organizations, is incorporated as a nonprofit under IRS rules that forbid it from doing partisan political advocacy; if the NAACP itself had aired the ad, its tax exempt status could be jeopardized. To get around this limitation the NAACP exploited a “loophole” and created The NAACP Voter Fund. The Voter Fund is incorporated as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. A 501(c)(4) nonprofit is defined by the IRS as a nonprofit that is devoted to some sort of social welfare issue. Such organizations can’t endorse candidates without risking their tax exempt status, but they can run the sort of issue ads that the NAACP ran directed at Bush.

For Wellstone and other extremist supporters of campaign finance reform, allowing the NAACP to take out such ads is an intolerable loophole in the law. As such Wellstone recently introduced an amendment to the campaign finance reform bill currently under consideration by the Senate which would forbid 501(c)(4) organizations from taking out any sort of ads within 60 days of a primary election.

Several opponents of any campaign finance reform, namely Republican Mitch McConnell, have actually signed on as supporters of Wellstone’s bill. Why? Because it is clearly an unconstitutional restriction of free speech, and there’s a good chance opponents of campaign finance reform will succeed in crafting any resulting bill in such a way that the Supreme Court will have to strike down the entire law rather than pick and choose to strike down just Wellstone’s amendment.

Wellstone, for his part, offers only the most pathetic of defenses in favor of his amendment. Despite the clear language from the Supreme Court on this matter, Wellstone thinks his amendment would survive legal challenge. And what about those NAACP ads? Don’t worry, Wellstone says, the Federal Elections Commission will be able to tell the good ads from the bad ads,

A comprehensive study conducted by the Brennan Center of ads run during the 1998 election found that only 2 genuine issue ads — out of the hundreds run — would have been inappropriately defined as a sham issue ad. Finally, in the event of constitutional problems, the Wellstone amendment is fully severable.

Hmmm. A sham issue ad, of course, is where the nonprofit claims to be just promoting an issue but, in fact, is really endorsing a candidate. Was the NAACP ad a sham issue ad? I would hazard a guess that it probably was. Moreover regardless of whether you think it was or not, the additional reporting costs and lawyers fees necessary to defend every advertisement would put everything back to square one — groups with large financial resources would still be in the game while the genuine grassroots efforts would get pushed out of the process entirely (Jesse Helmes once cleverly used the FEC to go after an ACT UP chapter that made the mistake of attacking him in a radio interview — few genuinely small groups can afford the risk of a protracted dispute with the FEC).

On Wellstone’s Senate web site there is some delightful Orwellian language with his office saying that these provisions are only fair,

Wellstone points out that limiting the issue ad ban just to corporations and labor will invite a shift in spending to non-profit groups in future elections, suggesting that in future years — even if this bill should pass — Congress will be forced to revisit sham issue ad regulation to close yet another loophole in federal election law.

Liberals used to trumpet this saying that the best response to speech with which they disagreed was simply more speech. Wellstone and others seem to have reversed this and decided that the less speech the better. It’s more than a bit weird to see a Democrat supporting efforts to outright ban political advertisements by labor unions. I guess they think that’s a small price to pay for an outright ban on corporate ads, but it seems like one immense Faustian bargain.

Hopefully the Supreme Court will still manage to save the soul of the country by invoking the ultimate loophole to this whole process, the First Amendment.

Source:

Wellstone Pushes to Close Sham Issue Ad Loophole In McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform Bill. Paul Wellstone, Press Release, March 26, 2001

Planting Shrubs in Kalamazoo

Later today the President is going to give a speech about 100 yards from my office here in Kalamazoo, the main effect of which is I won’t get to work out because they’ve decided to have him speak from the Recreation Center here.

The security here is amazing — they shut down most of the Recreation Center four days ago, and the Secret Service has been everywhere.

I wonder if Bush will give the same paramount consideration to safety of civilians the next time he decides to bomb Iraq?

Anyway, on a related topic, although I try not to be an elitist sometimes I have the feeling that I am the last conscious person left in Michigan. The hot topic with my liberal friends lately has been Bush’s gutting of the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed standards on arsenic.

For those not following that debate, an independent report a few years ago concluded that the current standard, 50 parts per billion, is probably too high, but they didn’t offer any guidance on what would be an acceptable standard because there isn’t a lot of conclusive research on such low levels, except in animal models.

So the EPA went ahead and put forth a 5 parts per billion standard which Bush killed. My liberal friends have been going on about how this is just for the evil corporations who want to dump arsenic in our water. Amazingly, not a single person who has brought this up to me as an example of a good regulation killed by corporate greed was aware that the major problem with the standard was that arsenic occurs naturally in large quantities in many Western states and the cost of complying with the new standard would have been extremely expensive — far in excess of even the most optimistic estimates of benefits.

If you look at a state like New Mexico, for example, it is not inconceivable that it could cost literally billions of dollars to bring their water treatment systems in compliance with a 5 parts per billion standard. Promulgating such expensive regulations without a clearer idea of the benefits is the worst sort of government intervention.

And Now, For Something Really Amazing…

Okay, here’s something really amazing I can do with Conversant that was basically impossible with a static system. At Overpopulation.Com I have a list of all the countries of the world. The minor amazing part is that web page is one short macro that automatically pulls all of the country names from the underlying directories (since countries don’t change that often, this one is cached to maximize performance).

Anyway, I’m only about 1/3rd of the way through the nations of the world but you can get a flavor of the power of this system by visiting the page about Ethiopia. This page is also generated dynamically and at the moment simply provides links to every article on the site that mentions Ethiopia. It is relatively easy, by the way, to insert static content such as a description of Ethiopia, statistics and a map which I will go through and do in a few weeks.

Linking the content together this way throughout the site is something I’ve always wanted to do, but when you’ve got 230+ countries it becomes almost impossible. With Conversant it happens automatically after a process that probably takes 3 minutes per country to set up.