The Revenge of the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal

I had read a couple chapters of Beyond Victor's Justice? The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal Revisited and took a look at Justice Pal's dissent.

His reasoning was, I think, fairly correct in what the consequences of prosecuting for ex-post-facto crimes and for the reasoning behind the Japanese defendants.

Japan Focus has a nice article on the subject and on how people have tried to distort the dissenting opinion to try to absolve Japan of guilt for the direct atrocities the Japanese military committed.

While I reject the idea that humanity can or should unify into one political order, Justice pal was correct in that doing so on a peaceful basis would require an honest and fair international law environment. Punishing senior government officials for laws passed by another country after the alleged crimes were committed is a violation of both the fundamental notions of law and of the trust needed for international cooperation.

The notion of "Crimes against Peace"  and "Crimes against Humanity" were not codified by Japanese law at the time and that war as an instrument of state policy was still accepted at the time of initial Japanese actions in China. He also argued that Japanese officials were not acting on some great conspiracy (as the prosecution alleged) but rather in the normal conduct of state policy that assumed war was a legitimate path for a country to take in pursuit of its objectives.

By prosecuting Japanese officials for these charges, the tribunal was not acting on behalf of a legal order above nations but rather on behalf of a victor who sought to cloak their actions under the prestige of law. Instead of seeking to handle cases of these "Class A war criminals", Pal believed that the tribunal could only prosecute more conventional crimes like those of Unit 731 or the Nanjing Massacre.

Justice Pal also questioned if many of the defendants were liable for the illegal actions of their subordinates given the frequent lack of any real control the defendants had over their subordinates. A legitimate argument could be made that military seniors are responsible for their subordinates but Pal disagreed with extending that to government ministers (civilians) for the actions of other people in their ministries. I would agree with that claim giving the very real difficulty in getting anything accomplished in government and in the virtual impossibility of firing senior leaders.

In regard to prosecuting senior IJA officers for the Bataan Death March, he concluded that a lack of evidence made prosecution unwarranted (and historians have found no reason to believe the atrocities committed against US and Philippeno POWs were ordered by the senior IJA leadership, only racist junior officers). He found conspiracies existed on lower levels (like the IJA in Manchuria) but not at the ministerial level.

Pal argued that Japan was only imitating Western Imperialism in their own quest for power and that while the means Japan had employed diplomatically were reprehensible, evil is not by itself criminal.

I hope to expand on this topic when I have a little more time.

Hobby-Lobby Case Confusion

I had a puzzling and still slightly disturbing interaction with a non-practicing JD over the week-end. As things happened, a panelist mentioned the Hobby-Lobby case and he felt compelled to comment. He raised the prospect of a solely computer controlled company (which is reasonable) but extended it to a bit of an extreme.

As was predictable, I tried talking to him afterwards (because I had actually read the entire decision and the dissent) and found out he had not. He was declaring the decision flawed for reasons I could not really determine. When I tried to respond to his complaints against the decision by pointing out that those issues had been addressed in both the dissent and the majority opinions, he declared them to be irrelevant. When I protested that the arguments made by the majority were logically coherent and in keeping with past decisions, he declared me an idealist (a surprise to anybody who knows me) and that the coherency of it irrelevant because court decisions are decided for other reasons.

Because we broke up and didn't discuss it later, I don't know his views in more detail but I am guessing that his concern is that the decision is part of a trend that he finds worrying in that corporate administration is becoming increasingly driven by ideological and social questions instead of the clear predictability of businessmen making money for the government to use while demanding no stake in society. Because he knows little of corporate administration and has not bothered to read the recent controversial rulings of the Supreme Court, his inclination to regard them with antipathy might be a product of fear of unknown consequences.

The Cthulu Mythos (the gritty remake)

In the extra-dimensional space known as filler, an idea was born. It was one of the elder ideas and one which had a thirst for human worship.

The Cthulu mythos is like a darker version of the Wizard of Oz.

What? You say Frank Baum is not like some creepy reactionary guy from New England who hated cities, the poor, and anybody not like him?

The parallels are obvious to any decent conspiracy theorist.

1: A large literary universe most created by other authors. 
Really!

2: A fantastic world hidden from the gaze of the rest of society. (OK, OK, a pretty common fantasy trope).

3: Sorry, I thought I had something and didn't.

The really interesting thing is that shared fictional universes were occurring a hundred years ago and not just as people try to add things to the Star trek or Star Wars universes.

Leading Rednecks

One of the side-effects of joining the National Guard is that the junior enlisted in certain jobs tend to come from the small towns that are really, really, full of bored dysfunctional people. While the experience was not pleasant for me, I have learned a few things (so please avoid my mistake).

1: These are people whose main understanding of life comes from television. Even though they had been deployed, they described special forces personnel with awe because of how tough they were physically, not because of the special nature of their work. When they tried giving me advice on becoming a lawyer, they seemed to think that most time is spent in a courtroom shouting objection instead of understanding principles and doing background research.

2: They are quite frequently scared of cities. Even the new platoon sergeant explained his refusal to visit the state capitol because "there are too many people, too close together". Of course, he said that in a noisy, crowded, and chaotic bar. There are plenty of people in the unit who want to be cops. 'Great!" I thought, the city needs a lot more of them and is constantly hiring. Nope, these people would rather move a few hundred kilometers away and work for a pittance than work in a large city with plenty of other officers ready to provide support if needed.

3: They perceive confidence based on physical aggression. When we needed to clean a room, one new guy left his stuff in there (after 1SGT had made a point of telling us to get our stuff out) and I decided I could make the point most delicately to the new guy that his stuff needed to be packed in the future. They didn't think much of my explanation of what 1SGT wanted and then chimed in with shouts and threats.

4: Redneck has become a tribal identity. Explaining that would involve explaining some of the nastier ethnic hatreds of my "peers".

Observations on president Reagan

Well, I'm going to guess a lot of people hate him and a lot of people think he was the last great American hero.
As much as he has been derided for his supposed "Voodoo Economics", Reagan's economic policies were clearly applications of serious academic views of Economics.

His "A Time For Choosing" speech in support of Barry Goldwater referred to the ideas of the Laffer Curve in that high taxes were wasted after a point. His condemnations of Jimmy Carter were references to the Neo-Malthusian of Paul Ehrlic and on the "conserve resources because we will eventually run out of them" economic approach of Carter. In what was Julian Simon's ideas without a citation, Reagan argued that humans create resources and trying to ration raw materials was a needless impoverishment of humanity.


The bitter bilious battle between bureaucrats is based on the divide between the economic arguments of the Noe-Malthusian assumptions of Paul Ehrlich and those of Julian Simon.

The pattern I see is that Reagan operated under highly insightful and counter-intuitive economic ideas which were not fully received by academia at the time. Because the assumptions and prescriptions of those economists were outside the main body that was quickly accessible to Liberal thinkers and journalists, they could not follow his reasoning and had little inclination to do so.

The economic legacy of his times are still generally acknowledged as being a good one but the hostility directed towards him at the time is a reminder of the political difficulties in trying to apply economic policies that are outside the common set of analogies. Another factor is that when there is a major economic crisis on the level of 1970s era stagflation tends to be the product of existing and widely accepted economic theories being flawed.

Reality Check Bounced

I suppose this day was inevitable. The day that I acknowledge my failure.

I just received my LSAT score and got a 160.

Obviously this was a little disappointing. Not least of which was because of my much higher practice test scores.

Before I get accused of either being a retard (a still plausible answer) or of not facing up to my failure, I would like to point out some other factors that might have contributed to my terrible score.

I had been away at my National Guard drill where we had a (usually pretty intense) live-fire exercise in which we had the added misery of a completely re-organized unit. Sleep was also kind of lacking. Around hour four of the test, I could tell I wasn't doing to well attention-wise and it was section 5 instead of section 3 that was scored.

I now face attending a low ranked school or taking the test again and delaying school (and life) by another @#$%ing year.

The New FPS: Killing Joy

As you can probably tell by reading anything on this site, I have no sense of humor. That is hardly unusual on the internet. One of the great things about a global network connecting people virtually instantaneously is that the work of humor researchers can be accessed and understood by people who would normally have no interest in their work.

One such case (and the actual reason for the lead-in) is The Humor Code. The question of what triggers the emotion of “Funny” is something that is not settled in the way that “Sadness”, “Anger”, or “Confusion” are. What the book does is posit a new and apparently reliable theory that it stems from a benign violation of a serious rule. Of course, therein lies a key point.

What is benign? As a person begins to understand a topic more and makes more connections to potentially catastrophic outcomes, things may be viewed as less benign than previously. While a husband getting hit with a frying pan might be funny to a child who has no conception of massive internal bleeding or the double-standards of domestic aggression, it is a lot less funny once a person has read through various court cases about serious injury or death from such domestic nightmares. Has the person who has faced such serious violations of a serious rule lost their sense of humor? Yes.

As we face the tragedy of life, much of the supposedly benign violations cease to be perceived as harmless in a broader context. The power of the optimism bias is less influential once the person knows more about a subject and has acquired experience in it. I suspect that, extreme optimism makes people perceive so much as benign that the many violations of those rules can be viewed as funny. To an equally optimistic but much more experienced person, the seriousness of the violations becomes more apparent and thus does not trigger humor as much as sorrow.