Mambo Kings

The week, we’re not sorry. We’re not sorry for the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on known terrorists (our guest, the WSJ’s Bret Stephens isn’t sorry either). We’re also not sorry for the executives at Sony, the North Korean hackers, the normalization of diplomatic relations with Cuba, or for Jeb Bush running for President in 2016. We’re not even sorry for the crazy things our pets eat. Nope, not sorry.

Music from this week’s episode:

I’m So Ronery from the Team America: World Police soundtrack.

The opening sequence for the Ricochet Podcast was composed and produced by James Lileks.

Babaluuu, EJHill!

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There are 19 comments.

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  1. Heisenberg Member
    Heisenberg
    @Heisenberg

    I cannot get any of my Ricochet podcasts to download or refresh properly – they all are giving me the “!”.  Tried re-subscribing.  Also the flagship podcast refuses to refresh on my iPhone podcast app (no matter how many times I try to refresh, it says “last updated Dec 7, 2014”).

    Anyone else?

    • #1
  2. thebeekeeperkissedme Inactive
    thebeekeeperkissedme
    @thebeekeeperkissedme

    Oh James how do you put up with it! Rob was determined to crowbar you out of delivering the Foody Direct spot.

    • #2
  3. Blue Yeti Admin
    Blue Yeti
    @BlueYeti

    Heisenberg:I cannot get any of my Ricochet podcasts to download or refresh properly – they all are giving me the “!”. Tried re-subscribing. Also the flagship podcast refuses to refresh on my iPhone podcast app (no matter how many times I try to refresh, it says “last updated Dec 7, 2014″).

    Anyone else?

    Had a temporary issue with the feeds.  It’s fixed now.

    • #3
  4. BuckeyeSam Inactive
    BuckeyeSam
    @BuckeyeSam

    The puffy shirts return!

    Did you guys get talked into them by the low talker?

    • #4
  5. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    BuckeyeSam: The puffy shirts return!

    The Mambo Kings – with Desi Lileks.

    • #5
  6. user_1938 Inactive
    user_1938
    @AaronMiller

    I’m with you guys in uncertainty about this Cuban deal.

    You’re certainly right, Peter, that to treat a despicable regime like the Castros with anything other than open scorn is wrong, even while we trade with them. Though I doubt President Obama could have secured any major concessions since the Castros are evidently content with the current situation.

    I started out in general favor of the deal because the purpose of the embargo expressed by Rubio and many others for years has been to topple the Castro regime… which is an absurd expectation after so many decades of failure. Claims of Cuba’s isolation seem exaggerated if it is also claimed that Cuba has effectively meddled in other South/Middle American nations. I figured lifting the embargo would be no great gain but no great loss either.

    But, after a couple days of arguing the point, Valiuth and other Ricochetti have me leaning the other way now. The Cuban people are unlikely to gain much from commerce with America if they haven’t gained anything from commerce with all the other Western nations which have ignored our embargo. And the timing of this deal is awful, considering the recent troubles of Castro’s financial allies in Russia and Venezuela.

    In any case, the one real solution to the Castro problem — assassination — remains off the table. So the embargo is almost a moot point. And even if the Castros were removed from power, I wonder if similarly minded (or even more brutal) Cuban strongmen are waiting in the wings.

    My sympathies for your family through all this, Peter.

    • #6
  7. BuckeyeSam Inactive
    BuckeyeSam
    @BuckeyeSam

    EJHill:

    BuckeyeSam: The puffy shirts return!

    The Mambo Kings – with Desi Lileks.

    “Lucy, how many times do I have to tell you? Don’t come town to the club!”

    • #7
  8. common Inactive
    common
    @common

    I have to ask the Ricochet crew, and Peter Robinson in particular: why did you not mention Richard Epstein when you were citing examples of conservatives (or if Epstein would prefer, a Libertarian) who opposes the enhanced interrogation, which Epstein thinks is torture?

    I don’t agree with Epstein, but that’s a pretty big elephant in the room to overlook.

    • #8
  9. Big Ern Inactive
    Big Ern
    @BigErn

    Wow. Bret’s interview was absolutely epic. Nice job all around!

    • #9
  10. Eugene Kriegsmann Member
    Eugene Kriegsmann
    @EugeneKriegsmann

    When my dog was less than a year old she spent a major part of every day disecting various and sundry possessions of mine, most notably first editions from my library of climbing literature. One day I came home from work and found a sandy material scattered all over my deck. Without trying to figure out what it was I started to sweep it off into the adjoining flower beds. As I was sweeping I glaced down and saw a piece of the material that was larger than the rest. I bent down and picked it up. It was a small piece of skull. It was then that I realized that was I was sweeping off my deck was my parents’ ashes. I had placed them in a ziploc bag in an onyx urn and located it in my garden alongside of my pond. In her explorations Sasha had discovered that the lid of the urn could be moved. She did that and discovered the bag of ashes which she dragged up on to the deck and spread them far and wide. After months of living with a water torture, never knowing what depredation I would find when I got home I could do nothing but laugh.

    Sasha is now eleven years old. She has been a endless joy throughout our years together, and, hopefully, for more years to come. Whatever was destroyed in her first year pales to insignificance in comparison to hour of pleasure she has bought to my life. Nothing of value in life comes without a cost.

    • #10
  11. Mike H Inactive
    Mike H
    @MikeH

    OK. If waterboarding is not “torture” it’s not “harsh interrogation” either. If you think language must be used properly and consistently, you should try harder to come up with a proper way to describe a controversial issue.

    It’s true, waterboarding is painless and non-disturbing enough that people will voluntarily undergo it in certain controlled situations. But when you force someone to do it, it becomes much more disturbing, and putting the qualifier “harsh” in front of “interrogation” does not do this distinction justice.

    Interrogation is understood as asking questions. Harsh interrogation implies asking questions for a long time in an angry manner. When you start employing extremely uncomfortable and scary non-voluntary physical acts, you have crossed a line into something else.

    If your argument rests on people using words too broadly, don’t use words too broadly!

    I’ll take a whack at it, how about “induced trauma?”

    • #11
  12. 1967mustangman Inactive
    1967mustangman
    @1967mustangman

    I think Rob is being very naive if he thinks that the North Koreans can’t pull off this kind of hacking job.  Think about it.  They groom their best and their brightest, they send them to top universities around the world, and then the come home and they hack the enemies of the Dear Leader. They are capable, they are very capable.

    • #12
  13. Casey Inactive
    Casey
    @Casey

    I just love how excited Rob gets every time North Korea comes up.  Very entertaining and unusual.

    • #13
  14. user_1938 Inactive
    user_1938
    @AaronMiller

    Stephens: “Numerous journalists — famously Christiopher Hitchens — underwent waterboarding. You don’t voluntarily undergo a treatment that you then call torture.”

    What a silly argument. The reason those journalist volunteered to experience those methods was precisely because they knew it would be terrorizing and they wanted to be able to report how much so. The reason these methods are part of soldier training is precisely because they are so distressing and the closest experience we can provide to malicious methods without damaging our soldiers. Our soldiers are subjected to it to prepare them for the possibility of having to resist more brutal methods.

    Stephens is apparently among the many people who believe “torture” necessarily involves malice and blood. Fine. But these techniques we employ are used by our interrogators because they similarly include the component of extreme distress or terror… and that is considerable in itself. That is not the only consideration, but it’s not a hysterical distraction either.

    If “torture” is the wrong label, “enhanced interrogation” is still a euphemism and a political manipulation. “Brutal interrogation” might be most accurate. It distinguishes the goal of sadism from the goal of information. But it also acknowledges the methodological focus on pain/distress.

    • #14
  15. user_1938 Inactive
    user_1938
    @AaronMiller

    In regard to China’s future economy, I’m no economist, but surely we can’t consider economic power purely in terms of manufacturing and service industries. China has been making deals in Africa, Asia, and the Americas to become a primary supplier of bare resources like metals and minerals. Correct? Whatever their fictional numbers claim, their economic strength and influence does seem to be growing.

    Does their economy rival America’s? Not by a long shot. But America’s economic future is uncertain. Yes, we still invent wonders, but we also still loan money to deadbeat home owners because Democrats dislike reality. China holds much of our debt, while the majority of our national debt is owed to ourselves (so it’s Monopoly money, secured only by the world’s lack of attractive alternatives). China’s diplomatic influence in the world is growing while ours is declining. And, perhaps most importantly, what “little” wealth they already have is enough to fund a formidable military threat.

    China doesn’t need to become equally wealthy to become a dominant force and a threat to America’s interests.

    • #15
  16. raycon and lindacon Inactive
    raycon and lindacon
    @rayconandlindacon

    Having just completed the assassination of the CIA for “torture” in the democrat senate, we are now connecting our nation with Cuba, that paragon of human rights.

    Welcome to Obama’s America.

    • #16
  17. Karen Inactive
    Karen
    @Karen

    Here’s something I think we miss in the whole enhanced interrogation v. torture argument. For one thing, interrogation and torture have different purposes. When interrogating these detainees, they didn’t ask them any questions that the interrogators didn’t already know the answer to. They weren’t sleep deprived, water boarded, etc, just for the sake of doing it or in order to punish them, but to see if the detainee was being honest and how trustworthy he could be. It wasn’t the 24 scenario where they were shouting at them like “tell me where the bomb is hidden or we’ll water board you again!!” It was to measure their resistance, not to physical pain but to cooperation with the US. Their reaction and resistance revealed how invested they were in their mission, their position within the organization or value to their group, along with a whole host of relevant and important information that was used to connect the dots to terror plots and terrorist positions. The point of the interrogation techniques were used to determine if a detainee was an asset or not and to what degree, not to make him suffer. EIT aren’t soft torture. Ripping out someone’s fingernails might get you one piece of intel, but the person won’t be much good to you after and that intel might not be accurate or helpful in the larger context of intel gathering.

    • #17
  18. Grendel Member
    Grendel
    @Grendel

    That’s Vol. 5 Number XLV.

    • #18
  19. CitizenOfTheRepublic Inactive
    CitizenOfTheRepublic
    @CitizenOfTheRepublic

    A data point on “cheap” Cuba.  In 1994, Coca Cola cost $1 just about everywhere in Havana.  Or, perhaps, more precisely 1 New Peso, which cost $1 each.

    My experience of the ridiculousness of a communist state opened my eyes to the fact that so-called “capitalism” can be as simple as natural interactions among people who can do things for each other.  It doesn’t require a “system,” but communism is a SYSTEM with the darndest bunch of prohibitions on doing most anything natural or reasonable with one’s property or time without the state’s mediation and permission.

    At the time, it was considered a big deal that people were now PERMITTED to sell peanuts and the like on the street.  If your system makes selling peanuts to people who want them a crime, well now….that’s some way to run a country….or perhaps California.

    Back in November 1994, I was one of those painfully earnest (boring) gray-shirt socialist types from farm country, and I got to have my very own George Orwell Experience near the end of the first week I was there.

    On the occasion of “A World Solidarity Conference with Cuba” held in the Karl Marx Theater, they had South African ANCers, Rigoberta Menchu, Daniel Ortega, Cuahtemoc Cardenas, FMLNers, European socialist/communists, American Socialist Worker Partiers, …everybody who was anybody left of Bill Clinton… and Fidel Castro himself sitting front and center on the stage.  For about 3 days all these Solidarity-ists from every corner of the world got up and denounce “el bloqueo” and how the Imperialist United States was starving the Cuban people.  [And, in that time, they were starving – a friend, a former English professor, who translated for the church organization that hosted the Pastors for Peace (socialism/peace….same thing in those circles) embargo-busting Friendshipments later related how at its worst in 1993 he dropped over 30 pounds from his 150-lb frame and would lock himself in the bathroom to cry at night because he couldn’t get enough food for his two young daughters.]

    Each night they took all the international “solidarity activists” and VIPs to cultural events [“cultural events” – Potemkin villages; you say to-may-to, I say po-tah-to].  One night was the National Ballet.  Another an event at a block party with traditional dancers and all.  But, the last night, I awoke – having fallen asleep on the tour bus because I was suffering from one of those nasty respiratory bugs one more often gets from air travel – and found myself at ONE HELL OF A PARTY…moreover a FEAST.  Open bars with a big dance floor, Los Van Van performing, and a giant buffet table that extended for dozens of yards.  I was shocked by the extravagance.  Sooooo, I asked a similarly earnest fellow traveler, “couldn’t all this food, these resources, been put to better use?  really feeding those starving Cubans that we’re here to help?”  I learned, “No, this is just the way it is. what has to be done to entertain all these socialist/communist/trade unionist VIPS.”

    I’ll be damned if I didn’t see the pigs walking on two legs years before I ever read “Animal Farm.”

    On the bright side, my visceral reaction to the whole thing did keep me from getting in the line for a personal meeting with El Caudillo.  Very slightly lessening the wrongness of everything I thought and did in that era.

    Oh yes….end the embargo.  Tourism money has already been flowing where it flows without the government being able to regulate the economy, the society, the people just they way it wants to.  But, a few Canadian, Brit, Italian, Spaniard tourists are as nothing to the tsunami of American tourism dollars.  Money is power.  It will flow to where it flows when people buy what they want.  That is truly upsetting to a system whose ideal is to control all that power through the state.

    For all these decades the United States government has been doing the regime the favor of stopping American citizens from freely traveling and spending.  It has done the Castro Brothers and their state the favor of keeping out the ordinary middle-American cultural influence – the favor of providing the giant, glaring, ready excuse for communism’s every failure to provide material benefit – “The Gringos are blockading us, sabotaging us, making us poor.”

    Take away the excuses.  Flood them with dollars. Bury them in fat, dumb and happy Midwesterners.  Their cultural elite are just like ours; they will be disgusted by us.  But, normal people will see their way to living like they want when the power is available to them….when the dollars are flowing all around.  And, they won’t have to toe to a party line to get access to resources.

    The argument for reforming China through trade was mostly self-interested baloney.  And there’s a BILLION of them, thousands of miles away.  Cuban ain’t so big, and it’s RIGHT THERE.

    If I were terribly cynical, I’d note that MANY Cuban Americans have been legally, extensively traveling to Cuba for years.  They, but not we.  Some Americans are more special than other Americans under the current legal regime (and I just HATE affirmative action and other race/culture-based, racist laws). So, it might not just be goofy leftists who are comfortable keeping that island – somewhat preserved in time – all to themselves.

    Rather more seriously, I have rights as a free man that a state better have a damned good reason to restrict.  Throwing an American citizen in prison or confiscating his wealth for traveling to another country and engaging in wanton acts of tourism or of (gasp!) commerce based (for most of this embargo’s life) on the Woodrow Wilson-era, anti-German-frenzy, wartime, trading-with-the-enemy legislation is not in our tradition.  That is in the fascistic, uber-state tradition of Wilson that we ought reject.

    As my handmade, Washington, DC protest sign circa 1994 said, “Free Citizens, Free Travel, Free Trade; End the Embargo of Cuba.”

    Even idiotic socialists can be accidentally right sometimes – 23 year-old me, Barack Hussein, whoever….

    • #19
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