Interesting article

[catsittingstill]

There is an interview with John Yoo (think "torture memo") here. It is interesting in a teeth-gritting kind of way. What actually struck me is at the very end (maybe the middle is just too painful to deal with) when the interviewer asks him what's on his iPhone. (Really, the questions they come up with...not, "how do you look yourself in the face in the morning" or "how did you explain the whole torture thing to your family" but "what's on your iPhone"...but nevermind.)

Q. What's on your iPhone?
A. I can't get the thing to work right now, so I don't have any music. I have a lot of books. There's an enormous amount of ancient literature that you can download for free, so that's what's on there. In terms of music, what I tend to listen to is classical music and then Top 40. Basically, there's a 400-year gap in my knowledge of music.

1) Bush took legal advice from a man who can't suss out an iPhone.  Okay, we knew about Michael "Heckofajob Brownie" Browne; we knew competence was not a big factor in being considered for the Bush administration.  But still!

2) He reads e-books.  Okay; that's not going to turn me off e-books; if Timothy McVey liked kittens that wouldn't make kittens bad. 

2a) The free literature is, of course, mostly not ancient but simply out of copyright.  Although if members of the Bush administration can't tell the difference between "75 years old" and "from the dawn of history on the plains of Ur", that explains a lot about the whole "failure to protect Iraqi antiquities with due dilligence" thing, doesn't it?

3) Classical music covers the period from 1750 to 1820.  Doing the math, that gives us a gap of 189 years, not 400.  259 years at the absolute maximum, supposing he only likes the very earliest classical music.

Not only does he not know that, he doesn't even *realize* he doesn't know that, because he didn't bother to do the 30 seconds of research to figure it out.

Typical.

Comments

[stevemb.livejournal.com]

IMO, a large part of it is that the habit of pandering to their anti-intellectual base naturally leads to intellectual laziness.

[howeird]

Hey - quit torturing the guy.
:-)

"can't get the thing to work right now, so I don't have any music."
It an effing TELEPHONE, you idiot. 'not getting it to work' would mean not knowing how to make it call, or maybe not knowing you can load up a phone book on it.

Oh BTW, he doesn't say he actually reads the books, he just happened to stumble on a way to download them.

I am *so* happy we can haz regime change.

[dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com]

3) Classical music covers the period from 1750 to 1820. Doing the math, that gives us a gap of 189 years, not 400. 259 years at the absolute maximum, supposing he only likes the very earliest classical music.

It sounds like he's talking about the genre in general, not the period, but that still doesn't excuse his limiting it to the baroque period. Not that I don't mind if he never comes Bach.

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Avedon has a reaction to the recently-released Yoo memos up over here--I think it's a pretty good one.

My impression that his remarks about ancient literature and 400-year-old music (likely enough some of the music we have both danced to) is that he is simply out of touch. (The term "classical" is common idiom for older music; I don't fault him for using it, and it may have even been inserted by the reporter or newspaper editor.) He's hardly the only person to have problems with a UI. Yet Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil" comes to mind. This little man, this cipher, this semi-educated bigoted non-entity helped turn the USA into a tyranny for a time. He's a law professor. And yet there's nothing to him. I croaked at the corruption of the discipline of economics a while back. Maybe there's something to say about law, too. I suppose Yoo represents some school of thought in law, otherwise he could not have become a professor.

"Got to kick at the darkness/Till it bleeds daylight."