Published by marco on 19. Feb 2024 22:36:38 (GMT-5)
I listened to the The Vladimir Putin Interview by Tucker Carlson (127 minutes), which is also available as Ep. 73 The Vladimir Putin Interview (Twitter). The article Tucker Carlson Interviews Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlson (Scheer Post) includes a transcript found on the Kremlin’s website. You have to subscribe to Tucker Carlson to get the transcript from him. Those dirty commies in the Kremlin just gave it away for free.
The interview was over two hours. What follows are just some longer quotes I took from the transcript, with a few notes of my own. I’ve cherry-picked the stuff that Putin said that I broadly—or even sometimes very specifically—agree that he expressed in a realistic and historically accurate way. Where I disagreed with something that he said, I’ve noted it. I may have missed something; it’s a long interview.
He spoke completely extemporaneously, without notes or a teleprompter. It was clear that he was expressing how he personally sees these topics of international import. He didn’t seem to be playing to his western audience in any way. Much of what he said, he’s already formulated in similar ways—if not occasionally identical ways—in essays and in other speeches he’s given.
This is not to say that he’s a hero, or even honorable, but only to say that, as the leader of a foreign power with no small amount of influence—even if, as he acknowledges, it’s not even close to that of the U.S. or China—there seems to be a lot of opening for reasonably working with Russia under Putin.
Russia asks that it not be treated as a vassal. If that cannot be guaranteed, then there is no need for negotiation and the chips will fall where they may. Putin clearly indicates that he doesn’t think that Russia is holding such bad cards. Their economy seems to be impervious to U.S. machinations. Putin speaks of an economy that is working for himself and other elites, but doesn’t speak at all of the troubles on the ground that affect the large majority of Russia’s population. This is not unlike how the U.S.—or probably any other nation—reports on its economy.
What is clear is that many of the roadblocks to, say, Germany having its natural gas or Ukraine having peace, have been thrown up by the west. Russia has some conditions, but they seem eminently reasonable, at least for initial discussions to begin.
Still, Putin starts off with a bald-faced lie.
“if you don’t mind I will take only 30 seconds or one minute of your time for giving you a little historical background.”
Why was that a lie? Because it wasn’t just “30 seconds or one minute”. He proceeded to recite a Russian history lesson with a focus on “Where does Ukraine come from?” that starts with “[t]he Russian state started to exist as a centralized state in 862.” It went on for about the first thirty minutes.
After a few minutes, Tucker interrupts with “I am losing track of where in history we are?”
“It was in the 13th century.”
Putin then positively leaps forward in time to 1654. After several more minutes, Putin says “[t]his briefing is coming to an end. It might be boring, but it explains many things.”
The modern-day discussion begins in earnest after that, with Tucker asking Putin why, if he believes that Ukraine is such a hodge-podge of cobbled-together lands that are really mostly Russian and Hungarian, didn’t he just take it back at the beginning of his presidency, 22 years ago?
The answer is obvious: because it wasn’t causing trouble then. Ukraine means “border”; even its name derives from being Russia’s border to Europe. The Soviet Union had let go of so many other territories—Russia’s aim wasn’t to regain territory, it was to guarantee a modicum of regional stability and security for Russia itself.
With NATO pushing right up to Russia’s borders—through the hand-puppet of Ukraine—that was no longer possible. That, and the nearly decade-long civil war that had been fomented in eastern Ukraine, right on Russia’s border, made it long-term impossible for Russia to just stand by and watch NATO—the U.S.—militarize its border.
The U.S. was positively braying about how it not only had the right to take up Ukraine as its ally, but also to move some of its own nuclear weapons there. It was utter madness to anyone who wasn’t 100% in the tank for NATO’s—and primarily the U.S.‘s—view of how the world works.
“I understand that my long speeches probably fall outside of the genre of an interview. That is why I asked you at the beginning: ”Are we going to have a serious talk or a show?“ You said — a serious talk. So bear with me please.”
Deep breath. We’re up to 1991 now. He finishes up the history lesson. Tucker asks,
“But we have a strong China that the West doesn’t seem to be very afraid of. What about Russia, what do you think convinced the policymakers to take it down?”
This is ludicrous on its face. How can anyone think that the U.S. is not afraid of China? They’re sanctioning them to death and encircling them with bases. Putin answers,
“The West is afraid of a strong China more than it fears a strong Russia because Russia has 150 million people, and China has a 1.5 billion population, and its economy is growing by leaps and bounds — over five percent a year, it used to be even more. But that’s enough for China. As Bismark once put it, potentials are most important. China’s potential is enormous — it is the biggest economy in the world today in terms of purchasing power parity and the size of the economy. It has already overtaken the United States, quite a long time ago, and it is growing at a rapid clip.
“Let’s not talk about who is afraid of whom, let’s not reason in such terms. And let’s get into the fact that after 1991, when Russia expected that it would be welcomed into the brotherly family of ”civilized nations,“ nothing like this happened. You tricked us.”
We move on from there to the underpinnings of the current conflict in Ukraine. Putin reiterates the history of the Minsk agreement up until the end of 2021 and mentions, not for the last time, how the west just lies about everything, that they “simply led us by the nose,” which, well, he’s not wrong. The U.S.—and Europe in its wake—sees itself always as on the right side of history and in the moral role in anything that it does, so it sees no problem with simply lying to get what it wants. The ends justify the means, if Russia is to be vanquished.
“[…] the current Ukrainian leadership declared that it would not implement the Minsk Agreements, which had been signed, as you know, after the events of 2014, in Minsk, where the plan of peaceful settlement in Donbass was set forth. But no, the current Ukrainian leadership, Foreign Minister, all other officials and then President himself said that they don’t like anything about the Minsk Agreements. In other words, they were not going to implement it. A year or a year and a half ago, former leaders of Germany and France said openly to the whole world that they indeed signed the Minsk Agreements but they never intended to implement them. They simply led us by the nose.”
With the next treaty on the table in March/April of 2022—nearly immediately after the initial Russian invasion—he describes why the Russian troops left Kiev. It was not, as detailed in the western press, because they had turned tail and run.
“My counterparts in France and Germany said, ”How can you imagine them signing a treaty with a gun to their heads? The troops should be pulled back from Kiev. ‘I said, ‘All right.’ We withdrew the troops from Kiev.
“As soon as we pulled back our troops from Kiev, our Ukrainian negotiators immediately threw all our agreements reached in Istanbul into the bin and got prepared for a longstanding armed confrontation with the help of the United States and its satellites in Europe. That is how the situation has developed. And that is how it looks now.”
When Tucker asks him what he thinks of possible U.S. participation in the war, with actual boots on the ground, Putin responds,
“This is a provocation, and a cheap provocation at that.
“I do not understand why American soldiers should fight in Ukraine. There are mercenaries from the United States there. The biggest number of mercenaries comes from Poland, with mercenaries from the United States in second place, and mercenaries from Georgia in third place. Well, if somebody has the desire to send regular troops, that would certainly bring humanity on the brink of a very serious, global conflict. This is obvious.
“Do the United States need this? What for? Thousands of miles away from your national territory! Don’t you have anything better to do?
“You have issues on the border, issues with migration, issues with the national debt – more than 33 trillion dollars. You have nothing better to do, so you should fight in Ukraine? Wouldn’t it be better to negotiate with Russia? Make an agreement, already understanding the situation that is developing today, realizing that Russia will fight for its interests to the end. And, realizing this, actually return to common sense, start respecting our country and its interests and look for certain solutions. It seems to me that this is much smarter and more rational.”
Tucker asks Putin why he doesn’t just tell the world what the U.S. did to the Nordstream pipeline if he has, as he says, proof that the U.S. secret services blew it up. Putin chuckles and responds,
“In the war of propaganda it is very difficult to defeat the United States because the United States controls all the world’s media and many European media. The ultimate beneficiary of the biggest European media are American financial institutions. Don’t you know that?”
Tucker acknowledges that Russia would probably not make much headway in the western press with their allegations, but wonders then why Germany doesn’t defends itself and its interests. The destruction of the pipeline put it directly in thrall to the U.S., paying four times the price that any other nation pays for its natural gas.
“Tucker Carlson: Yes. But here is a question you may be able to answer. You worked in Germany, famously. The Germans clearly know that their NATO partner did this, that they damaged their economy greatly – it may never recover. Why are they being silent about it? That is very confusing to me. Why wouldn’t the Germans say something about it?
“Vladimir Putin: This also confuses me. But today’s German leadership is guided by the interests of the collective West rather than its national interests, otherwise it is difficult to explain the logic of their action or inaction. After all, it is not only about Nord Stream-1, which was blown up, and Nord Stream-2 was damaged, but one pipe is safe and sound, and gas can be supplied to Europe through it, but Germany does not open it. We are ready, please.”
Putin mentions the “golden billion”, a phrase I understood immediately, but that I’d never heard before. I’m not sure if he understands the unstated irony that he and his cronies are very much in the golden billion, but that probably most of the populace over which he rules is not. Perhaps he is appealing to them? Or to the other nations of the BRICS, like Indonesia and India? It’s unclear, but he’s trying to lead us to think that he truly believes that the world would be better if wealth was divided in a more egalitarian manner.
Perhaps he does, as long as he personally doesn’t have to give anything up. At any rate, it is safe to say that he thinks that wealth and power should accrue to the nations to which it naturally falls, either by resources or by sheer hard work, rather than to the nations that manage to take what they want. Russia and China have that in common: they are not seeking empire in the way that the U.S. very aggressively does. This much is clear.
“The world should be a single whole, security should be shared, rather than meant for the ”golden billion“. That is the only scenario where the world could be stable, sustainable and predictable. Until then, while the head is split into two parts, it is an illness, a serious adverse condition. It is a period of a severe disease that the world is now going through.”
Putin probably has no idea how ironic it is for him to be lauding journalism, a field that he has decimated during his rule. Politskaya would like a word.
“I think that, thanks to honest journalism — this work is akin to work of the doctors, this could somehow be remedied.”
They quickly move on—though the subject of journalism would reappear at the end again—to the insanity of the U.S. wielding its most important asset as a weapon that damages the U.S. more than it does its intended targets. Putin talks about the US. Dollar and economic sanctions. I’ve quoted liberally from this section because it’s quite important to see how the stewards of the western economy either don’t know or don’t care that they’re destroying value for no reason. This, at a time when we need every reason we can get to fight climate change, rather than to fight stupid wars—either economic or military.
“As soon as the political leadership decided to use the US dollar as a tool of political struggle, a blow was dealt to this American power. I would not like to use any strong language, but it is a stupid thing to do, and a grave mistake.
“Look at what is going on in the world. Even the United States’ allies are now downsizing their dollar reserves. Seeing this, everyone starts looking for ways to protect themselves. But the fact that the United States applies restrictive measures to certain countries, such as placing restrictions on transactions, freezing assets, etc., causes grave concern and sends a signal to the whole world.
“What did we have here? Until 2022, about 80 per cent of Russia’s foreign trade transactions were made in US dollars and euros. US dollars accounted for approximately 50 per cent of our transactions with third countries, while currently it is down to 13 per cent. It was not us who banned the use of the US dollar, we had no such intention. It was the decision of the United States to restrict our transactions in US dollars. I think it is a complete foolishness from the point of view of the interests of the United States itself and its tax payers, as it damages the US economy, undermines the power of the United States across the world.
“By the way, our transactions in Yuan accounted for about 3 per cent. Today, 34 per cent of our transactions are made in Rubles, and about as much, a little over 34 per cent, in Yuan.
“Why did the United States do this? My only guess is self-conceit. They probably thought it would lead to a full collapse, but nothing collapsed. Moreover, other countries, including oil producers, are thinking of and already accepting payments for oil in yuan. Do you even realize what is going on or not? Does anyone in the United States realize this? What are you doing? You are cutting yourself off… all experts say this. Ask any intelligent and thinking person in the United States what the dollar means for the US? You are killing it with your own hands.
“Tucker Carlson: I think that is a fair assessment. The question is what comes next? And maybe you trade one colonial power for another, much less sentimental and forgiving colonial power? Is the BRICS, for example, in danger of being completely dominated by the Chinese economy? In a way that is not good for their sovereignty. Do you worry about that?
“Vladimir Putin: We have heard those boogeyman stories before. It is a boogeyman story. We are neighbours with China. You cannot choose neighbours, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of 1000 kilometers with them. This is number one.
“Second, we have a centuries-long history of coexistence, we are used to it.
“Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive, its idea is to always look for compromise, and we can see that.”
Putin expands on the topic of the shifting global economic picture, citing figures about the relative share of the G7 countries—it was the G8 until Russia was expelled only ten years ago in 2014!—versus the BRICS nations. The BRICS nations now account for more of the global economy, and certainly a large majority of manufacturing. The G7 have a much larger proportion of their share coming from banking and other financialized services.
And isn’t it wild that the ostracizing of Russia began in earnest (again) only a decade ago? Before that, there were sanctions, but they were milder. And before that, there was the crippling of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet. But still, Russia was still in the club a little bit, anyway. No alliances, no NATO, but they were in the G8. Then came the coup in Ukraine, provoking the annexation, and the nearly immediate banning of Russia from the G8. Their seat in the Security Council remains.
“Look, if memory serves me right, back in 1992, the share of the G7 countries in the world economy amounted to 47 per cent, whereas in 2022 it was down to, I think, a little over 30 per cent. The BRICS countries accounted for only 16 per cent in 1992, but now their share is greater than that of the G7. It has nothing to do with the events in Ukraine. This is due to the trends of global development and world economy that I mentioned just now, and this is inevitable. This will keep happening, it is like the rise of the sun — you cannot prevent the sun from rising, you have to adapt to it. How do the United States adapt? With the help of force: sanctions, pressure, bombings, and use of armed forces.”
Tucker asks about whether a change in U.S. leadership would help? Does Putin think that the Biden administration is particularly intractable?
“It is not about the personality of the leader, it is about the elites’ mindset. If the idea of domination at any cost, based also on forceful actions, dominates the American society, nothing will change, it will only get worse. But if, in the end, one comes to the awareness that the world has been changing due to objective circumstances, and that one should be able to adapt to them in time, using the advantages that the U.S. still has today, then, perhaps, something may change.”
Putin returns to the topic of the global economy, specifically with China’s and Russia’s role in it.
“Look, China’s economy has become the first economy in the world in purchasing power parity; in terms of volume it overtook the US a long time ago. The USA comes second, then India (one and a half billion people), and then Japan, with Russia in the fifth place. Russia was the first economy in Europe last year, despite all the sanctions and restrictions. Is this normal, from your point of view: sanctions, restrictions, impossibility of payments in dollars, being cut off from SWIFT services, sanctions against our ships carrying oil, sanctions against airplanes, sanctions in everything, everywhere? The largest number of sanctions in the world which are applied – are applied against Russia. And we have become Europe’s first economy during this time.”
Tucker asked Putin about the potential for change in the U.S. through electoral action, for fresh ideas of the sort Putin thinks that the U.S. needs in order to better fit into the global order that is emerging, whether it likes it or not.
“America is a complex country, conservative on the one hand, rapidly changing on the other. It’s not easy for us to sort it all out.
“Who makes decisions in the elections – is it possible to understand this, when each state has its own legislation, each state regulates itself, someone can be excluded from the elections at the state level. It is a two-stage electoral system, it is very difficult for us to understand it.
“Certainly there are two parties that are dominant, the Republicans and the Democrats, and within this party system, the centers that make decisions, that prepare decisions.”
Putin questions not only the wisdom, but also the morality, of trying to beat down any possible competitors on the global level. These competitors will exist by sheer force of numbers, no matter what. He cites Indonesia as a rising player, that just by the sheer size of its population and the accompanying manufacturing power, will take its rightful place among powerful nations soon enough.
“[…] it is necessary to continue ”chiseling“ Russia, to try to break it up, to create on this territory several quasi-state entities and to subdue them in a divided form, to use their combined potential for the future struggle with China. This is a mistake, including the excessive potential of those who worked for the confrontation with the Soviet Union. It is necessary to get rid of this, there should be new, fresh forces, people who look into the future and understand what is happening in the world.
“Look at how Indonesia is developing? 600 million people. Where can we get away from that? Nowhere, we just have to assume that Indonesia will enter (it is already in) the club of the world’s leading economies, no matter who likes or dislikes it.”
Back to Ukraine, with specifics about why Zelensky was elected and how he’s betrayed the people who voted for him, who’d elected him to make peace, to end the civil war. Instead, Zelensky expanded the civil war and provoked Russia into invasion. There were many, many ways to avoid the invasion. They would have required relinquishing some power to federalist territories in the east—as outlined in the Minsk agreements—but that seems eminently preferable to where Zelensky is steering the ship of state of Ukraine now.
“[Zelensky] came to power on the expectations of Ukrainian people that he would lead Ukraine to peace. He talked about this, it was thanks to this that he won the election overwhelmingly. But then, when he came to power, in my opinion, he realized two things: firstly, it is better not to clash with neo-Nazis and nationalists, because they are aggressive and very active, you can expect anything from them, and secondly, the US-led West supports them and will always support those who antagonize with Russia – it is beneficial and safe. So he took the relevant position, despite promising his people to end the war in Ukraine. He deceived his voters.”
Tucker asks why Putin doesn’t try harder to get negotiations going again? If he wants peace, then why doesn’t he go to the table with Ukraine. Putin responds that it is because Ukraine refuses to talk, that Russia has always been ready to negotiate—before the invasion and war, soon after the invasion, and ever since.
“President of Ukraine issued a decree prohibiting negotiations with us. Let him cancel that decree and that’s it. We have never refused negotiations indeed. We hear all the time: is Russia ready? Yes, we have not refused! It was them who publicly refused. Well, let him cancel his decree and enter into negotiations. We have never refused.”
At 01:50:00, he draws a comparison between the threat imposed on the world by a failure to control the production of nuclear weapons with that posed by AI. It’s impossible to stop it like we couldn’t stop gunpowder. There will come a time when we would need to regulate this internationally.
“Humanity has to consider what is going to happen due to the newest developments in genetics or in AI. One can make an approximate prediction of what will happen. Once mankind felt an existential threat coming from nuclear weapons, all nuclear nations began to come to terms with one another since they realized that negligent use of nuclear weaponry could drive humanity to extinction.
“It is impossible to stop research in genetics or AI today, just as it was impossible to stop the use of gunpowder back in the day. But as soon as we realize that the threat comes from unbridled and uncontrolled development of AI, or genetics, or any other fields, the time will come to reach an international agreement on how to regulate these things.”
Tucker asks about the NYT journalist who’s serving time in a Russian prison for espionage. Putin basically says: you have many cards to trade for him. Do so, and he’s yours. The only reason that Gershkovich is still in prison in Russia is because the U.S. refuses to negotiate and just wants him returned “for free”, when the U.S. has many prisoners that Russia would like back, people that they’ve similarly accused of spying for Russia while in the U.S. They traded for the basketball player (Griner?); they can trade for the journalist.
“I do not rule out that the person you referred to, Mister Gershkovich, may return to his motherland. By the end of the day, it does not make any sense to keep him in prison in Russia. We want the U.S. special services to think about how they can contribute to achieving the goals our special services are pursuing. We are ready to talk. Moreover, the talks are underway, and there have been many successful examples of these talks crowned with success. Probably this is going to be crowned with success as well, but we have to come to an agreement.”
Back to Ukraine and a potential settlement/peace agreement.
“Tucker Carlson: So, I just want to make sure I am not misunderstanding what you are saying — and I don’t think that I am — I think you are saying you want a negotiated settlement to what’s happening in Ukraine.
“Vladimir Putin: Right. And we made it, we prepared a huge document in Istanbul that was initialed by the head of the Ukrainian delegation. He affixed his signature to some of the provisions, not to all of it. He put his signature and then he himself said: “We were ready to sign it and the war would have been over long ago, eighteen months ago. However, Prime Minister Johnson came, talked us out of it and we missed that chance.” Well, you missed it, you made a mistake, let them get back to that, that is all. Why do we have to bother ourselves and correct somebody else’s mistakes?
“I know one can say it is our mistake, it was us who intensified the situation and decided to put an end to the war that started in 2014 in Donbas, as I have already said, by means of weapons. Let me get back to further in history, I already told you this, we were just discussing it. Let us go back to 1991 when we were promised that NATO would not be expanded, to 2008 when the doors to NATO opened, to the Declaration of State Sovereignty of Ukraine declaring Ukraine a neutral state. Let us go back to the fact that NATO and US military bases started to appear on the territory of Ukraine creating threats for us. Let us go back to coup d’état in Ukraine in 2014. It is pointless though, isn’t it? We may go back and forth endlessly. But they stopped negotiations. Is it a mistake? Yes. Correct it. We are ready. What else is needed?”
Just as an aside, a commentator on Twitter reflected my reaction to the juxtaposition of this interview coming out and the “diagnosis” that Joe Biden is mentally unfit to stand trial,
“Vladimir Putin just spent 30 minutes going over the last 1,000 years history of Russia and Ukraine in detail without notes.
“Joe Biden can’t remember when his son died.
“God help us all”
]]>“[…] supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in... [More]”
Published by marco on 13. Feb 2024 22:49:31 (GMT-5)
The article The US/UK attack on Yemen and the global eruption of imperialist war by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS) describes how the U.S. and UK opened a new front in their war on the middle east.
“[…] supposedly it is Yemen that is the “aggressor,” carrying out “unprecedented attacks” on US military forces deployed in the Red Sea, thousands of miles from the US border. American imperialism, which has a military larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, claims to be waging a “defensive” war on the other side of the world against a small, oppressed and impoverished country.”
Not for the first time, though, right? Vietnam was sold as a defensive war—defending against the specter of communism and the terrifying “domino theory”. Panama, Nicaragua, Grenada. They were all defensive. The U.S. is always defending its interests, so every act of aggression it perpetrates is, in fact, defensive. A rather banal rhetorical trick that otherwise-intelligent people seem to delight in falling for. It follows that preemptive attacks are also defensive. Since there is always a slight—perceived or actual—to which one can point, everything is defensive.
The Pentagon, which runs the by-far-largest military force that mankind has ever seen, stated, “We’re not interested in a war with Yemen. We’re not interested in a conflict of any kind.”
JFC. 🤦♂️
So there you go. They just spend one trillion dollars per year on occupation and war because the U.S. is defending itself. It’s true, though! The U.S. thinks the entire planet belongs to it. That notion—the notion of empire—must be defended from anyone who thinks otherwise—even against the other people living on it..
“For nearly a decade, the Houthis in Yemen have been subject to ruthless slaughter, waged by Saudi Arabia but armed and financed by the United States. According to the United Nations, 377,000 people have been killed in a genocidal campaign that has involved blockades resulting in mass starvation and disease. First under Obama and then under Trump, the US financed this assault with more than $54 billion in military equipment, aided and abetted by its imperialist allies, including the UK.
“The devastation of Yemen is part of more than 30 years of unending and expanding war, spearheaded and led by American imperialism, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1990-91. This included the first Gulf War in 1990; the dismantling of Yugoslavia, culminating in the war against Serbia in 1999; the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001; the second war against Iraq in 2003; the war against Libya in 2011; and the CIA-backed civil war in Syria that began the same year.
“Every single administration since that of Bill Clinton has authorized military operations, airstrikes, and destabilization operations in Somalia, across the Gulf of Aiden from Yemen, seeking to control the critical waterway leading to the Suez Canal.”
That’s a good summary of the U.S. Empire’s defensive posture. Look—people don’t pay their protection money willingly. You gotta lean on ‘em a bit. Sometimes a lot, for those who are hard of hearing.
Like Iran.
“The launching of military strikes against Yemen marks a new stage in the deepening imperialist military offensive throughout the Middle East and beyond. The US and its imperialist allies are waging a de facto war against Iran, working to eliminate Iran’s military allies throughout the Middle East. The strikes against Yemen are directed at encircling Iran and provoking it into retaliation against US forces, which could be used to justify a full-scale war against Tehran.”
Bush II listed Iran as one of the baddies. The sanctions have continued since then uninterrupted. The only time most people hear about Iran is either when they’re being accused of trying to develop nuclear weapons (they’re not) or when an uprising looks ready to break the stranglehold that the mullahs have there—not that the U.S. would support an open, democratic regime there. It doesn’t need f*@kiing France there; it wants something like another Iraq: keep the cheap oil flowing under U.S. aegis, don’t get too uppity, and don’t think too much about stuff.
It’s incredible to think that the war on Iran was basically declared the second the mullahs took over and the U.S. never forgot about it. Through an unbroken chain of administrations led by both parties, the animus has remained, utterly unchanged. Biden’s foriegn policy is underpinned by the same precepts as Bush I or Bush II. Obama and Clinton looked no different. They all ran wars and incursions. Reagan and Carter as well. Johnson, Nixon, Kennedy were in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Truman mopped up Japan. Eisenhower was in Korea, for whatever reason. He was also quite busy squashing any leftist notions all over Europe, in Greece, Portugal, and Italy, among others.
If you’re at all interested in knowing more, check out William Blum’s Killing Hope (I read it in 2001, before I’d even started tracking my books) and Rogue Superpower (which I read in 2003, before I’d started writing notes for books). Or, like, anything by Noam Chomsky, but most especially his latest, which he wrote together with the inestimable Vijay Prashad, The Withdrawal
“Every war launched by the US and its imperialist allies has ended in one bloody debacle after the other, with millions of people killed. But each disaster only reinforces the determination of US imperialism to use war as a means to secure its global hegemony.”
That’s all it is. Everything else is just window dressing.
The article Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide Operations In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter) adds,
“[…] the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power.”
This is all done to protect trade routes, to keep prices low. The attacks by the Houthis have resulted in no casualties. They’re annoying. They cause companies to lose money. Some stuff gets to some countries more slowly. The U.S. and UK bombed the Sanaa international airport in Yemen. WTF. No declaration of war. No attempt to negotiate. No consideration of alternatives. No congressional approval. Just a dictator shooting things. This is what people were afraid Trump would do. This is what I wrote at the time that Biden would likely do. He’s a merciless piece of shit. He always has been.
Apparently wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not enough for the Biden administration. Nothing ever makes them think it’s time to back down, or that it might be time to negotiate, or that things might be getting out of hand. Forget cold wars. Biden makes everything hot immediately. He’s fighting Russians directly in Syria—and proxy-fighting them in Ukraine. He’s funding and arming Saudi Arabia to flatten the Houthis in Yemen. He’s funding and arming the Israelis to flatten the Palestinians in Gaza—and supporting tons of violence in the West Bank as well.
This is mindless violence, all to quash any hopes of rebellion against the empire. All to prevent any change to the system that subjugates so many and funnels so much wealth toward Empire—and a handful of people in it.
The world organizations are also proving to Yemen that attacking merchant vessels really is the only recourse, just like Israel convinced any Palestinians who dreamed of living without a boot on their neck that the only way to get it off is violence.
The article Technicality Could Sink Genocide Case v Israel by Joe Lauria (Scheer Post) goes into more detail, but the upshot is that South Africa brought its case against Israel without 100% proper notification prior to the case, so Israel says that there is no standing “dispute”, which means that South Africa shouldn’t have been able to bring the case, and that the court should actually not even agree to hear it because it didn’t follow procedure.
Basically, if you put your fingers in your ears and scream so that you can’t hear accusations, you can pretend to have been blindsided by an official accusation, just shocked at a court summons, upon which the court has to instead reprimand the accuser, telling them to start all over.
I suppose it’s a neat trick, that. Of course, it just means that international law is completely and utterly toothless unless it’s being wielded against poor nations to relieve them of their resources and to load them up with debt incurred to pay fines for crimes committed by dictators emplaced and propped up for decades by the same countries that now accuse, prosecute, convict, and sentence them. In other words, international law is only wielded against African nations.
It’s a sham, a scam—and it always has been. The “International rules-based order” is no stupider than what it purports to replace.
Lauria’s article writes,
“American academic Norman Finkelstein, told an interviewer: “It will completely discredit the Court if they issue a decision — we have decided not to pursue this case of genocide because we don’t think there is a dispute. That just can’t work.” ”
“Murray added:
““I am sure the judges want to get out of this and they may go for the procedural points. But there is a real problem with Israel’s ‘no dispute’ argument. If accepted, it would mean that a country committing genocide can simply not reply to a challenge, and then legal action will not be possible because no reply means ‘no dispute’. I hope that absurdity is obvious to the judges. But they may of course wish not to notice it…””
All of the good little NYC liberals are lining up behind King Biden and his wars, of course. The article Houthis And The Blowhards by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) is representative. It states that anyone who disagrees with him loves terrorism. He writes,
“These are our children, our academics, our overly-educated and unduly-passionate true believers that the terrorists are the good guys and these Israel, that the United States, both independently and in complicity with Israel, are evil.”
I didn’t misquote that. He is nearly incoherent in his rage. As usual, you can almost see the spittle flying over the keyboard, flecking the screen.
My, but how Mr. Greenfield likes to ascribe bad opinions to what he considers to be opponents, if only because they fail to unquestioningly love the things that he loves. He loves the USA and Israel, in no particular order. His context is that the U.S. modestly tiptoes through the world, minding its own business, and sometimes horrible, petty, small-minded, blinkered animals and terrorists wish harm on it and even try to do harm to it. The same story applies to Israel.
In his mind, there is no agency on the part of either of these countries. In his mind, they are always just reacting in as measured a manner as possible in order to prevent the next unprovoked, unforeseeable, completely unjustified, and utterly unexplainable attack on the unutterable magnificence that is the ship of state of these great nations. Anyone with a different context is automatically assigned the most ridiculous of opinions, the most straw-man-like of justification for their ideas, opinions, and world-view.
I’ve never seen him make any attempt to grapple with the real arguments that might be made. He always takes the biggest fools at their word—who, in fighting empire and against injustice, are doing the right thing for the wrong reasons—rather than taking on a real interlocutor, even if only a fictitious one.
The Houthis attacked shipping vessels, harming no-one. The U.S. and UK obliterated cities and an international airport, killing dozens of civilians. Greenfield will never analyze whether his “side” might be unjustified in doing so. It’s perfectly OK with him for his “side” to break all sorts of laws “defending itself” because laws are for other countries.
The epithet “terrorist” is exclusively for other states, certainly not his own or any with which he has developed an affinity. This is not a principle. This is just the same mush-brained American-liberal mindset that has helped build an empire. It’s great that he seems to be for justice for Americans wronged by the American court systems—that’s what he used to post about, almost exclusively—but this penchant for justice and fairness doesn’t extend beyond the border. And it certainly doesn’t extend to his precious Israel.
Published by marco on 13. Feb 2024 22:17:53 (GMT-5)
The article When META Met Society by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) writes about the evils of META (Most Effective Tactics Available). The author cites an essay by Megan McArdle. Neither one of these fools can think of an example of META that corresponds to actual power. That perennial dipshit McArdle thinks that a 17-year-old swatting hundreds of people is a good example. Greenfield sticks to the obvious, as cited below.
“If you were big and strong, you could beat up someone small and weak. You could steal their wallet, watch and jewelry. The only thing that prevented this from happening constantly was the societal belief that this was wrong and bad, and that people who did this to other people were wrong and bad. ”
And here’s another one of his hobby-horses,
“The law prohibits the use of deadly force against another except in self-defense (with certain inapplicable exceptions). Protesters figured out that they could simply stand in front of a car, which would turn into a deadly weapon if intentionally driven into a person, and there wasn’t a damn thing the car could lawfully do about it. A handful of protesters could thus shut down thousands of cars, together with the thousands of people within them, to inflict misery for their cause with this one cool trick.”
He and McArdle agree that “dubious asylum claims” are a dastardly life-hack exploited by immigrants. The common thread in all of their examples is that they are perpetrated by people with little-to-no power who obtain power through a hack. This pisses off elitists like McArdle and Greenfield the most because they feel that “those people” should know their place. The system has been rigged against them, but they should still play by the rules. Fair is fair.
Except that no-one who actually has any power plays by those rules. That is what society teaches. Fake it ‘til you make it. Cheat big or go home. McArdle and Greenfield are probably more than well-off enough to be taking advantage of dozens of sleazy tax loopholes that let them enjoy much more of the benefit of their burgeoning investments than they would in a fair society.
Instead, they are focused laser-like on the evils of:
None of these examples of META—let’s just call them “hacks”—are admirable, but they’re chump change. These examples are fleas on the back of the dog. The same dog that’s tearing everyone’s lives apart is complaining about the fleas and getting its victims to side with it.
Neither are any of their examples of the people who have real power in society. The real hack is to figure out how to make money without doing much of anything, or to figure out how to con the government out of a lot of money, then use that money to maintain the structure that let you get rich and to manipulate it into making you even richer.
I think it’s much more relevant to talk about “levers” instead of META or even “hacks”. Western civilization seems to have settled on running a society that’s inherently scammy. People will find ways to scam. They are encouraged to do so. The whole of modern society is a Swiss cheese of ethics and morals, where we’ve been taught that nothing means anything, unless you can get money.
It’s inevitable that the parchment of laws is going to get a bit holey as everyone who gets a lot of money pops holes in it. Go read some of Vince McMahon’s alleged text messages—the article Vince McMahon’s Disturbing Texts to Janel Grant in Trafficking Lawsuit Revealed by Subjoheet Mukherjee (Ringside News) includes enough of them to give you an appalling idea. Those will convince you that the problem is not at the bottom but at the top. The people taking the most advantage of the holes in society’s rules are the ones who made them.
McMahon’s text messages also illustrate how corrupt and debased a society is for obviously deranged people like him to be able to not only succeed, but basically win. As Some Thoughts On Vince McMahon by Chris Seaton (Simple Justice) writes,
“Why is a billionaire in his seventies who spends his days dictating his every word to professional assistants writing text messages like a drunken, horny 17 year old boy?”
Or why is he “allegedly sexually assaulting a young woman with his boss while she recovered from cancer treatments.”
But sure, let’s focus laser-like on how teenagers, climate activists, teen-aged climate activists, and desperate immigrants are tearing the country apart. A likely story (as my Mom loved to say). “Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf,” as we say here in the DACH [1] region.
Published by marco on 13. Feb 2024 22:04:05 (GMT-5)
Jeremy Scahill was absolutely en fuego in this 90-minute interview. I’ve cleaned up the YouTube transcript—it gets most of the words, but includes verbal tics, has no punctuation, has a very cavalier attitude toward capitalization, and simply will not transcribe certain words correctly. Anyway, Jeremy and Briahna had a great conversation about terrible, terrible topics.
At around 24:00 they talk about the circumstances surrounding the recent defunding of UNRWA.
“Jeremy It’s hard to shock me. The Wall Street Journal on Monday—as all of this is happening—and the focus is on: there were 12 UNRWA employees that Israel…
Briahna Out of 30,000, by the way, we should say that it’s a huge agency. That represented 0.04% of all employees, but go ahead. I’m sorry.
Jeremy […] I mean it has this…has such whiffs of the buildup to the invasion of Iraq, which was based on lies. But the Wall Street Journal puts on its main web page—right at the top—what purports to be an article based on what they call an intelligence dossier, that says that it’s a far greater a problem than just these 12 individuals. That, in fact, a full 10% of UNRWA employees are connected to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad.“And, when you read down…to: “intelligence dossier.” It’s like I was having flashbacks to the Christopher Steele, Russia-gate stuff. But also to Judith Miller mushroom-cloud stuff, because if you dig into the article, what they’re saying is that the Israeli government provided this information to the United States government and then the Wall Street Journal was able to review it.
“And, you know, it’s all basically guilt by innuendo. And, you know, it was devastating because then—you know, people don’t read, they don’t check facts—it just becomes—even in the liberal comment-sphere—it became like, ‘see! […] it’s not just a few bad apples! This is pervasive throughout the organization.‘
“The lead author of that Wall Street Journal piece is herself a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, who has boasted that her closest friend basically created the social-media strategy of the IDF. So, it basically was laundering, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal, an insidious, violent, propaganda campaign being implemented by a government that just had a devastating set of rulings issued against it for plausible violations of the genocide convention, in service of trying to further starve the people of Gaza.
“And that narrative that was set last week and then doubled down on by The Wall Street Journal, is now becoming the dominant narrative and Anthony Blinken—on Tuesday, Bri!—was asked about the evidence and he said publicly that the United States had not done its own investigation, but that the allegations are very, very credible. I mean: think about that statement. For America’s top diplomat to admit to the world that we didn’t bother to actually do our own investigation before we cut off funding to the most vital humanitarian organization operating in a country that is now under the watch of the world court for a potential genocide. That is the top diplomat of the United States saying we didn’t bother to even look into this ourselves.
“We just believe notorious liars who have lied from the moment that this thing started, who have lied for decades about the Palestinians, whose entire worldview is: dehumanize Arabs, dehumanize Palestinians, treat them as human animals. The United States is taking the word of that government to cut off funding to basically the only force in Gaza able to provide any meaningful aid and medical care right now, to a people that could well be found to be victims of genocide. This is, on a moral level, … I find it difficult to imagine a more immoral stance than that which the United States is taking at this moment on this issue.”
At 33:00 Jeremy talks about how accusing people who live in Gaza—as so many employees of UNRWA do—of knowing people in Hamas is utter nonsense, Of course they know people in Hamas; Hamas is the local government.
“So when you say—as the Wall Street Journal is alleging, based on this laundering of Israeli so-called intelligence—that 10% of these people had connections to Hamas or Islamic Jihad, I’m sure the number is far greater than that. Because what do you mean by connection? Hamas is not just the Qassam Brigade. Hamas is the ruling authority, whether you like them or not. They pick up the trash. They provide civil services. The laziness is also part of the banality of evil. The laziness among the public, who don’t even bother to check—well, what does that even mean? When I read ‘people are connected to Hamas,’ it’s like, well, of course, they are. This isn’t some scary smoking gun that you’ve produced for us. Hamas is much more complicated than the Qassam brigades and October 7th. This is a long story.”
At 46:00 Jeremy cautions Briahna to be careful about dismissing all claims of rape on October 7th, Just because there are some spectacular lies going around doesn’t mean nothing happened. It warrants a sober and serious investigation. Soldiers rape. They generally do it once they’ve occupied an area, not when they’re flying by in jeeps in a four-hour sortie, but it’s still possible. So, we have to hear from the victims, not people who claim they saw victims. There have been too many of those that have been utterly refuted. But we have to continue to listen and not close off. Israelis can be and are victims, too. Don’t stoop to the level of the worst of their government’s speakers.
“I think, on the one hand, we have the propaganda campaign, which clearly is riddled with lies, exaggerations, and is aimed at enforcing a dehumanization narrative that Israel hopes will continue to justify by its mass slaughter of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. On the other hand, you have—I’m sure you have civil servants in Israel and and people who work with survivors and victims of sexual violence that really do actually want to solve alleged crimes. And all I’m cautioning is that we be careful with running away with our own narratives.”
At 52:00 Jeremy discusses how the Israeli government’s tactic of making it seem like Arabs are so barbarous that they would rape anything is backfiring on them, for exactly the reasons listed above. In fact, Briahna’s amount of sympathy is noticeably limited for exactly that reason.
“If you just look at this exclusively through the lens of justice for victims, this conduct is contaminating the investigation. On the other side of this is part of a campaign to dehumanize Arabs and particularly Arab men/ It is an attempt to portray the enemy as savage barbarians who murder, loot, rape, and pillage for the sake of those things rather than that they’re engaged in an attack that from their perspective is one battle in a 75-year war for liberation.
“People accuse me of being pro-Hamas. If you go back and look at everything I’ve ever said about Hamas, all I do is state factual information about Hamas and that somehow is being pro-Hamas. No. It’s journalistic malpractice not to explain the stated intent or the response to allegations by a party that we’re being told is tantamount to the Nazis and Isis. It’s journalistically responsible to say ‘hey, we’re being told these guys are the new Nazis. Let’s do some fact-checking. Why don’t we see if that’s actually true. This is basic journalism.”
At 01:01:00 Jeremy talks more about journalistic malpractice, about how deferential the US media is to Israel’s narrative,
“The dominant sort of tone is always—the number one rule is “deference to Israel’s narrative”. That is the number one rule of how to cover anything involving Israel. You must refer to the narrative of the Israeli State […] I think that large American news organizations have done an immense disservice to the public in the way that they’ve covered this war, in general. But also dozens upon dozens of our colleagues have been murdered and their family members have been killed. […] Our colleagues are being murdered in broad daylight.
“[…] there is good journalism that’s out there. I just think that that the drum-beat coverage that we see to facilitate wars, all the lies that were repeated early on, when independent journalists were questioning them—we’ve talked about a lot of them today—they were going along with it. CNN promoted many of the most outlandish, obscene lies that Israel was deploying immediately to try to justify the slaughter that Netanyahu always knew he wanted to unleash on Gaza.”
Finally, at 01:14:00 Jeremy talks about how offensive it is for Biden to even be running for president, and how hollow it is for flacks like AOC to be shilling for him.
“Make an argument why people whose families have been murdered with American bombs—with the full support of the American political establishment—why they should be voting for Joe Biden, the man who has single-handedly made this all possible for Israel to do. My answer to AOC is: don’t run around telling people like me why we should vote for Biden. Let’s hear you publicly make the case why a Palestinian voter in this country—whose loved ones have been murdered—why should they be voting for Joe Biden and why should they be declaring that support in January of 2024 when the election is 11 months away?”
Published by marco on 11. Feb 2024 22:23:47 (GMT-5)
The more I listen to the Blowback podcast, the more it’s clear that the U.S. has never been ruled by good people—or by smart people. They may be intelligent but their ideology makes them stupid. Or they’re just stupid. Either way, none of them are good. None of them have anything approaching universal principles. They are nearly all at least self-serving hypocrites. They are nearly all raging egos, bastards who don’t take the blame for anything. They are more than occasionally actual monsters.
In Cuba’s case, the institutional memory—the institutional hatred—is both breathtaking and persistent. The U.S. has never forgiven Cuba for its affront in throwing out its businesses. The Cuban Embargo continues, to this day. Cuba’s been tenacious for long decades. They repulsed an actual invasion.
Neither has the U.S. ever forgiven Iran for its revolution. Both countries will be revenged with eradication, come hell or high water. Iran’s time seems to be coming around again. The monsters running the U.S. Empire are getting antsy. They think they see an opportunity for more direct intervention, as they like to call it—such an anodyne term for what is effectively a wholly illegal assault on a sovereign nation.
The demonization of Iran is driven in large part by Israel, which led the charge to demand the U.S. bully Iran over nuclear weapons their neither had nor wanted. It’s deeply ironic, of course, that this witch hunt is egged on by Israel, which does have nukes, but shouldn’t. The U.S. applies completely different rules—the definition of hypocrisy. The inchoate hatred for Iran is palpable. Iran is back on the table because of the recent Israeli surge, which is shootings target in Syria and Lebanon.
They will pretend that they aren’t instigating a war, then react in shock at the first, tiny response from Iran. This is par for the course. The U.S. media meanwhile describes every disturbed grain of sand in the Middle East as being due to Iran’s malign influence. It’s only a matter of time before they all convince themselves that they’ve put enough energy into building the so-called case against Iran to justify a direct assault.
I don’t know why they bother with all of the rigamarole. Nothing ever happens to the U.S. on an international level, anyway. Nicaragua once took them to an international court—and won!—but the U.S. just ignored the verdict. Israel is following this template by ignoring the recent ICJ decision. U.S. and Israeli athletes will continue to attend international competitions. They will continue to take part in unimpeded international trade. They will take part unhindered in financial markets.
But let’s get back to Cuba. The article U.S. Policy is Exacerbating Cuba’s Growing Humanitarian Crisis by William M. Leogrande (Scheer Post) writes,
“Since 2022, 442,000 undocumented Cubans have arrived at US borders, more than 50,000 have come as legal immigrants, and tens of thousands more have emigrated elsewhere. Cuba is hemorrhaging its young, best-educated people. Migration is also a blow to the domestic economy. Last year, more than 12,000 doctors left. In Havana alone, there are 17,000 vacant teachers positions. Even Cubans earning good salaries working for foreign diplomatic missions and international organizations are leaving because they cannot envision a future for themselves in their homeland.”
“The humanitarian situation on the island cries out for a US response. Washington has offered Cuba humanitarian aid before. In 2008, in response to the devastation caused by Hurricane Gustav, George W. Bush’s administration offered Cuba $6.3 million of aid, $5 million directly to the Cuban government without preconditions. Just last year, the Biden administration provided $2 million in the wake of Hurricane Ian to help rebuild housing in the hardest hit communities.”
$2 million! My goodness. So much money. What will they do with all of that aid?
“President Biden could take four simple steps to help ease the crisis:”
Spoiler alert: Lifting the blockade is not on the list.
“There are moments, John F. Kennedy wrote in Profiles in Courage, when politicians must choose between doing what’s politically expedient and doing what’s right.”
F@$k JFK. He only looks less bad relative to the psychos he surrounded himself with. He was an elitist racist. I don’t care what sort of fine words he wrote or said. When he had the chance, he did none of it. He was an anticommunist, sociopath-level capitalist with a bad temper and a chip on his shoulder—just like all of the rest of them.
“Joe Biden is known for his genuine empathy for others. Right now, he is focused on the acute humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the interminable war in Ukraine. But if the responsible senior officials in the State Department and National Security Council put Cuba on the president’s agenda and briefed him on the depth of the crisis there, maybe he would do the right thing.”
This is so unmoored from reality that it’s barely comprehensible. Joe Biden is not “known for his genuine empathy” (writing “for others” is redundant); Joe Biden is a notorious asshole. He always has been. His sociopathy and mania are directly responsible for the Ukraine and Gaza nightmares. He is president of the United States. He chooses the people to run these policies.
He chose to continue forcing Russia into a corner—he completely ignored two proposals from Russia in 2021. He wanted the Ukraine war. His unquestioning support for Netanyahu is directly responsible for Israel’s boldness in its most-recent war. He just opened a new war against Yemen—yes, a war. What else do you call attacking another sovereign nation and killing its citizens with missiles?
He’s not inflicted with those situations—he created them. He likes it this way. He doesn’t give a shit about anything other than being reelected. He’s a nightmare. Don’t hold your breath until he helps Cuba, FFS. You’ve got to be kidding me.
I’ve finished listening to the bonus episodes for season 2 of the Blowback Podcast, which is called “Cuba Libre”. When you really learn how the U.S. has just shat on that country for almost 65 years, you can’t possibly have the absolutely stupid hope that Joe Biden—of all f@$king people—is going to do a good goddamned thing for that island. And JFK! Don’t even get me started on that guy.
Ok, fine. So I got started. I read one of his speeches. My notes on the Commencement Address at American University, Washington, D.C. on June 10, 1963 (JFK Library) are below. Read through and then see my conclusion to see why I think this is relevant for today.
“Second: Let us reexamine our attitude toward the Soviet Union. It is discouraging to think that their leaders may actually believe what their propagandists write. It is discouraging to read a recent authoritative Soviet text on Military Strategy and find, on page after page, wholly baseless and incredible claims–such as the allegation that ‘American imperialist circles are preparing to unleash different types of wars . . . that there is a very real threat of a preventive war being unleashed by American imperialists against the Soviet Union . . . [and that] the political aims of the American imperialists are to enslave economically and politically the European and other capitalist countries . . . [and] to achieve world domination . . . by means of aggressive wars.’”
This is all true. He knew it at the time. Also I’m sure that he said the first sentence without noting the irony at all.
“it is sad to read these Soviet statements–to realize the extent of the gulf between us. But it is also a warning–a warning to the American people not to fall into the same trap as the Soviets, not to see only a distorted and desperate view of the other side, not to see conflict as inevitable, accommodation as impossible, and communication as nothing more than an exchange of threats.”
He didn’t follow his own advice. He’s just reading out loud. No-one since has listened either. He literally peppered this speech with statements that belie this one. Like the one about “find[ing] communism […] repugnant” below.
“No government or social system is so evil that its people must be considered as lacking in virtue.”
Except Cuba—right, Jack?
U.S. elected officials are really quite advanced in their bullshit. They just spew things that have nothing to do with reality. Clinton and Obama would really follow in this guy’s footsteps with their lofty rhetoric, almost none of which was true.
“As Americans, we find communism profoundly repugnant as a negation of personal freedom and dignity.”
This is such a shockingly ignorant and simple-minded thing to say—but people keep pointing me to this speech as indicative of JFK’s enlightened mindset.
“Almost unique among the major world powers, we have never been at war with each other.”
Again: so simplistic. He doesn’t consider anything other than trading blows on a field to be “war”. Demeaning the lives of thousands, possibly millions, just to exact petty revenges on the USSR was nothing to this man. He didn’t care about anything but projecting U.S. power. He never made a concession. He considered none of this violence, none of it was war. What an asshole.
“For we are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.”
But you and your country did this ten times more than the USSR. You knew how far ahead you were. You lied about it. The USSR was always losing, always behind—there was never a “gap” for the U.S. to fill. Kruschev said that military buildup is good for capitalism whereas it is harmful to socialism.
“We must, therefore, persevere in the search for peace in the hope that constructive changes within the Communist bloc might bring within reach solutions which now seem beyond us. We must conduct our affairs in such a way that it becomes in the Communists’ interest to agree on a genuine peace.”
They are the ones that have to change, of course. The U.S. is so perfect that there is no room for improvement. All concessions and change and growth are for loser countries that haven’t yet achieved the enlightenment of the exceptional nation. It’s enough to make you want to throw up.
“To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint. Our diplomats are instructed to avoid unnecessary irritants and purely rhetorical hostility.”
JFC JFK. This has never been the case. You’re high on your own supply.
“We are unwilling to impose our system on any unwilling people–but we are willing and able to engage in peaceful competition with any people on earth.”
Oh f@$k off. This is ridiculous. Going back to before I was born, U.S. presidents were all sociopathic, deluded liars, just utterly unaware of how hypocritical they were—because their prime axiom is always that U.S. Americans are better. Correction: Elite U.S. Americans are better. They deserve to have everything as their noble birthright. Letting anyone else have anything would be a waste because they’re all too benighted to appreciate it. Filthy communists. Filthy natives. Filthy poors.
“The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today. For there can be no doubt that, if all nations could refrain from interfering in the self-determination of others, the peace would be much more assured.”
Methinks he’s projecting quite a bit here. Jesus, Kennedy, do you even listen to yourself? Do you even bother to think for a second whether the behavior of the nation under your control exhibited the characteristics you seem to hold so dear? Or did it do literally the exact opposite at every opportunity? News flash, JFK: since your assassination, it has continued to do so—namely, not what you said you wanted. You never did it. And no-one since has, either. This has never been a priority. It’s just pretty shit to say when we want to tell the world how we demand it think of us. Judge us by our words, not our actions. Or else.
“The pursuit of disarmament has been an effort of this Government since the 1920's. It has been urgently sought by the past three administrations. And however dim the prospects may be today, we intend to continue this effort–to continue it in order that all countries, including our own, can better grasp what the problems and possibilities of disarmament are.”
You mean disarming everyone else, right? Because there was an armaments phase in the 1940s unlike the world has ever seen. The U.S. has never been about disarmament. I have no idea what he’s talking about. It’s pure fantasy.
“To make clear our good faith and solemn convictions on the matter, I now declare that the United States does not propose to conduct nuclear tests in the atmosphere so long as other states do not do so. We will not be the first to resume. Such a declaration is no substitute for a formal binding treaty, but I hope it will help us achieve one. Nor would such a treaty be a substitute for disarmament, but I hope it will help us achieve it.”
This is great. Did we end up doing that, though? I’m seriously asking because I don’t know. Did we actually stop atmospheric testing?
Yup, we did. Two months later with the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (Wikipedia). Heartfelt congratulations to JFK and the team.
“While we proceed to safeguard our national interests, let us also safeguard human interests. And the elimination of war and arms is clearly in the interest of both. No treaty, however much it may be to the advantage of all, however tightly it may be worded, can provide absolute security against the risks of deception and evasion. But it can–if it is sufficiently effective in its enforcement and if it is sufficiently in the interests of its signers–offer far more security and far fewer risks than an unabated, uncontrolled, unpredictable arms race.”
This never happened, though. It’s hard to say whether it would have, had he not been assassinated. He talks pretty sometimes. So did Obama—who also did the opposite of everything he ever said. I’ve learned enough history to know that Kennedy also did other than he said, especially when it counted.
“The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough–more than enough–of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on–not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
“The U.S. will never start a war.”, will only “be prepared if others wish it.” Yeah, sure. That’s not how it worked out. It’s just words. Pretty words, but the world already has enough evidence to know that it was lies.
If you managed to make it through that analysis of Kennedy’s long speech, you may have noticed that so many of Kennedy’s statements are still the exact same things that U.S. administrations are saying today. The U.S. keeps saying it doesn’t want war, as it bombs everyone in sight. It claims it doesn’t want conflict—because what it really wants is docile vassals that don’t fight back as they U.S. plunders them. The U.S. still demands that everyone else change to satisfy it. The U.S. continues to claim that its military serves only peaceful purposes. The U.S. has the world convinced that NATO is a peaceful, defense-oriented organization.
Too few people see this for the bullshit that it is. Too few people see that this mindset is kept up by the massive firehose of propaganda from the largest and most sophisticated media and brainwashing operation in history. Only so can the Empire keep all the balls in the air. Only so can the Empire convince the world that it loves nothing more than peace as it bristles with weapons and pounds everyone that disagrees into sand.
I wrote something like the following, although I’ve enhanced it a bit.
]]>Israel is interested in clearing all of the Palestinians off of that land. They will shoot them if they have to,... [More]
Published by marco on 7. Feb 2024 22:10:25 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 7. Feb 2024 22:15:58 (GMT-5)
A friend asked me for my opinion on the situation in the middle east, specifically on Israel/Palestine. Hoo-boy.
I wrote something like the following, although I’ve enhanced it a bit.
Israel is interested in clearing all of the Palestinians off of that land. They will shoot them if they have to, but starving them into leaving the country is also acceptable. Once they’re finished in Gaza, they’ll finish up in the West Bank, where they’ve already increased the ferocity of the occupation. It’s mostly about plunder, with a soupçon of racist animus to keep everyone focused.
Israelis will continue to support this for the same reason that Americans support all of their own colonial activities: they are positively stewing in a sea of propaganda that keeps them terrified of largely imaginary or self-inflicted threats. Meanwhile their elites consolidate power and fortune.
I’ve been writing feverishly about it. I was actually quite surprised to see how much I’d written in the last 4 months about this topic.
🎥 = includes video interview
💕 = personal favorite because I remember making a particularly brilliant point
Those are just the actual articles I wrote, mostly extracted from my notes, of which there is a giant post, once per week, that you’re welcome to dig through for even more. But I honestly can’t imagine that anyone could stand it. I write for me.
Published by marco on 6. Feb 2024 22:45:33 (GMT-5)
It’s a bizarre thing that some countries just get to fly over other countries with their militaries—with their air force, to be more precise—and just bomb them on any day they feel like it. Like Israel just up and bombs Iraq, Lebanon, or Syria whenever it feels like it and no-one blinks an eye. The article US and UK Bomb Dozens of Sites in Yemen by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post) writes that this just happened recently. No-one really cares—not enough to even dream of doing anything about it. No country that the U.S. would consider listening to has even objected. France? England? Germany? Nope. Nope. Nope.
You will barely read about it. Rounded down, no-one will learn that their country committed acts of war against other countries. It doesn’t matter. Why? Because those countries are defenseless. You’re allowed to bomb them. No-one says anything. The less of a danger a country is, the more likely it is that you’re allowed to bomb it without repercussions. That is how the world works. There is no rules-based order. There is no international justice. There are no democracies straining to bring enlightenment to benighted peoples. That’s just the horseshit they feed you to keep you quiet while they do what they want. There is only Empire. There is just might makes right. There is just certain countries getting to do what they want, when they want, to whom they want.
“Some members of Congress have criticized President Biden for launching the strikes in Yemen without congressional authorization. “The President needs to come to Congress before launching a strike against the Houthis in Yemen and involving us in another middle east conflict. That is Article I of the Constitution,” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) wrote on X.”
Oh wow. He tweeted it. I’m sure the President gives a single, flying blue f$*k about that.
The essay Western Empire Bombs Yemen To Protect Israel’s Genocide Operations In Gaza by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin’s Newsletter) writes,
“[…] the US and the UK just bombed the poorest country in the middle east for trying to stop a genocide. Not only that, they bombed the very same country in which they just spent years backing Saudi Arabia’s genocidal atrocities which killed hundreds of thousands of people between 2015 and 2022 in an unsuccessful bid to stop the Houthis from taking power.”
This is all done to protect trade routes, to keep prices low. It’s not even that trade is being blocked. It’s just taking longer to deliver. BOMB THEM. The attacks by Ansarallah have resulted in no casualties. They’re annoying. They cause companies to lose money. Some stuff gets to some countries more slowly. The U.S. and UK bombed the Sanaa international airport in Yemen. WTF. No declaration of war. No attempt to negotiate. No consideration of alternatives. No congressional approval. Just a dictator blowing shit up. This is what people were afraid Trump would do. This is what I wrote before the last election that Biden would almost certainly do. He’s a merciless piece of shit. He always has been.
Apparently wars in Ukraine and Gaza are not enough. Nothing ever makes him think it’s time to back down, to negotiate, that things are getting out of hand. Forget cold wars. He makes everything hot immediately. He’s fighting Russians directly in Syria. He’s proxy-fighting them in Ukraine. he’s funding and arming Saudi Arabia to flatten Ansarallah in Yemen. He’s funding and arming the Israelis to flatten the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
This is mindless violence, all to quash any hopes of rebellion against Empire, all to prevent any change to the system that subjugates so many—and funnels so much wealth toward Empire—and a handful of people in it.
]]>“These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by... [More]”
Published by marco on 4. Feb 2024 22:02:26 (GMT-5)
The article Go Straight to Jail by Jack Norton, Lydia Pelot-Hobbs, and Judah Schept (The Baffler) discusses the effects of jails on the communities in which they’re located.
“These numbers represent real people—hundreds of thousands of people who are directly impacted by the violence of jail incarceration and detention, millions of people who are affected by the extraction that jail facilitates, and by the violence that is perpetrated on families and communities through policing and incarceration across the varied geography of the United States.”
Jails and prisons are state-sanctioned violence. The society wielding these tools hope that the effect will be to lower the overall level of violence. These measures do not in any way address the conditions that led to the original violence, Instead, the negative consequences aim to reduce the likelihood of that person using violence as a solution to those original, continuing—and likely exacerbated by incarceration—problems. We may not have started it—it’s arguable that society is responsible to a large degree for the violence it not only contains, but can be seen to engender with its policies—but we are definitely participating. It’s a cycle of violence.
“While incarceration has always been wielded as a class-war project […]”
“As John Irwin noted, the jail “was devised as, and continues to be, the special social device for controlling . . . the lowest class of people.””
True. The rich don’t get arrested; they barely even go to jail. They get fined, at worst. Poor people lose their lives for mistakes or as exaggerated reactions to societal transgressions that have far less reach and impact than rich-people crimes. When a poor person robs an apartment, that’s one victim. When a rich person steals a company’s pension fund, that’s thousands of victims. If the poor person is caught, they lose their family, freedom, livelihood, future. If the rich person is caught, they sit out a pre-trial period at their luxurious home or homes, then plea-bargain for a fine and no admission of guilt. Of course they get to keep the money.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 22:35:43 (GMT-5)
Similar to the article Cheerleading for the … what’s the opposite of underdog?, the content below appeared in my Links and Notes for October 13th, 2023, which I managed to publish on October 23rd. I’ve edited things lightly, but I’m publishing these reactions again to have them in a separate article and because I think my initial take has aged relatively well.
The article The Spiral of Violence that Led to Hamas by Peter Singer (Project Syndicate) writes,
“Hamas reportedly holds roughly 150 hostages, and has said that it will kill one every time Israel bombs a Gazan home without warning. Hamas leaders surely remember that in 2011, Netanyahu, as prime minister, was willing to free over 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, some of them terrorists, in exchange for the release of a single captive Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Against that background, they may believe that Israel will not be prepared to sacrifice the lives of the hostages in order to achieve its military objectives.”
They would be wrong, I suppose. It looks like Israel is calling them on it, telling them to put their money where their mouth is. That they hope for a prisoner trade has been the expressed intent of the kidnappings from the very first statement by Hamas, but we can, of course, disregard their actually stated goals and reasoning and instead imbue them with the goals and reasoning we’d like them to have instead. It makes things easier, I suppose. Israel has thus far been quite tight-lipped about the hostages—it seems almost as if they’re already treating them as martyrs. [1]
“When Hamas attacks Israeli civilians, it knows that this will lead to Israeli counterattacks in Gaza that are bound to kill and injure many civilians. Hamas locates its military sites in residential areas, hoping that this tactic will restrain Israeli attacks, or at least lessen international support for Israel.”
“How far Israel will go with its declared intention to deny electricity, fuel, food, and water to the two million citizens of Gaza, many of them children, is hard to know. What is certain is that Hamas’s brutal crimes do not entitle Israel to starve children.”
We know a bit more about how serious they are. They seem to be deadly, deadly serious about it. The first trucks went in—20 of them for 2.3m people—just yesterday, about 10 days after the shutdown. There were concerns about whether Egypt would try to smuggle weapons to Hamas amid the food and water supplies.
These are reasons that sound like they make sense until you realize that the alternative—doing nothing for days on end—probably meant the suffering and/or expiration of thousands of innocents, of children.
We have international treaties for a reason, but they’re not worth the paper they’re written on when signatories ignore the rules to which they’d agreed when it pleases them. They would, of course, like the rules to apply when they are in need, when they are being oppressed, but Israel, like the U.S., can no longer conceive of a world in which they would be on the back foot.
They’re not on the back foot now, not really, stop blowing smoke up my ass—so they don’t have to care if the whole international legal structure collapses. It doesn’t benefit them anyway. [2] Just like for the U.S., these international agreements that what they now perceive as weaker leaders of the past having signed are just getting in the way of their plans, of their empire, of their colonialism. [3]
If they would take a step back, they might be appalled to realize that they are being held back from doing horrific crimes by ethical and moral codes to which they in more clear-headed times agreed. In the current bloodthirsty atmosphere, such concerns are swept away before a sheet of red that obliterates all but vengeance. [4]
“And now what? Restore deterrence? How, exactly? Self-punishment in the form of a renewed occupation of Gaza? A land invasion is difficult to imagine. The atrocious level of destruction and casualties this would entail is one reason, with the many Israeli hostages now in Gaza providing additional insurance. The risk of Hezbollah opening an additional front from Lebanon in the north is another. Hezbollah’s capabilities dwarf those of Hamas, and a two-front war, with Iran possibly backing Israel’s foes, is an apocalyptic scenario. This is exactly why US President Joe Biden warned Israel’s enemies “not to exploit the crisis.” To drive home the point, Biden has ordered the US Navy’s newest and most advanced aircraft carrier to the eastern Mediterranean.”
Singer’s certainty here now seems unwarranted. It’s unlikely that Hezbollah will join the battle. Israel is already bombing Syria and Lebanon preemptively, something that they are presumably allowed to do without reprobation by the international community. They haven’t dared attack Iran directly yet, but I’m really wondering whether the reaction of Europe would even be negative. After all, Israel is allowed to defend itself, is it not? [5]
They may force the point, by forcing the U.S. to put its money where its mouth is, following up with force on the side of a deranged, reckless, genocidal power that already had overwhelming superiority over its declared foe.
“Netanyahu’s machine of poisonous political disinformation is already at work disseminating a conspiracy theory according to which leftist army officers were responsible for the negligence that led to this dirty war. No one should be surprised that Netanyahu would resort to the infamous “stab in the back” narrative – a conspiracy theory also peddled by the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. How else could the inciter-in-chief explain his criminal negligence?”
“Israelis will question the conceptziyya that they can reap the benefits of a Western nation-state while being inured to the hardships their neighbors seek to inflict on them.”
The phrase “seek to inflict on them” seems a bit out of place considering the overwhelming power that Israel has. They are the only nuclear power in the region. They have managed to display a deranged, anything-goes approach to foreign policy in which no slight is ever forgiven, no matter how small, in which every slight is answered a dozen-fold.
No sane nation-state would attack Israel first, knowing that it is quite likely that a mushroom cloud will rise over their capital city, rising silently to the applause of all European and American leaders. So, no, I don’t think the Israeli fear of invasion by its neighbors is to be considered very likely. [6]
Naturally, Israel will take a page from Dick Cheney’s book, citing the 1% => 100% doctrine, rounding up a vanishingly small danger to a certainty that warrants preemptive attack—just to be on the safe side. It’s balderdash, of course, but it will be sold as a perfectly normal way to reason about things, a perfectly just way of handling the situation.
The next article The Insane Idea That Nations Get To Do War Crimes Whenever Something Bad Happens To Them by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter) writes,
“Dropping military explosives on children is just as wrong now as it was on October 6th. Wars of aggression were just as wrong on September 12th 2001 as they were on September 10th. But there’s this idiotic belief in mainstream culture that a nation experiencing a traumatic event means it gets to go on a murderous rampage until it feels better.
“As soon as the Hamas attack occurred we were inundated with messaging from the western political/media class which conveyed the idea that because something bad happened to Israel, Israel now gets to do a little genocide, as a treat. This is stupid nonsense, and should be rejected by all thinking people.”
“If you saw your friend stumbling around with his car keys in one hand and a bottle in the other after losing his job, you wouldn’t tell him you stand with him and support whatever it is he’s getting ready to do. You’d understand that people can make unwise decisions after something bad happens to them, and you’d do what you can to help steer them away from it.”
“The death toll from Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza has already more than doubled the death toll from the Hamas attack, and we can expect it to keep multiplying because there’s no meaningful opposition to the bloodshed. The United States, who as an indispensable backer of Israel could end all this with a word, has refused to draw a single red line on what Israel may or may not do if it wishes to retain US support — even its indiscriminate use of white phosphorus, which violates international humanitarian law. War crimes are being committed not just openly but announced in advance as Tel Aviv commits itself to the collective punishment of Palestinians with a complete siege of Gaza, and Israel’s allies have no objection to this.”
There are two points here: Hamas blew its whole load on October 7th. There will be no more meaningful resistance now. Perhaps they will be able to launch some of their rockets (Norman Finkeltstein said he’d read claims that they have 100,000 of them), but they’re unlikely to hit useful targets, like chemical factories, that could do real damage to Israel. Gazans are buttoned down and will suffer what Israel sees fit to mete out. [7]
The other point is that this is exactly what the major powers want to happen. They don’t green-light war crimes because they’re confused about what war crimes are. It’s because laws against war crimes are only there to be wielded against enemies. They don’t apply to anyone inside the circle of trust. If you’re useful to empire, then you get to do what you want. Empire will decide which laws apply to you based on your usefulness.
If you’re useful, you get a free pass to do whatever you like—and you never have to answer for it. If you’re not useful, or if you have something useful that Empire wants without paying for it, you are forced to pledge fealty to Empire, to mouth the words that it wants you to say, to “condemn” terrorists. To make nuance-free statements that are nowhere near to expressing your actual beliefs.
The article International Hypocrisy: The U.S., Once Again, Leads the Way by Robert Fantina (CounterPunch) contains many interesting citations from “Palestinian Ambassador to the U.K., Husam Zumlot” from his interview on BBC News.
“How many times have you interviewed Israeli officials (question by Ambassador Zumlot to the interviewer)? How many times? Hundreds of times. How many times has Israel committed war crimes, live, on your own cameras? Do you start by asking them to condemn themselves? Have you? You don’t.”
“You know why I refuse to answer that question (why he won’t condemn Hamas for its violence of last week)? Because I refuse the premise of it. Because at the very heart of it is misrepresentation of the whole thing. Because it is the Palestinians who are expected to condemn themselves.”
“You bring us here whenever Israelis are killed. Did you bring me here when many Palestinians in the West Bank, more than 200 over the last few months (were killed)? Do you invite me where there are such Israeli provocations in Jerusalem and elsewhere?”
The only time you will be given a voice is to say things that Empire wants. Empire cannot learn new things from you because it already knows everything there is to know.
It knows that it is Empire and that you are not. What could it possibly learn from you?
Your only job is to say the things that Empire wants you to say when it wants you to say them in order to enjoy a slight benefit, to bask in the warm, though oft wan and temporary, beneficence of Empire, to not lose your livelihood, your home, your family, your life.
This is the implicit bargain of living with Empire—the implied threat for non-compliance is always destruction of everything you hold dear. Empire doesn’t care because it doesn’t cost Empire anything, whereas it amuses Empire to throw your pitiful life away for its purposes, for its own enrichment, even if it’s a total waste—it still feels good to use its power.
And don’t go looking for consistency. Superficially, there is none. Bianca Graulau writes, “Filter the propaganda through this lens: the US empire will always choose sides based on its own interests.” That is 100% the correct context through which to process information coming from Empire.
More long-windedly, but still worth quoting, Fantina writes,
“The U.S. isn’t interested in human rights, international law or self-determination. Certainly it has no interest in peace in the Middle East. It is interested in power over the entire world and the profits that that power will bring them. So what if its hands are dripping with the blood of Palestinian children? Biden cares no more about that than George Bush cared about the blood of Iraqi children. No, the geopolitical goals of the U.S. are always front and center. Human rights and international law are nowhere on the U.S. list of priorities.”
This has been obvious for the long part of my lifetime during which I’ve paid attention to international affairs, with a focus on the affairs of Empire. It is of no value to listen to what Empire says; you must watch what Empire actually does.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 21:49:10 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Dec 2023 22:17:52 (GMT-5)
The content below appeared in my Links and Notes for October 6th, 2023, which I managed to publish on October 21st. I’ve edited things lightly, but I’m publishing these reactions again to have them in a separate article and because I think my initial take has aged relatively well—especially as compared with that of European leaders like Frau Baerbock of Germany.
The article Netanyahu regime staggered by Palestinian uprising by Alex Lantier (WSWS) was published on October 8th and writes,
“The World Socialist Web Site condemns the vicious and obscenely hypocritical statements of President Joe Biden and leaders of the European Union denouncing the Palestinian resistance as “terrorism” while supporting without any reservations Israel’s onslaught on Gaza.”
“Pledging “rock-solid and unwavering” support for Israeli military operations against Gaza, Biden said: “The United States unequivocally condemns this appalling assault against Israel by Hamas terrorists from Gaza, and I made clear to Prime Minister Netanyahu that we stand ready to offer all appropriate means of support to the government and people of Israel. [1] Terrorism is never justified. Israel has a right to defend itself and its people.””
OMG 😱 the U.S. is so delighted to be able to wholeheartedly endorse the further tightening of the noose that they’ve been funding for years, but this time, because of the Palestinian attack—unprovoked, of course!—they feel like they can also reclaim the moral high ground, without doing any work at all.
This is such a slam dunk that of course all the EU and US leaders are going to take it. They don’t give a shit about anybody but themselves, but pretending to care about Israelis is not only lucrative, but more than occasionally politically necessary.
No-one ever lost an election for not caring about Palestinians. Quite the contrary.
Check out Baerbock, one of the truly worst, most ruthless, and most disgusting women in politics since … Hillary Clinton? Margaret Thatcher? Condaleeza Rice? Susan Rice? Samantha Power?
“German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock declared: “The odious violence of Hamas against civilians in Israel is unprecedented and unjustifiable. This terrorism must stop immediately. Israel has our full solidarity.””
Unprecedented! Not only unprovoked, but unprecedented! This, from a fucking German! A German is saying that Palestinian violence is unprecedented. You can’t make this shit up. She is the foreign minister—the top diplomat—of that once progressive country.
“The hypocrisy of these statements is staggering. As always, the sympathies of the imperialist powers are with the oppressors. Any manifestation of resistance by the oppressed is greeted with frenzied denunciations. The media ignores the fact that the Israeli government is led by a criminal, whose coalition is dominated by fascistic racists, and is engaged in efforts to suppress the constitution.”
The attacks are an act of desperation, of course. They knew exactly what would happen in response. I’m not sure whether they were just trying to tip Israel’s hand, to force them to actually do something so awful that even a reprehensible c*#% like Baerbock would have to shut the f*#% up and sit down while the adults do the talking.
“On Saturday night, in a bloodcurdling address to the nation, Netanyahu told “residents of Gaza” to “get out now, because we will operate everywhere and with full force.” Since his government blockades Gaza and does not let anyone leave, this is a declaration that Netanyahu sees Gaza’s entire population as a legitimate target. Asserting that “Hamas wants to murder us all,” Netanyahu pledged to “fight them to the bitter end” and that cities where Hamas operates would turn into “cities of ruin.””
Netanyahu will target civilians. He and his predecessors always have. The western world doesn’t care at all. The money continues to flow. [2]
Of course, no-one will actually pay any attention to what the “enemy” has to say about why it’s doing what it’s doing. Putin knows the feeling. We fail to listen to our own detriment. This is not about capitulation to violence, but in learning what it would take to avoid it and to determine whether that price is too high. If we categorically refuse to even learn what the price might be, we are dishonorable, reckless, and exceedingly stupid hypocrites.
Here is a part of Hamas’s declaration.
““As the Israeli occupation maintains its siege of the Gaza Strip and continues its crimes against our Palestinian people, while showing utmost disregard for international laws and resolutions amid US and Western support and international silence, we have decided to put an end to all of that. We announce a military operation against the Israeli occupation, which comes in response to the continued Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and violations at the Al-Aqsa mosque.””
They are referring of course to the multiple attacks inside a mosque carried out by Israeli police over the last couple of years. Most recently, people swept through, spitting on people. On Biden’s watch, by the way. Utterly vile, but a neat tactic for provoking a violent response without actually striking first.
If history is any guide, Gaza is truly going to get curb-stomped, probably worse than they’ve ever been before. [3] As noted in Violence Begets Violence by Raouf Halaby (CounterPunch)
“Hamas and its supporters will no doubt claim Saturday’s attack on Israel to be a victory. And in truth, taking on one of the mightiest armies in the world is beyond belief. Breaking out of their open-air prison and with slingshots (Kalashnikovs, motorcycles, and a bulldozer), as compared to Israel’s infinite military might, the fifth strongest military in the world with proven air, land, and sea prowess, will be celebrated by Hamas and across the Near East as a victory.
“At best, it is a pyrrhic victory, one for which Palestinian citizens in Gaza and the West Bank, as happened in the past, will pay dearly. Since 2008 Israel has launched four major wars on Gaza, each of which was more brutal than the preceding one. I fear that the current Israeli avenging war, unlike the previous ones, will exact a very heavy price on the 376 square-mile enclave, the world’s largest open-air prison in which 2.3 million Palestinians exist.”
The next article A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer one by Haviv Rettig Gur (Times of Israel) was already laying the groundwork for what was to come.
“Hamas did everything it could to shock Israelis, to humiliate and horrify, kidnapping children, desecrating corpses, and then crowing about it to the world.
“And Israelis watched it all, minute by agonizing minute. And they agreed. Their weakness had become clear, unavoidable.
“And very, very dangerous.”
“And it will soon learn the scale of that miscalculation. A strong Israel may tolerate a belligerent Hamas on its border; a weaker one cannot. A safe Israel can spend much time and resources worrying about the humanitarian fallout from a Gaza ground war; a more vulnerable Israel cannot.
“A wounded, weakened Israel is a fiercer Israel.
“Hamas was once a tolerable threat. It just made itself an intolerable one, all while convincing Israelis they are too vulnerable and weak to respond with the old restraint.”
This is both true and a rallying cry. It’s also amazing that the author is expecting us to believe that either the current or any previous Israeli leadership has lost any sleep about the humanitarian fallout. I mean, I’m sure that there has been some restraint from just outright murdering every Palestinian that crosses their paths, but, from out here, in the real world, it doesn’t really look like much restraint is considered at all. If there’s any concern about humanitarian fallout, it’s lost in a rounding error.
Israel has been exposed as weaker than it projected and it will react in the same way that the U.S. did, when a similar thing happened to it over 22 years ago. The younger people of Israel face the same choice that we Americans did at that time: seek understanding, wonder what those scarred wizened visages meant by “chickens coming home to roost”, or double down, look inward, and lash out. [4]
It’s quite obvious what Israel, led by Netanyahu, will do. It remains to be seen how much of the population of Israel follows, in their heart of hearts. Most Americans followed. Some questioned. Those who questioned didn’t matter. Their opinions never do. There is no solace in being right when the world burns for so many others. [5]
The last article The Violence in Palestine and Israel Is the Tragic Fruit of Brutal Oppression by Seraj Assi (Jacobin) writes,
“The tragic scenes unfolding in Gaza and Israel are a chilling reminder that occupation and oppression bear a price. For the truth is that when you imprison two million people in 140 square miles, placing them under a merciless siege with no end in sight, with no way in or out, with drones and rockets buzzing overhead night and day, with constant surveillance and harassment, with scant control over their day-to-day lives — ultimately, the dispossessed will rebel.
“The violence was not unprovoked, as the mainstream media has depicted it. It has been brewing and festering in every corner of the country.
“In the West Bank, the Palestinian town of Jenin is still reeling from the devastation of a recent unsparing Israeli attack, which left the town a razed ghostland. The small town of Huwara has yet to recover from the deadly horrors unleashed by settlers on its residents.”
It’s not that Hamas didn’t commit war crimes. It’s more that the world shouldn’t be surprised that it did.
“During the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, settlers stormed into the Al-Aqsa Mosque complex in Jerusalem, staging provocative tours, harassing and beating worshippers, and spitting on Christians.”
It doesn’t justify the rocket attacks, but it goes a good way towards explaining them. If you want the rocket attacks to stop, you should consider all of the options: you could turn the screws even tighter, to make sure that no-one can get rockets. Or you could see what you would need to do for people to not even want rockets. That ship has probably sailed, but it might not be bad, as a thought experiment.
“The ongoing explosion in violence is the ugly reality of Israeli apartheid, the culmination of decades of occupation of a stateless people deprived of basic human rights and freedoms. Unless the root causes are dismantled — the siege lifted, the apartheid system and occupation ended — violence will continue to tragically haunt Palestinians and Israelis for years to come. [6]”
“There is no principle that enables Schumer, or Biden, or any liberal, to find common ground with people who can make excuses for rape, together with the litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.”
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 17:34:00 (GMT-5)
The article The Rot On His Own Side by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) writes,
“There is no principle that enables Schumer, or Biden, or any liberal, to find common ground with people who can make excuses for rape, together with the litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.”
I’ve written about the author a few times because of the extremely sharp turn he took on October 7th, 2023. See Losing the plot completely on November 1, 2023, Some commentator are still MIA on November 6, 2023, and Moar unhinged commentary on November 23, 2023.
At the beginning of December, Greenfield was still setting up his strawmen and then knocking them down. I hope he’s having fun over there, but it seems much more like he’s going down a rabbit hole like James Howard Kunstler did a few years ago.
“The litany of horrors perpetrated by Hamas.” As if the things that happened almost two months ago are the worst thing that’s ever happened to anyone ever—and as if nothing equally bad has happened since that we might also be paying attention to. Nope, just wallowing in misery and not all interested in any solution that doesn’t offer more misery. Now, he’s off and running on the RISE OF ANTISEMITISM.
“The same failure of principle that infects this ideological schism at its core, where decisions are made based not on substance, but on identities and which box they’re in. Black people are still very much subject to discrimination. Looting is wrong, even when done by black people. Rape is a heinous crime. Rape is still a heinous crime even when done by Palestinians. Even when done by Palestinians to Jews.”
He starts off strong here. It’s a topic he’s admirably addressed in the past. He’s a strong defender of the idea that identirarianism has been damaging to nearly everyone but its most adamant advocates.
But then he gets to the second part, which I’ve highlighted. Who’s he talking to here? Is there anyone worth listening to who’s saying that rape is sometimes OK? Is there anyone at all? Maybe a handful of yahoos who aren’t worth listening to? Is there any reason to continue to treat this idea like there’s a danger of it overtaking the Zeitgeist? What the hell are you arguing about?
Having doubts about whether people were raped before they blasted to smithereens with hellfire missiles is not the same as thinking rape is OK. Even the Israeli government stopped pounding the rape drum weeks ago. Why does Greenfield still mention it all the time, when even the Israelis have given up on that story? Did he not get the memo?
Does he really think he needs to fight the good fight, standing up for the rarely held principle that it’s not OK for Palestinians to rape Jews? Is he getting a lot of pushback on that? Or what is going on?
Once he’s worked himself up into a lather about this, he drops his final stroke of genius,
“[…] there is far more in common between the progressive left and the Nazis and Klan than there is with a principled liberal.”
Put up the straw man, then knock it down. Way to go!
I did not see that one coming.
]]>““Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 17:24:18 (GMT-5)
The article No ‘End of History’ in Ukraine by Scott Ritter (Scheer Post) mentions Francis Fukuyama, citing him at length on what he meant by “the end of history”.
““Liberal democracy,” Fukuyama wrote, “replaces the irrational desire to be recognized as greater than others with a rational desire to be recognized as equal.” “A world made up of liberal democracies, then, should have much less incentive for war, since all nations would reciprocally recognize one another’s legitimacy. And indeed, there is substantial empirical evidence from the past couple of hundred years that liberal democracies do not behave imperialistically toward one another, even if they are perfectly capable of going to war with states that are not democracies and do not share their fundamental values.”
This is all just fine, sound, and admirable reasoning, It’s just that the elites in the U.S.—in their nearly unparalleled hubris—assumed that Fukuyama was talking about their country. In fact, given Fukuyama’s premise and definition, the conclusion should be that the U.S. cannot possibly be considered a liberal democracy. It is, in fact and instead, an empire.
It’s like the nearly incessant babble about free markets: it’s a good idea, in principle, but inapplicable because we don’t have free markets. We never have.
Ritter went on, citing Marx as counterweight to Fukuyama,
“Karl Marx, who famously observed that, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.””
The “Fukuyama school of thought”—such as it is—is just something invented to ostracize official enemies.
“Political scientists in the Fukuyama “end of history” school view this conflict as being derived by the resistance of the remnants of Soviet regional hegemony (i.e., modern-day Russia, led by its president, Vladimir Putin) over the inevitability of liberal democracy taking hold.”
It’s an adorable fairy tale for an empire to tell itself, but it’s an even more useful tool to convince its conquests to give up with less of a fight. These conquests know they’re in for a lot of pain if they don’t bend the knee. What better way to convince them to do it sooner than a fairy tale that will actually come true for a handful of elite members of the conquered? Instead of fighting the empire, the target of conquest ends up fighting against itself over table scraps.
And so it goes.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 17:12:59 (GMT-5)
This kind of thing happens with awful regularity in the U.S. the Florida executes man after US Supreme Court denies his intellectual disability claim by Kate Randall (WSWS) is about a guy who is very obviously intellectually disabled. He is not ready for the world as she is. He had the kind of life that no-one would want to have, not in a million years.
“Zack suffered a litany of horrors in his childhood. His lawyers wrote in a court filing that his mother drank heavily throughout her pregnancy. He was hospitalized at the age of three for drinking about 10 ounces of vodka. He endured extensive physical and sexual abuse from his stepfather, including forcing him to drink alcohol, injecting him with drugs, running over him with a car and creating devices to electrically shock him if he wet the bed. Zack’s older sister killed their mother with an ax.”
But it’s cool, because he’s apparently not considered to be intellectually disadvantaged enough to get protection under the law. An intelligence test invented by shysters in the 19th century that continues to be used today has decided that he’s 9 points too smart to be retarded enough to not be able to be killed. Score another big win for Florida, the state loved so hard by Republicans and Libertarians alike.
“The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) notes, “Unlike almost all other states, Florida rigidly required an IQ of 70 or below to demonstrate intellectual disability, with no allowance for the test’s margin of error.” Zack at one point scored 79 on an IQ (intelligence quotient) test. IQ tests have been demonstrated to be inaccurate in measuring intelligence.”
The average IQ is 100. If you’ve ever had the pleasure of discussing anything more complex than whether you want your receipt with someone with an IQ of 100, then you should really brace yourself for what a conversation with a person who scores 79 would be like. This isn’t to say that the IQ test is accurate necessarily, but that it will give you a ballpark idea of what that person is going to be capable of. Zack’s statement, quoted in the article, seems literate enough—eloquent even—but I imagine that he had quite a bit of help with it.
Ron DeSantis is happily signing death warrants for severely mentally challenged individuals. Bill Clinton also happily signed death warrants for the same, so maybe DeSantis is hoping to follow his example into the White House.
Read about Ricky Ray Rector (Wikipedia), who’d done terrible things, but who’d effectively lobotomized himself in a botched suicide attempt. There was no need to imprison the guy, to say nothing of executing him. He needed a different kind of care.
The man that Rector had become after his suicide attempt was on the mental level of a dumb child. Rector had no idea what was going on. He might as well have been Old Yeller. According to the Wikipedia link above,
“For his last meal, Rector requested and received a steak, fried chicken, cherry Kool-Aid, and pecan pie. As noted above, Rector left the pie on the side of the tray, telling the corrections officers who came to take him to the execution chamber that he was “saving it for later.””
Clinton took time off of the campaign trail to go watch him die.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 16:53:51 (GMT-5)
This video is from a while back and I included in my weekly notes, but it was an interesting enough example of the kind of person that Glenn Greenwald is willing to interview—even though there’s not a lot of overlap between Glenn’s principles and whatever passes for Max Abrahms’s principles. The guy is pretty popular in some circles—he writes for the Atlantic, surprise, surprise—so it’s good to hear what he’s got to say instead of just dismissing it out of hand.
I think this is pretty representative of the kind of things he just machine-guns at whoever happens to be listening. At one point he says
“It’s hard for me to remember a case where China actually attacked the US homeland … in large numbers. I don’t think it’s crazy at all to think that Al-Qaeda would do so. In fact … ”
Yeah, it’s hard for me to remember that too. I pay pretty close attention, so I’m almost certain I would have heard had “China actually attacked the US homeland”. What does that have to do with anything? Silo thinking and silo media is so terrible for everyone. Poor Max hasn’t had anyone to call him on his bullshit, so he ends up talking more and more and never notices that he’s not only not always right, but he’s underinformed about a lot of things that he thinks he’s mastered.
Basically, Max Abrahms is terrible. Kudos to Glenn to give him enough hope to hang himself. The guy wants people not to be able to wave flags of terrorist organizations in the U.S. That is not a thing that we can do. If they want to wave those flags, then they can wave those flags. Hell, there are a ton of confederate flags in the U.S. There are confederate flags in Switzerland.
But Abrahms thinks that specifically Arabic/Muslim organizations represent the worst terrorism that could possibly exist and they should be “punished” and “degraded”. (Yes, these are the words he uses.)
Abrahms said that calls to violence should be investigated. Greenwald granted him that theoretical, but then concluded that not just students should have their freedom of speech restricted, but then also people like Nikki Haley, who’s calling for the flattening of Gaza and Iran. The dude could literally not answer that question—you could see it not computing at all—but instead started describing the so-called violent protests on U.S. campuses in excruciating detail. That’s his hobby horse. Glenn wasn’t going to knock him off of it so easily.
Abrahms is interested in restricting the speech of those with absolutely the least power. You would think that someone who expresses himself so often about Palestine/Israel issues could pronounce Intifada correctly (he kept saying Antifada). Glenn pulled on his leash, telling Abrahms that nearly everyone else that Glenn has talked to, including many pro-Israel advocates, are more offended that the antisemitic narrative in the U.S. is wildly exaggerated.
For example, the ADL considers any pro-Palestinian protest to be at least one, if not multiple, anti-semitic attack. This is a pretty naked attempt to generate “proof” that anti-semitic attacks are increasing exponentially. Abrahms enthusiastically confirms that this is his very own hobby horse too. THIS IS HAPPENING. He doesn’t listen at all to what Glenn said, or give him the respect of refuting it. What is Glenn talking about? Who are all of these other fools to whom Glenn has spoken? Are they perhaps self-hating Jews? Traitors?
When Glenn asked him what he proposes to do to hinder these supposed attacks, Abrahms again doesn’t answer the question. I don’t think that Abrahms is used to any pushback whatsoever. That’s not part of his talking points. He probably didn’t feel comfortable saying that he thinks that all of the protesters should just be thrown out of college and probably society.
At 21:45, Glenn says wraps things up with an actual explanation of free speech as it applies to this situation,
“The case went to the Supreme Court the Supreme Court, which overturned the conviction and said that advocating violence is clearly within the realm of protected speech.
“Which means that you’re allowed to say ‘flatten Gaza,’ ‘erase Gaza,’ ‘remove Gaza from the map,’ ‘I think all Palestinians should be killed,’ ‘there are no innocent Palestinians.’ There’s a huge number this week of Israeli officials and journalists who have said ‘there’s no such thing as an innocent Palestinian.‘
“That’s protected speech. You can go on campus and say that. You can say it in front of Palestinians and it’s protected speech.
“To go and say ‘I think the Israeli government and their occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza has become so barbaric and inhumane over decades that I think on the part of Palestinians is justified in order to resist it,’ those are both to me clearly within the realm of free speech.
“I would never send the FBI or law enforcement after students on campuses for saying these things.”
People have rights. International law... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 11:27:20 (GMT-5)
Israel doesn’t have a right to exist because no state has any rights, least of the right to exist. What a silly concept! Can you imagine if the Russian Tsars had taken the Bolsheviks to the ICC [1] because their right to exist had been violated? What a concept.
People have rights. International law regulates various aspects of how states may interact, but does not grant any rights to them. There is no “no takebacks” clause in international law. Any state can disappear or change shape if the people living there will it.
So let’s take a look at this interesting line of argument [2]: focusing on Israel’s war crimes is antisemitic because there was less of a focus on everyone else’s war crimes. Netanyahu named Saudi Arabia and Yemen. He could just as legitimately have named the U.S., but, not only would it be politically impossible, it probably didn’t even occur to him.
He’s not wrong! But it’s not a unique line of reasoning. It’s the same thing Americans do when they claim that they aren’t as bad as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, or that they’re no worse than whatever their occupation happened to replace in whatever country they’re blowing the crap out of. If you protest Trump, then why didn’t you protest Obama? And so on.
Do people have to show proof that they also marched against the bombing of Yemen or Iraq before they’re allowed to say anything about the annihilation they’re observing in Gaza?
The reason the argument works is because there’s a grain of uncomfortable truth to it. There are reasons why people protest one thing and not another. Sometimes these are racists reasons. Often they’re plainly partisan reasons. Sometimes it’s just because you weren’t aware or as politically engaged, or whatever.
People are enormous hypocrites who basically do the thing that they think will benefit them the most personally. You brainwash them a bit, then wind them up and send them out into the world on what they think is their own personal crusade. This is not a new dynamic.
No-one actually cares about dead or suffering or starving people that they don’t know. They only care about those people when they’re closer to home, when they know them or when that suffering could impact their own lives directly.
Why don’t we get to do genocide when everyone else does?
I heard Jeff Dorchen of This is Hell! make Netanyu’s argument in a recent episode. [3] He said that he doesn’t remember so many people marching against South Africa, so this newfound hatred of apartheid must be antisemitic. Brilliant!
What he doesn’t address is just how much more visible the apartheid is now, outside of Israel. There was no social media, no ubiquitous video during South Africa’s apartheid. It was so much easier not be aware of it.
He also ignores that the Israeli occupation is at least 55 years old and it’s only now that there is anything like some pressure being applied for Israel to behave in a civilized manner toward all of its citizens. It’s absolutely rich to be able to shit on people for many decades and then start whining when someone finally calls you on your bullshit.
What I find specifically interesting in Israel’s case is that a lot of Israeli politicians—by their own proud and oft-repeated admission!—think that Muslims—and nations like Saudi Arabia—are reprehensible, just base and bestial. They’re not Jewish and therefore lesser. But then isn’t it odd that they hold themselves to the supposedly low standards of a low culture that they disdain?
How many decades should you be able to stomp a mudhole in some other culture before we’re allowed to ask you to stop without being told we’re specifically against your culture or religion? I’m asking seriously here, ‘cause I wanna put it in my calendar. I don’t want to step on any toes here. Let me know.
Do you see how you might find yourself asking, “how in God’s name is any of this antisemitic?”
Should Saudi Arabia knock it off too? Absolutely! Should the U.S. knock it off? Oh my God, the U.S. is the worst—the most hypocritical of all. Israel stands in the very long shadow of U.S. hypocrisy here.
It’s highly disingenuous and unfair to round up everyone who disagrees with you to a racist [4], though. I mean, c’mon. Total kindergarten tactics.
Israel is getting picked on for its human-rights transgressions, not because its people are largely Jewish, but because it’s small. Israel punched above its weight for decades because it protected itself with the magic shield of equating any criticism of its policies with antisemitism. Germany and the U.S.—and much of the rest of Europe—are still trying to do it. But there’s only so far above your weight you can punch before you get your clock cleaned.
There’s only so far above your weight you can punch before you get your clock cleaned.
Israel went too far. They stepped out from under even the long, long shadow of the U.S. Empire’s protection and people finally saw enough. They were shown too much, and are not afraid enough of the repercussions anymore. Israel, as they say, “lost control of the narrative.”
This has nothing to do with antisemitism. It has everything to do with force-projection. Israel projects a tremendous amount of force for its size, but not an infinite amount. The U.S. gets away with a lot more because no-one dares piss it off. That used to be the same for Israel—until the weight of its crimes outweighed its threats.
Russia suffers from the same problem. They didn’t get away with their invasion because they’re a chosen enemy of Empire. They have negative force-projection. The world considers them to be less powerful than they actually are. They get away with nothing.
Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, delivers fossil fuels. Its ability to project force on the hapless Yemenis remains unrestricted. It’s aided and abetted by the U.S. There has never been the same uproar. The reason is not antisemitism, but pure Machiavellian, market-force conclusions. Nobody wants Saudi Arabia to stop delivering oil. They haven’t pushed their madness and crimes far enough to tip the scales, as Israel has.
Congo is in utter turmoil, with 20M people internally displaced, but the raw materials continue to be delivered, so we ignored the 100 warring factions. As long as the coltan flows, everything else can be ignored.
What does Israel supply to the world? Other than disdain?
OK, they do have the absolute best, zero-click spyware that money can buy. Top-notch. [5]
Let’s be honest, Israel is being very, very provocative with this latest attack. They are making it very clear that they either have a completely different worldview—one in which they are definitely the good guys—or that they just do not give a shit what anyone else thinks. The U.S. is backing it, so f&%k off.
I just think it’s rich when those who’ve controlled the narrative and gotten literally everything they ever wanted start yowling their heads off about discrimination as soon as the leash tightens just a tiny, little bit. I understand Israelis thinking this—they’re mired in just as much a soup of propaganda as Americans. But Dorchen is outside of that miasma and should honestly know better. [6]
I think what we’re witnessing is the laziness of utter dominance. The people in charge of Israel drank the Kool-Aid that they get to do whatever they want whenever they want so long ago that they’ve forgotten that they had to drink Kool-Aid to come around to that mindset. They neglected their duty to brainwash the next couple of generations, in both their own country and all of the others.
Despite massive efforts, it was impossible to keep this current stage of the conflict out of the news. In fact, they definitely wanted it in the news!
They all were so far up their own asses that they couldn’t conceive of anyone looking at the situation and coming to any conclusion other than “Israel is defending itself against utter evil.” They forgot that there is a ton of context that they routinely elide. They no longer had any idea what the world looked like outside of their echo-chamber.
So what did they do? They went back to that hoary classic. Accuse literally everyone who doesn’t agree with them of antisemitism.
I think there’s also a disavowal of the standards that they claimed for themselves. That is, Israel will not stop telling everyone that it is the only democracy in the Middle East. It’s practically on the flag. But it’s not on the flag. You know what’s on the flag? The star of David. It’s a Jewish state. Israel is a very modern state, in that it is an ethnotheocracy, but it identifies as a democracy.
So, yes, the standards to which the world holds you are higher, Israel. But it’s because you asked us to grant you the benefits of being certain things the world considers to be morally superior. At some point, the piper comes calling, and you have to live up to those standards. At some point, you have show the receipts instead of just claiming things and reaping the benefits.
Israel has gotten so accustomed to be taken at its word that, at the first sign of doubt, they react by suspecting foul play. This is dishonest to themselves as well as to the rest of the world. You can only burn so much goodwill before the other kids stop playing with you.
Of all people, I am 100% aware that nearly all of this essay pertains to the U.S. of A. just as well, if not better, than it does to Israel. But please reference the thousands of other articles on my blog for in-depth critiques of the USA. This one’s about Israel.
Just quickly, though: I do think that the U.S. is losing whatever’s left of its shine, as well, perhaps accelerated by its full-throated support of Israel’s recent actions.
I just saw an article that wrote something about “anti-Israeli” rather than “antisemitic”, but they should really have written “anti-Israel”, I guess. Or “anti-Israeli government”, to be more precise. I think it’s important that we remain vigilant in maintaining the distinction.
As a U.S. American, I know all too well how an ostensible democracy manages to avoid representing the will of anything but a psychotic minority most of the time. I’m not against the people of Israel, not at all. Some of them might be ignorant of what their government is really doing, or they kind of know, but they don’t care, because “I’ve got mine, jack” and “I’ve got bills to pay.”
But that doesn’t make the average Israeli any more evil or racist than any other first-world resident, not really. Americans and Europeans are just as capable as Israelis in this regard. Very few of them, relatively speaking, speak up—or are even aware of—the extent of their own countries’ true crimes.
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2023 09:56:57 (GMT-5)
I recently wrote about how good the Best of This is Hell! 2023 end-of-hear series has been. The episode Best of 2023: Living and Reliving the U.S. Invasion of Iraq / Rasha Al Aqeedi (This is Hell!) was a counterexample. I thought Rasha’s analysis was more superficial than the standard set by the other episodes.
“Chuck: Was it a combination of incompetence and arrogance?
Rasha: Absolutely. That’s a perfect way of describing it.”
Ah, so nice to be able to remove agency. The U.S. was just floating helplessly down the stream of history, just like the rest of us. OK OK OK.
Now, they’re vibeing about privilege. She talks about her having been privileged to have grown up as a Sunni in a country with an oppressed Shia majority. But neither of them talks about how the problem that most people have with discussions of “privilege” is that it doesn’t explain everything like people wish it did.
She didn’t mention the sanctions regime once. She’s a bit like a lot of people of that generation and class—she can recognize that her class separates her from most of the other citizens of her country, but she still kind of judges them for wanting to go back to the old days, when there was a dictatorship.
Look, middle-aged and older people in Iraq might very well remember that their country had one of the highest overall living standards in the Middle East and Africa. You have to deal with that, without telling them that they can now vote every four years. She doesn’t quite get around to saying that they don’t really have a democracy. She just says it’s a failure of democracy.
It’s not a language barrier. She’s totally fluent. She now lives in Fairfax, Virginia, which is, quite frankly, the heart of the empire. She says very explicitly that she’s never going back or moving back to Iraq.
Maybe I’m completely misinterpreting her, but she doesn’t seem to place much blame on America, even for the continuing muddle that is Iraqi domestic politics. The U.S. is still heavily involved there, but gets no mention. I understand that we want to focus on the people of Iraq taking responsibility for their own country, but the reality is that there is only so much room to maneuver that they’re going to be allowed by the U.S. If Iraq wanted to establish an Islamic state, that … would not be allowed to happen.
I don’t expect her to be ululating “Death to America”, but she barely even acknowledged the U.S. influence. Maybe it’s because I just finished season 1 of Blowback, which recounted a lot of Iraqi history, with a preponderance of American influence in the last 50 years.
When I’d caught up to episode 7, I started... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Dec 2023 22:50:43 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Dec 2023 10:16:39 (GMT-5)
So I’ve been listening to this podcast called Blowback by Brendan James and Noah Kulwin. It’s an American history podcast, but with a focus on foreign policy. I started listening to the fourth season, which is about Afghanistan. It’s in progress and up to episode 8 of 10 as of yesterday.
When I’d caught up to episode 7, I started in immediately on their inaugural podcast, S01, which is about Iraq. It’s not just about the invasion of in 2003. It starts in the early 20th century, explaining how British machinations kicked off the whole modern-day colonization of Iraq.
“Blowback isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. It’s part of the algorithm of Empire.”
Don’t skip the bonus episodes because the interview with Naomi Klein was fantastic. [1] She noted that members of the Trump administration were absolute pikers as plunderers of public coffers, when compared with the Bush administration, which stolen dozens of billions at once.
It’s a very worthwhile podcast. I like to think that they—perhaps subconsciously—named the podcast after the excellent and important book by Chalmers Johnson.
The following essay is a mix of notes that I took while listening to the podcast interwoven with real-life experiences talking to people about similar topics during that time.
In the first half of S04E07, the hosts discuss America’s attack on Afghanistan, illustrating very clearly why America doesn’t care about Israel’s cruelty. America recognizes that Israel’s cruelty is nothing compared to its own. I wrote part of this before I’d listened to S01, which just piled on the shocking cruelty and disdain for human life inherent in every move made by the American Empire.
The hubris, the greed, the pettiness, the small-minded focus on personal gain—it’s breathtaking.
I lived through all of this; I was politically awake, paying attention. The names are all familiar. Most of them have been recorded multiple times on this blog (search Wolfowitz, Cheney, Bush, Condaleeza, or Rumsfeld). But the power of the podcast is such that it’s so well put-together that it’s more overwhelming when seen all at once.
While some might see an anti-American slant in this history podcast, there absolutely isn’t one. It’s just an honest assessment of what happened, complete with testimonials by the major players. They hang themselves with their own words. The podcast even includes America’s own justifications but, shorn of their mythical power, they’re made to stand on their own, which they do, in a way. They are obviously purely Machiavellian considerations of personal and national and empirical power—but there is no way to read any moral or ethical standing in them. These people did it for power and because they’re powerful. They did it for the money.
That’s also the point of discussing the situation in Israel. It’s only complicated if you lend any credence to obvious propaganda. Just focus on the facts. There are enough facts to decide. Once you’ve looked at history—at what actually happened rather than what Israel says happened or the justifications they give—Israel does not come out looking like an enlightened, democratic, or moral nation-state.
Instead, it seems to decide things based on protecting what it considers to be its own and lending as much empathy to human beings outside of their group as they would to stones in their front yards. In all of those ways, Israel is just like its big brother across the Atlantic.
That’s not judgmental! It’s just accepting reality. Once you’ve learned history—and this history isn’t controversial; no-one’s denying it; they brag about it!—you can’t unlearn it.
Like Israel, the U.S. also has special rules for special people. It has different laws for how Americans are to be treated versus foreign nationals. Do you remember the whole debate about spying after Snowden’s revelations? The only problem was that they’d been accused of invading the privacy of Americans. The rest of the world is just fine. Gotta keep an eye—and an ear—on those psychos in the rest of the world. There’s no telling what they might do. Better to get them before they get us.
Most Americans think that the Constitution applies only to American citizens.
This is the attitude of nations like this. It’s not pretty, but there’s nothing judgmental about recognizing it. You’d be a fool not to, given the overwhelming evidence.
The Israeli government itself offers only half-hearted and incredibly obviously mendacious defenses of its own moral basis for this system, but it doesn’t really care who believes it. Israel’s defenders, on the other hand, are incredibly invested in talking about anything but what has actually happened.
I was given a muddled history lesson on the Balfour Declaration of 1917 one night, as if that has anything to do with what is going to happen next—or with what has happened in the last 40 or 50 years. It’s incredible how focused people are on vaguely justifying Israel’s behavior when they (A) don’t seem to understand what that behavior actually is—i.e., the depths of depravity to which they go—and (B) how little that has to do with determining what happens next.
What is the world going to do about an obvious genocide unfolding in a very important place? Some countries have cut off diplomatic ties, while others offer full-throated support for genocide, including regular weapons shipments. They will all be judged by history.
People who are not involved have a chance to remain outside of the fray, but have a duty to inform themselves and understand what is actually, really happening—and what has actually, really happened. Which events are supported by incontrovertible evidence? Which ones are not?
Why are the ones without a shred of proof taken at face value while those with a preponderance of evidence are ignored? Those are the interesting questions.
It is not discriminatory to notice when someone is being an asshole and to then point it out.
Israel has trained the world to believe that focusing on its actions is antisemitic. There are other countries that do the same or much worse. Yes, that’s true! But those countries—e.g., Saudi Arabia or Myanmar, for two examples—don’t also demand that we simultaneously treat them as enlightened democracies, as leading lights of human civilization.
They’ve had it both ways for many decades. It’s just coming to a stop now (hopefully). It doesn’t matter that the U.S. never seems to get its comeuppance. That’s relevant only in a discussion of relative justice. The fact that the U.S. gets away with worse stuff all the time doesn’t absolve Israel of its own crimes. That’s not how crime and punishment and justice works.
Myanmar is apartheid; they have official second-class citizens. So does India, actually, with its caste system. A bunch of countries (Wikipedia) have some form of apartheid or another. But they don’t claim to be better than that—or they’re not surprised when they’re not taken seriously. We know that they are the way they are.
Israelis wants to be an apartheid theocratic state, but wants to identify as a democracy. How very modern. We should not allow that. It makes no sense for us to accept all of those claims. We don’t have any skin in the game, so we don’t have to accept it.
What strikes me the most is how similar the U.S. military attitude is to war crimes to the one that Israel has. Israel isn’t covering new territory here. The U.S. has done everything horrible that Israel is doing—and more. The U.S. gets away with slaughter on levels that Israel could never dream of. It discusses its war crimes just as brazenly as Israel does.
No-one who matters dares open their mouth about it. It’s shocking the level of U.S. sycophantism you’ll encounter in Europe. They’re totally blind to U.S. war crimes, almost all of the time. When challenged on it, they’ll usually admit it—but their default attitude is to never think about the Empire or the degree to which its crimes have damaged the world.
They support NATO, convinced that it’s a defensive organization. They don’t see NATO as being the hand-puppet of the U.S. This cripples the politically and gets them unquestioningly supporting very dubious, immoral, and self-destructive policies.
The Israelis bombed Palestinians on supposedly safe roads to which they’d directed those refugees? They learned it from the U.S. Look up highway of death from the first Gulf War in 1991. Iraqi forces were retreating from Kuwait, as directed by the U.S. They had given up.
It was a hodge-podge of civilian vehicles and half-broken-down military vehicles. The U.S. bombed every last one of them while they were trapped in a giant column in the desert. Fish in a barrel. There was nowhere to go. U.S. jets incinerated them all. There are close-up pictures of people carbonized behind the wheels of their vehicles.
Bombing civilians? There was the nuclear-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There was the fire-bombing of Tokyo. There was the relentless fire-bombing of Dresden. Israel regularly cites all of these as precedent. They’re just doing what Daddy did.
Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. No justice ever for any of those civilians. I get it! It must be frustrating for Israel. They can truly whine about being under the magnifying glass when their benefactor never seems to suffer the same fate.
That’s because the Empire determines where the magnifying glass goes. They run all of these international agencies. They threaten to withdraw funding if those agencies don’t focus on the official enemies. There is no way you can focus on the U.S. and, usually, Israel.
Now, after multiple decades, the wall of support is crumbling for Israel. Israel is no longer getting away with having its cake and eating it, too, as it has for almost six decades. So they cry “antisemitism”.
It’s absolutely Israel’s prerogative to call everyone who disagrees with any of their most-cherished policies an “antisemite”. But you’re a fool if you allow it to influence your thinking in any way. It’s not a fact of history. It’s subterfuge. It’s chaff. You’ll just tire yourself out fighting an endless stream of lies.
Still, The U.S., France, Germany, and Britain are falling all over themselves to make derogatory talk about Israel—let’s face it, anything less than fawning is basically unsupportive and therefore hostile—equivalent to anti-semitism.
If you’re going to end up being called an antisemite the second you no longer express full-throated support for every Israeli policy, then you might as well get it over with early. Don’t waste a second of your time with information that isn’t factual or is evidence-free. Don’t waste a second of your time trying to please an entity that’s going to throw you under the bus the second you’re no longer useful to it.
I get to hear about students chanting antisemitic slogans on college campuses. Interesting. Is there video? No? Not even after a month of allegations that this is happening? Not a single video? Not a single recording?
Huh. That’s weird.
Misdirection. Chaff. Subterfuge. Dissembling. Bullshit.
I guess I don’t have to take it seriously then. If this phenomenon was as prevalent as they say, so prevalent as to be worth prioritizing as a real concern, it shouldn’t be difficult at all to show a few seconds of evidence. And yet…there is none. So, you can just ignore the allegation until some evidence shows up. It’s remarkably easy.
That didn’t stop a Soviet-style show-trial in Congress, though.
You don’t have to be that moron that engages in a discussion just long enough to figure out which of the two possible sides to an argument they will put their opponent in. Instead of having a discussion about what each person knows and where there are opportunities to learn something, these people are there to teach the other person one thing: why the speaker is right and the listener, should they disagree with any detail, is, at best, misguided, and, at worst, the enemy.
And so it goes. Even if you try to hold yourself above the fray, people will struggle mightily to put you in a box, a pigeonhole. Oh, do you not believe every Israeli lie with your whole heart? Ah, then you must be pro-Palestinian. Pro-truth and pro-justice and pro-fairness is not an allowed position.
I’ve done a tremendous amount of reading and thinking about world affairs over the last 20–25 years, and more than my fair share of writing. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t try to distill my entire viewpoint into a one-dimensional sound-bite or tweet within the first minute of our conversation.
I’m personally not specifically against any country. Most countries are filled with lovely, innocent people—especially if you just leave them alone. I’m against countries doing horrible bullshit at the expense of their own or other countries’ peoples.
I will admit that it especially sticks in my craw when it’s mixed with hypocrisy. On this point, the Israelis are occasionally refreshingly open—when they’re not lying their faces off. The U.S. generally tries to stay on its high horse much longer.
This pigeonholing has got to stop. When I recently heard someone recite the history of the Middle East that they learned from their right-of-center, very neoliberal newspaper from Switzerland (NZZ, if you’re wondering), then I don’t think to myself “this person is obviously pro-Israel.”
I think to myself that this person has put in some time to learn about the history, which is great! But they spent their time with a reliably partisan source, from which they won’t learn enough real history. It meant that there was an irrational focus on the Balfour Treaty—like anybody today gives a shit what the British think now, or thought then—and on agreements that the Palestinians had failed to sign.
They say, now do you see? Do I see what? What argument are you actually making? That the Palestinians’ suffering is actually all their own fault? That’s your argument?
Stop beating around the bush, then. Just come right out and say it. You can’t? Why not? Because it sounds fucking ludicrous when you say it out loud? Because it utterly lacks empathy?
Because you’ve never imagined what it would be like for you to have to agree to something like the Palestinians were being asked to agree to? You know, after they’d been bent over the last few times they signed things or had things signed for them? (Now the Balfour Treaty is relevant. 😉)
A failure to agree to penurious conditions enforced on one in a quasi-legal, but obviously coercive process is sold to people by publications like the NZZ as the Palestinians being unable to agree to live with Jews.
I found myself thinking that these people are in such a hurry to learn what their viewpoint is expected to be—learning history takes time and effort and they’ve got other shit to do—that they leave their empathy, common sense, and bullshit detectors out of it, entirely.
When someone tells you that the history of Israel is of the poor Jews/Israelis just trying to figure out how to fit into a place that they consider their ancestral home and the current residents being greedy with their land—no bullshit detector goes off? They don’t wonder whether that’s the whole story?
These people don’t ask themselves—empathetically—what they themselves would do if someone came along and just said that half of canton Zürich just belonged to a bunch of Ukrainians now! Would they sign those documents making the annexation legally binding? Of course not.
But they very quickly believe exactly that story when it’s told about somewhere else. I don’t think that they’re pro-Israeli (as they quickly accused me of being pro-Palestinian). [2] I do start to think that they lack empathy and common sense.
They don’t wonder where 75 years of history went in their story. They don’t bother to try to find out what’s happening today. Their only defense would be that they are utterly unaware of what Israel is currently doing in Gaza. If they know, and they still think that’s OK, then they have completely lost their ethical and legal moorings.
You’d have to forget about talking about the Middle East and determine what their attitude is toward justice, fairness, human rights, international law, or equality. Because if you think Israel has any right to do what it’s been doing for decades, then you can only believe that might makes right.
In that case, you are a giant, giant hypocrite because you would never want to switch places with the Palestinians. You don’t have principles. Principles are those rules that you apply equally, regardless of whether the target is a friend or foe.
If it’s bad for Iran to be a theocratic state, then why is it OK for Saudi Arabia or Israel?
I’ll wait.
Oh. Because we have an empire to run.
No you don’t! You live in Switzerland! You don’t have to kowtow to Empire! You don’t have to buy into this militaristic us-or-them binary. Be. An. Adult. [3]
The person I was talking to the other night about Israel also laid out for me that the only solution to the current situation was for Israel to occupy the Gaza Strip again, to tighten the noose on those unruly bastards again. That will bring peace.
I mean, what an idiotic idea! It’s completely belied by literally every single instance of such a situation in the past! It has literally never worked that way. But it doesn’t stop fools like this from constantly proposing that the only possible solution is to provide even more weapons and money and support.
Well, actually, he said that the solution is to cut off funds—but he meant to the Palestinians! He’s convinced that they’re the ones getting tons of support! It’s incredible. Just an utterly broken bullshit detector.
Either that, or he has literally no idea what the power differential there is, what’s actually going on. In that case, it’s more a dereliction of duty, as he was the one who horned his way into a conversation about Israel to let us all know how it really is.
I tried to stop him, but at least I got an interesting essay out of it.
In a highly related matter, the article Made in the USA by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) discusses the closing of the Red Sea by the Houthis.
“The 10 Nation Red Sea coalition effort–called Operation Prosperity Guardian includes the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Canada, France, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles, and Spain. Not one country on the Red Sea agreed to join and only one Arab country–Bahrain–is a member. How’s that for diplomacy?”
“The US and Saudis have been “hitting them hard” enough to cause the deaths of 400,000 people (through bombs, drones, starvation and disease) since 2014. The US “escalation dominance” in Afghanistan ended with the Taliban stronger than it was before the war. It’s one thing not to have learned lessons about the self-defeating arrogance of Imperial power from Tacitus. It’s another level of stupidity altogether, for Atlantic Council gunslingers like Kroenig, to have elided the memory of the last 20 years of murderous futility, from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.”
But this is how every one of these morons thinks. This is how nearly everyone thinks. They split the world into “our side” and evil. Anything that gets in their way must be eradicated by military means, never by means of trade or just paying for stuff that other people have that you want. What a concept!
No. Plunder is the only way they know. A shockingly large part of the so-called civilized world cannot think outside of the confines of this binary: with us or against us. Anyone who refuses to allow themselves to be mugged by us must be against us. It is therefore valid to eliminate them before they eliminate us.
So we kill them, the money pops out like in GTA, and we continue along our way, whistling down the sidewalk into a rosy sunset, full of love for ourselves and our piety.
Everyone goes into a pigeonhole. With us or against us.
Most people are NPCs. They don’t understand anything about the world other than what’s been programmed into them. If you don’t agree with Party A’s talking points, then you must be in Party B. And vice versa.
Think outside the box!
What if the world just stopped selling weapons to the Saudis? What if the world paid to restore Yemen? The Houthis would knock it off immediately. That literally doesn’t even offer itself as a solution. It’s not military, so it’s not possible. It’s giving in to their violence—rather than them giving in to ours.
These people have no principles, no morals, not ethics. They are rudderless and garbage human beings. I don’t think they’re incapable of changing, of rehabilitation, but they need a lot of work before they can consider themselves to be moral beings, civilized members of a civilized society. Their inherent lack of empathy and knee-jerk, unthinking racism colors everything they do.
Is it racist? Yeah, it kind of is. They tend to think differently when the victims are brown than when they’re white. When the perpetrators are white or European (or Israeli), they are very generous in their interpretations, very forgiving of perceived crimes. When the perpetrators are official enemies, they believe anything and everything unquestioningly.
Yeah, it seems that people in Europe and America are pretty unilaterally being told that history began on October 7th and they’re absolutely delighted to believe it. I spoke to one person who winced when I said that history didn’t start on October 7th, so he’s definitely been primed to pigeonhole the shit out of anyone who uses that phrase. It was like watching the Manchurian Candidate awaken.
These people swallow loads of Israeli lies like they’re working a bathroom stall in a truck-stop bathroom. They don’t question because they don’t really care. Their instincts—bred into them by decades of propaganda—have already told them what they’re going to think.
They think that the worldwide protests are a bunch of Jew-hating, whiny young people who don’t understand how to fight terror. Typical pussies, the youth. No stomach for genocide when it’s necessary and right.
And we’re back to Blowback. It’s the same thing all over again. it’s the same same story as in Gulf Wars I and II. it’s the same story as in Afghanistan, as in Syria. These people don’t care about being catastrophically wrong again and again, as long as they themselves feel good about their opinion, as long as the solution is exclusively a military and not a moral one, and as long as they don’t pay a single tiny bit of a price for it.
And why should they care? They all fail upwards. They are rewarded for their behavior because ours is a savage, uncivilized world.
In that sense, we keep hearing about atrocities—and then we…don’t. They just kind of go away. Our lives basically don’t change. The U.S. or its clients commit war crimes. Some people get mad. It goes away. Nothing happens. GOTO 1
.
So I can understand these people’s point of view: Palestine’s been a humanitarian crisis for a long time—our whole lives, for most of us. It’s worse now, but these people have never been forced to give a shit before, so why should they give a shit now? People don’t think about justice, about fairness. They think about which opinion have they been told to have.
They have the luxury of having whatever opinion is the most convenient, because it has no effect on their lives anyway. And their consciences are clear because they honestly don’t care if idiots whose opinions they don’t care about think they’re bad people. They never have.
They have no moral compass, not really. They don’t get worried about things. They never doubt that they’re right. They spend a couple of hours watching TV—which has never lied to them before—and then start calling everyone else antisemites and terrorist-lovers and “Putinversteher”. It’s so easy to be a goddamned moron.
And they almost always end up backing the solution that will actually end up making the thing that they’re complaining about worse. When it gets worse, they complain about it more, and then believe the first fucking solution offered by the same idiots that made it worse the last time. They never learn.
They can only think in terms of “bigger, better, faster, more”, where what satisfies those conditions is spoon-fed to them by the companies that stand to profit the most. If something doesn’t go the way they only just recently started believing it should, then we should blow up whoever’s impeding it until they get out of our way.
Blow them up with the military! Sanction them economically! Starve those socialists! Kill those pesky Houthis! They’re blocking my Amazon shipments! They’re bad for my business!
Growth is king. There is no other solution to any problem. You can only grow or invent your way out of problems. You can’t ever wonder whether we’re on the wrong track. Reduction is never an option.
And the people that they claim to admire! It’s impossible to even fathom that they know anything about what these people really stand for—I have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re just wildly uninformed about their heroes rather than that they’re true monsters. You can tell that I’m talking about people I care for—otherwise I might be less generous.
They love Trump, Biden, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama—all sorts of monsters. They have no problem with entire cabinets full of the most dickish, mendacious monsters. I have to cling to a shred of hope that my friends and family simply don’t know anything about history, they know nothing about what these people have said, what they’ve done, what they stand for.
This has been happening to me for over two decades, so I’m used to it. But discussions where you’re constantly forced to waste time explaining that you can’t defend viewpoints that you don’t have, that have been ascribed to you by the person demanding justification—those discussions aren’t very fruitful. It’s bad enough when there is a massive information imbalance—I’m usually at fault here, as I have a lot more time and discipline to read hundreds of pages of news per week—but when your interlocutor is shooting for a quick and cheap checkmate, it’s even worse.
I’ve been told I love Obama, John Kerry, Joe Biden, etc. It’s all very tiring.
Just read the several thousand pages of my blog to find out what I really think, already. God, what the problem?
The YouTube algorithm is getting better! Just after posting this article, I was offered this video that illustrates perfectly what it’s like to be labeled and pigeonholed by a know-nothing know-it-all.
I was reminded of this silly thing again when I read an article called US Congress recommends placing assets at Lagrange points to counter China by Eric Berger (Ars Technica) about the LaGrange points—and that China is trying to take over the one on the dark side of the moon. There is no notion of cooperation. There is only competition. Either “we” get it or the Chinese do. There is no non-military, no non-aggressive solution.
Children in a fucking sandbox. We’re doomed.
]]>“Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those... [More]”
Published by marco on 28. Dec 2023 09:36:48 (GMT-5)
The article Undivided Loyalties by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post) starts off with this anecdote about Walter Lippmann.
“Lippmann, the celebrated editor, commentator and author attended a dinner party in Manhattan one evening, and at the port-and-cigars stage of the occasion the host announced an intellectual amusement. All those who advocated socialism were to stand on one side of the dining room, and on the other those who favored the capitalist system. The guests duly divided. And when they were done sorting themselves out, Lippmann sat pointedly alone at the table—the ultimate in either indecision or a refusal to stand for one thing and against another.
“[…] since hearing or reading the story I have thought many times about Lippmann as he sat by himself at the dinner table. One could argue he was a pitiful waffler, refusing to take a stand on a critical question of the day. Of what use are such people, you might ask. On the other hand, you may have it that Lippmann did take a stand, this stand being that there are virtues in both of the social and economic systems at issue, and it was his right to defend his position, a constituency of one.”
Or perhaps Lippmann truly thought it was a stupid game, without nuance, played for and by children.
If you have the luxury of not being forced to swear allegiance to a side, then you should take it. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you don’t have to make that choice. If you’re faced with someone or many someones directly trying to kill you—kill or be killed—then you will have to commit yourself wholly to one “side”. If you don’t have skin in the game, then you should indulge in the luxury of nuance.
Is there something useful to capitalism? Of course. Ditto for socialism. If you could have only one of them, which would you choose? Silly question. Any conceivable socialist society contains capitalist elements, and vice versa. It’s like asking whether you’d rather keep your brain or your heart. Let’s talk about something substantial instead.
Lawrence continued,
“We live in an era of violence, viciousness, injustice and cruelty that, if not unprecedented by way of scale and magnitude, is down there with the worst for its craven immorality and inhumanity. This adds another to the numerous responsibilities we bear in exchange for some time on Earth. We are called upon to declare ourselves and what we stand for. We are obliged —whether or not we accept this obligation, and the majority of us don’t—to act on what we stand for. We ought to make clear to what we dedicate our loyalties.”
OK, Patrick, let’s move to the “dedicate your loyalties” topic of the day: Palestine and Israel. Both sides want Israel to stop bombing. Israelis and their supporters wish they were able to stop bombing, but they don’t feel safe yet. They feel that Hamas might spring—whack-a-mole-like—from the ground again at any moment and reap another 1200 Israelis.
Palestinians just want the bombing to stop. But they also want the occupation to stop. Israel’s proposed solution seems to be to move the Palestinians anywhere else but Israel. “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.”
Palestinians can pinky-swear that they won’t attack again, but it’s an empty promise, one that they can’t really make. Because how can you promise your oppressor that you’ll never strike back without negating yourself? How can you promise that no-one among you will do so?
So there is no “sitting at the dinner table alone” in this question (calling back to Lawrence’s reference to the story about Lippmann), I suppose, but there is a requirement that we understand all sides and arguments—no matter how immoral we find them to be. We should be sure we understand before we decide.
If there are people on both sides who truly believe that the only solution is to eradicate the other … then we have to accept that as the starting point. Understanding will help illuminate potential solutions—escape routes, if you will—as well.
We also have to look the situation squarely in the eye and see it for what it is. As Lawrence puts it,
“[…] Israel began, with plentiful American support, its barbarous campaign to exterminate as many of the Palestinians of Gaza as it can before world opinion forces it to stop, while permanently displacing those it has not murdered. What we witness as the Israel Defense Forces attack Gaza is the exercise of power with[out] the merest pretense of decency, morality, or humaneness to veil it, to dress it up for the pitiful wafflers among us. It would take a Hannah Arendt to tell us if the deployment of power in this fashion is unprecedented in modern history, or in postwar history, or according to some other parameter. I would compare it, at a minimum, with America’s barbarity in Southeast Asia from the mid–1950s to the mid–1970s.”
Well, I think Israel has a long way to go in sheer numbers, but the indifference and single-mindedness—the arrogant presumption of infallibility—are very comparable.
So, the proposal is to get rid of unwanted people by slaughter and forced emigration. Hauptsach weg. We have to determine how large that group is, how intractable their opinion, and what solutions they would consider acceptable. If we’re honest, then we would have to plumb the depths of their solution space and determine how that affects our ability to plan a way for the future. Does the future contain them? Can it? If they’re made aware that they’re the problem and that the solution set being considered does not contain them, does their level of intractability change? If it does, if short-term self-preservation forces them to act against their own interests, to what degree is this a ruse from which they will retreat when the pressure is off?
How much influence do voices like this one have?
“Simcha Rothman, a member of the Israeli parliament for the Religious Zionism party, part of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition told the BBC this week that the UN has kept Palestinian refugees in Gaza for 75 years in order to hurt Israel and that the Gazans should be relocated in other places.”
He’s a member of parliament. He believes that Palestinians are a disease from which Israelis need to be freed. It’s an uphill climb if you have to deal with that as a starting point, I’ll grant you that.
In the Israel-Palestine conflict, there is no easy solution. There is one side with the absolute plurality of power and an absolute deficit of ethical underpinning not only for their current methods but also for the ways forward proposed by their most unreasonable representatives.
The temptation there would be to round up to punishing the “criminal” en masse—collective punishment because they’re all so unreasonable. In this, one would become just like the Israelis, treating them just like they treat the Palestinians, in their feigned mad hunt for Hamas terrorists in every living room and hospital lobby.
No, the solution has to consider the damage that has been done to all citizens of that area, whether or not they happen to have an elected representation over which they purportedly hold sway. Just as Palestinians are not the worst of Hamas, Israelis are not the worst of their government. We have to offer everyone a way out, a way to be their best, most reasonable, and generous selves.
What does that mean? If Israelis continue to believe that there are only upsides to exterminating or exiling a population from their land, then they have to be disabused of that notion. If they think that they can just take the land, settle it, and grow as they have, without any real drawbacks to their standing in the international community, then it should be made clear that this is not the case. We have to be open to the idea that it is entirely possible that they will not care.
Like children who understand that their parents cannot stop taking care of them, they might just push to get whatever they want in the short term. Perhaps shame and appeals to justice won’t work. We have to try, because I kind of have to believe that it will work. The world just has to be firm that the other, easier avenues are no longer available. The world has to convince Israel that it needs the world. It’s not an easy job.
Right now, Israel feels that they’ve built a moral justification for ethnically cleansing Gaza first, then the West Bank. It is banking on its own people being OK with that. It is banking on the international community not daring to punish it in any way that would dissuade it. So far, it’s been right. Dead right.
The Palestinians have no power and no leverage. They have to be convinced that we’re serious this time, that we’re really going to help them survive, get back on their own feet. It’s an uphill climb there, too. Just the sheer physical situation is already working against us. This is a population so traumatized and intellectually reduced by war and occupation that it may possibly already be too late.
A population of children who have only known occupation and trauma and malnutrition and war will not have developed any of the tools and nuance that they need in order to tread the narrow and winding path forward, avoiding the pitfalls that will deliver justification to an equally skittish Israel to leave the path. Just the malnutrition and dehydration alone, during their developmental years, are going to mean that the crop of the best and the brightest that they need for this endeavor is necessarily diminished. That’s just nature.
I’m not saying that they could never have done it! I’m saying that exigencies and deprivation of the sort these generations have experienced leave scars. They take primacy. It becomes all you know and you need a lot of breathing space and time to get to a place where you’re equipped to be diplomatic with the people who did that to you. That’s if, as outlined above, you haven’t been biologically diminished during formative years.
Any that manage to crop up anyway can be mown down with impunity. This serves to guarantee that only the least likely to struggle up past the ignorance imposed by occupation will survive. So, the Israelis target lawyers, scholars, doctors, journalists, and other thought leaders, until all that is left are exactly the slavering zombie-like hordes of haters they’ve been accusing all Palestinians of having been all along. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There is Hamas, which has, at various times, espoused their hatred of Jews and desire to eliminate them all. There are also more recent, official statements that are a good deal more moderate. There’s something to work with on both sides, if you deal with the more moderate parties. However, let’s round Hamas up to an intolerant organization that wants to eliminate anyone who isn’t cis-gendered, straight, male, Arab, and Muslim. That makes them the intellectual equivalents of Netanyahu, Gallant, Gantz, Ben-Gvir, and the like on the Israel side. There is shocking intolerance everywhere.
I’ve heard people say that the youth in America who support LGBTQA, BLM, etc. should not support Palestine because Palestine is actually against them personally. Those people are relentless in their efforts to conflate concepts. They conflate Judaism with Zionism, and they conflate Palestine with Hamas and ISIS and Wahhabism. They see no distinction.
The simple fact is that there are thousands of people being murdered and millions being made to suffer depravity for no other reason that they’re in the wrong place, of the wrong ethnicity and the wrong religion, and espouse the wrong opinions: namely, that they wish to exist without being subjugated to the sovereignty of rulers they did not choose. It is this that people are responding to.
Netanyahu responds that it is antisemitic to focus on war crimes committed by Israel when there are so many other war crimes to choose from on this planet. The youth of Europe and the U.S. are focusing laser-like on what Israel is doing. It’s a cute point, actually. He admits to the atrocities, but then says its antisemitic to notice only those atrocities. His solution would be, of course, to not notice any atrocities or, at the very least, to ignore those of Israel.
Look, people have their political awakening at different times. They didn’t listen when Yemen was briefly a topic. Congo was never a topic. It is the right thing to do to get Israel to stop what it is doing. It is wrong to stop there. But let’s take one thing at a time.
An empathy toward the Palestinians is a good start for a generation we’d thought had lost that capacity.
You can also go ahead and express empathy for the hundreds of thousands of Israeli citizens who’ve been uprooted by their own government’s murderous policies. You can empathize with an Israeli population that is now suffering existential fear because of those selfsame policies. You can empathize with the families of those innocents killed on October 7th.
But you can’t do only that. You can’t just see the suffering on one side and not acknowledge the suffering on the other, not if you’re interested in a long-term solution. Short term, though? Yeah, Israel has to stop bombing. This is ridiculous. Nothing good can even begin to happen as long as that goes on. The protesters are right that there needs to be a longer-lasting ceasefire.
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 23:01:20 (GMT-5)
The article German Group Won’t Present Arendt Prize to Masha Gessen Over Gaza Essay by Brett Wilkins (Scheer Post) is just one example among many recent ones, where both the German government and its cultural institutions are in increasing lockstep in controlling the narrative—controlling how its citizens are allowed to think.
In the case cited in the article, Masha Gessen will still receive the Hannah Arendt award, but it will be presented “without the participation of the Heinrich Böll Foundation”, whatever the hell that means. [1] Maybe they withdrew the cash prize? No idea. It doesn’t really matter. What matters is how demonstratively stupid, petty, and anti-intellectual the actions of the grand viziers of German culture are. Right now, I guess, but maybe they’ve always been this way and the moment has allowed them to emerge (entpuppen), spread their filthy wings, and soar.
I mean, I don’t really care about Masha Gessen particularly. I stopped reading her a long time ago, after they [2] went off the rails for Russiagate. I haven’t heard whether they’ve retracted any of the hysteria or fear-mongering from those years. But here they’re being punished for being on the right side of history, for writing absolutely factual information. Here is part of what they wrote,
“For the last 17 years, Gaza has been a hyperdensely populated, impoverished, walled-in compound where only a small fraction of the population had the right to leave for even a short amount of time—in other words, a ghetto. Not like the Jewish ghetto in Venice or an inner-city ghetto in America but like a Jewish ghetto in an Eastern European country occupied by Nazi Germany. In the two months since Hamas attacked Israel, all Gazans have suffered from the barely interrupted onslaught of Israeli forces. Thousands have died. On average, a child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes. Israeli bombs have struck hospitals, maternity wards, and ambulances. Eight out of 10 Gazans are now homeless, moving from one place to another, never able to get to safety.”
None of this is disputed. Israeli newscasters would proudly read that paragraph out loud in a primetime newscast.
The intelligentsia of Germany seems to have read that far, and then decided that it was beyond the pale to compare any possible situation—either in the past, the present or millennia into the future—with the awfulness that was a Jewish ghetto under Nazi occupation.
To them, Nothing will ever compare. Anyone who attempts a comparison is dead to Germany. They consider it antisemitic to even suggest that anyone has ever suffered or could ever suffer as much as the Jews. Jesus, it’s like watching that albino monk [3] castigate himself with that cat-o-nine-tails in The Da Vinci Code.
Gessen did go on, though, to differentiate the situations, properly crediting Germans for their unsurpassable cruelty and Jews for their unsurpassable victimhood—granting those features the fealty that Germany expects.
“The Nazis claimed that ghettos were necessary to protect non-Jews from
diseases spread by Jews. Israel has claimed that the isolation of Gaza, like the wall in the West Bank, is required to protect Israelis from terrorist attacks carried out by Palestinians. The Nazi claim had no basis in reality, while the Israeli claim stems from actual and repeated acts of violence. These are essential differences. Yet both claims propose that an occupying authority can choose to isolate, immiserate–and, now, mortally endanger–an entire population of people in the name of protecting its own.”
I’m quite convinced that they made these sweeping declarations about Gessen without having read—or perhaps without having understood—their essay. If this is a sign of things to come, then Germany has already gone completely off the rails. They’ve “lost the plot”. There is no coming back from where they’re going, not if they don’t control themselves soon. They can spend another century in the wilderness if they want to keep up this bullshit.
I’ve always said that Germany plummets headlong after its Lord and Master the United States, their slavish devotion to their conqueror a national fucking embarrassment. Now, they’re full-bore emulating U.S. anti-intellectualism and love of Israel. I’m really quite shocked that the German art and literature world is so riddled with idiots. I’d hoped for better.
The article leads with an unsourced tweet:
““The irony of calling for the suspension of a prize named after an anti-totalitarian political theorist in order to appease the authoritarian government of a rogue state currently committing genocide against an already-subjugated people seems to be lost,” said one critic.”
I was struck by my utter inability to tell which party he was from. My only hint was that he was calling for more money for Ukraine, so I figured he must be a Democrat. [1]
But all of the rest of the words were the same words a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 22:34:57 (GMT-5)
I heard part of this guy’s Jim Himes’s speech in the following video,
I was struck by my utter inability to tell which party he was from. My only hint was that he was calling for more money for Ukraine, so I figured he must be a Democrat. [1]
But all of the rest of the words were the same words a Republican would use to encourage continued war. Let me throw a bit of the transcript in here, taken from H5846 − December 12, 2023 (Congressional Record)
“Mr. HIMES. Madam Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Ohio for having this critical conversation today.
“Just outside this Chamber, on January 20, 1961, a new young President by the name of John F. Kennedy said, ‘‘We shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.’’
“We would pay any price, bear any burden, and meet any hardship to ensure the survival and success of liberty.
“What has happened to America that we shrink from our traditional role of standing up against tyrants, dictators, and genocidal maniacs in favor of liberty? What has happened to us?
“Why did Kennedy say those words? He didn’t say those words because he wanted to replicate the pain and tragedy of the world war in which he had distinguished himself as a war hero. He didn’t say those words because he wanted young Americans to die in East Asia or around the globe in the service of liberty.
“He said those words because he understood what he had learned in the 1930s and the 1940s, which is that brutal dictators don’t stop; they are stopped. They are stopped by those with the moral fortitude and courage to stop them.
“If we accede to where half of the Republican majority is today, which is that we are not going to support Ukraine in this fight, Putin will not stop. Soon, the United States will have no choice but to step in to stop Vladimir Putin.
“We hear these excuses: There is not enough accounting. There is not enough oversight.
“We didn’t hear that when we were supporting the Afghani regime, which is profoundly corrupt. We didn’t hear that about Iraq. We are only hearing that about Ukraine.
“We hear that we would like to know what the plan is for victory in Ukraine. Did anybody ask Winston Churchill, the hero of World War II, what his plan for victory was? No, they did not because he wasn’t sure. We stood by him because he stood for liberty and the moral clarity that this institution has now lost.
“If we think for one moment that Putin is the only one who is enjoying this moment, think about what President Xi of China is learning; think about what the Iranian mullahs are seeing; and think about what the North Korean dictator is coming to understand: That this Congress, when faced with the demand that we fight for liberty and freedom, we cut and run. That is what is being learned. Anybody who reads an iota of history will understand the tragedy that is behind that.
“It is time for this Chamber to find an iota of the moral courage and clarity that John F. Kennedy elaborated on just outside these doors. We do it because it is right. We do it because if we fail the Ukrainians, it may be the next generation of Americans and Frenchmen and British who have to stop Putin.
“Be assured that we will have to do that later in far, far more tragic circumstances than we have right now to stop—as John F. Kennedy called us to do—the march of tyranny and stand up for liberty.”
He hits all of the expected points:
In Greenwald’s segment, he compares this impassioned speech to the recent revelation that Russia has lost 85% of its troops. OMG we’re almost there! We can’t quit now!
But, wait….if Putin has lost all of his troops and hardware and stands before imminent defeat if we don’t lose our resolve, then why is Jim Himers telling us that Putin’s going to win not only Ukraine, but take over Europe if we don’t stop him? How could he do any of that if he has barely any military power left?
Which one is it? Both? It can’t be both. I bet it’s … neither.
Stop blowing smoke up our asses.
It’s funny. I’d stopped the video to write most of the rest of this article. When I restarted, Glenn continued with,
“He sounds exactly like Nikki Haley, exactly like Tom Cotton, exactly like Marco Rubio, exactly like Liz Cheney. Do you see how identical the Democrats and Republicans are? The establishment wings of those parties, when it comes to foreign policy—first of all, everything is Hitler, everything is World War II again. Oh, we didn’t ask Winston Churchill what his plan was; why would we ask the United States government what its plan is in this war?
“Because we’ve been caught in so many wars with no exit strategy, with no clear strategy, and all it’s done is eaten up American resources, destroy American standing in the world, and ended up causing us to lose so many wars. Because we had no plan, but you see how everything is World War II, everything is either: you support war and you’re Winston Churchill or you oppose it and you’re giving in to Adolf Hitler, just like Neville Chamberlain did.
“Beyond that, this is the same worldview as Republicans have. We’re faced with an axis of evil, composed of Iran, China, North Korea, Russia. This is standard Republican foreign policy orthodoxy that is coming out of the mouth of these desperate Democrats to fuel this war in Ukraine. But he also lied when he said there were no calls for safeguards or investigations into where the money went for Afghanistan and Iraq. There were all kinds of investigations about where the money went in Iraq and Afghanistan and what we found was, when we have no safeguards, billions of dollars disappear.”
Published by marco on 26. Dec 2023 22:14:14 (GMT-5)
Look, I know the title isn’t going to come as much of a surprise to anyone who knows me, but I’ve heard that he’s the “sane one”. I’d heard the same thing about Nikki Haley, though. It didn’t take at lot of research to belie that hypothesis. Here’s a very little bit of research on Vivek, based on the 20-minute interview below.
Dore let him talk. A lot. He didn’t even disagree with him, even though he said some pretty outrageous and clearly incorrect—at best, misguided—things.
Vivek is an idiot. He’s not a serious person. It’s a condemnation of our society and economic system that someone like this is considered to be highly educated and is just about a billionaire. It is a national tragedy that he thinks he should be President—or in any way involved with anything but the local politics of the HOA of the gated community where he lives.
He’s utterly convinced of his own cleverness, but he knows even less than Jimmy Dore about how the presidency works. He says that he wouldn’t get involved in Israeli politics because he wouldn’t be the president of that country. He probably even knows that that’s a shallow, stupid thing to say, but he’s so clearly delighted with himself for having thought of it that he can’t help saying it.
When Jimmy says that, as president, he’d be de-facto involved because he’d be funding Israel to the tune of $4B per year and he’d be in charge of nominating the UN representative, Ramaswamy ignores the funding part and just says that he doesn’t care about the UN. “I don’t think that the UN should be stopping Israel from doing what it’s doing.”
That’s not the only callous, wildly misinformed thing he says. This next one takes the cake.
At 13:25, he says,
“What does genocide refer to? The elimination of a race. Well, you know what? About 20% of the Israeli population is Palestinian. That’s more than the black or hispanic population of the United States. And you know, probably, arguably, the best place on planet Earth where Palestinians live the highest quality of life, with actual civic respect, is in Israel.
“So I do take issue with flatly using the word genocide—which refers to the elimination of a race—when the people of that race live the best possible life in the country that you’re calling the perpetrator of that genocide, and 20% of that population, more than the minority populations of this country, of Israel’s population, are Palestinians, who are living with rights within that country.
“[Jimmy: mutters “wow” very quietly a few times under his breath.]
“I think that there’s a lot of responsibility to go around for other Arab countries, for failed leadership, both of the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas all the way to Hamas’s failed leadership in Gaza, so I think that that’s something that, yes, involves a long history.
“That is not the role that I’m running for, of history professor at Harvard. I’m running for President of the United States, which I have my moral clarity, why I’m focused on running this country, without intervening there.”
I painstakingly transcribed his highly redundant waterfall of bullshit, just so you can get the sense of how he just keeps talking and repeating himself, in the hopes that no-one can get a word in edgewise to call him on his bullshit. I did take the liberty of adding paragraphs, so it’s hopefully easier to read than to hear.
He says that Israel actually protects Palestinians better than anyone and literally everyone else in the world is more responsible for the Palestinian plight than Israel, which is literally doing everything it can to help them. I suppose that’s one way of looking at it. Netanyahu and co. are grinning from ear to ear.
That line of reasoning reminds me of Bill Hicks’s joke Officer Nigger Hater about the trial of the cops who beat the ever-loving shit out of Rodney King, the act that sparked the LA riots. Below, I cite part of the joke from the link above
“Officer Coon looks in the camera and actually says, ‘Oh, that Rodney King beating tape? It’s all in how you look at it.’
“[…]
“‘All in how you look at it, Officer… Coon?’
“‘That’s right. It’s how you look at the tape.’
“‘Well, would you care to tell the court [incredulously] how… you’re lookin’ at that?’
“‘Yeah OK, sure. It’s how you look at it… the tape. For instance, well, if you play it backwards you see us help King up and send him on his way.’
“‘Hmmmm. Not guilty!’ [gavel bangs]”
Vivek didn’t stop there. He started repeating every wild myth about Chinese Uighur concentration camps, talking about how that’s what we should concentrate on instead of Israel. That those are far worse than Palestine.
Ramaswamy is like all the rest. He’s an asshat, an assclown who knows nothing, has no empathy, and has no principles. He doesn’t care about stopping crimes before they happen, especially when it’s his friends— or countries that he knows he has to be friends with in order to get elected as president—that are doing them—or where he thinks he can gain personal economic or political advantage.
I don’t know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he’s in prison, but it sure as heck looked... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 12. Dec 2023 22:50:15 (GMT-5)
The next in my ongoing series of people on tears, following Gideon Levy is on a tear, Amira Hass is on a tear, and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.
I don’t know whether he chose his shirt to signify that he feels like he’s in prison, but it sure as heck looked like a prisoner’s uniform.
0:00 Intro o1:10 The Four Food Groups of News 16:21 Ilan Pappé interview 16:53 Becoming and anti-Zionist 21:41 Israel is a plan of ethnic cleansing 34:04 Historical context of Oct 7 52:16 Alleged antisemitism on college campuses
At 39:00, Pappé and Aaron discuss how the Israeli government, if not most citizens are perfectly aware of the situation—it’s just that everything they’ve ever learned is that they should be just fine with it. In essence, “Yes, we understand that they have every right to want to kill us for what we’ve done to them, which is why we have to kill them first. What is so hard to understand about that?”
For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul?
As Pappé says, the logic of the argument is ironclad given a certain worldview, given a certain lifelong indoctrination. The solution domain is very simplistic; it is zero-sum—one side dies or the other. This is Starship Troopers come to life. It’s tedious. You don’t have the moral high ground. Your argument is that some pigs are better than others. Yeah, yeah. Dudes: we’ve considered and rejected such moralities. Try to keep up.
Matthew 16:26 (in the New Testament, which is maybe why it went unnoticed) says, “For what shall it profit a man though he should win the whole world, if he lose his own soul?”
“[…] this is very worrying because what the Israelis want to do is to use that event to absolve them from all their criminal policies before the 7th of October. And definitely to provide this moral support for what they’re doing now. And this is why we should insist on the context because otherwise you remain with a pretext […]”
“Aaron: I want to read you a quote that I know you’re familiar with. This is from Moshe Dayan. He is a famed Israeli military leader and in 1956, he spoke at a funeral for an Israeli soldier, who had been killed by some Palestinians living in Gaza. And Dayan said this, he said,
“‘let us not cast the blame on the murderers today. Why should we deplore their burning hatred for us for eight years? They’ve been sitting in the refugee camps in Gaza and before their eyes we have been transforming the lands and Villages where they and their fathers dwelt into our estate.‘
“That’s Moshe Dayan in 1956 so I wonder if you can talk about that quote and the significance of it in Israeli history I know it’s very famous. He goes on to say though that rather than making peace with these people, we need to be basically be even more aggressive.
“Pappé: this is probably you have to be an Israeli to to understand why it sounds so logical to Israelis to say that the Palestinians have all the right to hate us, to fight against us, even to kill us—and that’s why we have all the right to do the same to them.
“[…]
“If you go deeper you can see that this is actually a dehumanization of the Palestinians. It’s almost like a hunter who would say, ‘I really respect the bravery of the lion that I’m going to kill.‘ It’s not a respect for human beings.”
Pappé continued talking about how his otherwise-scientific and rigorously intellectual colleagues in Israel have an ethical structure composed nearly exclusively of logical fallacies in which they must believe so that the whole house of cards that justifies their belief that ethnic cleansing and genocide is not only OK for them, but they don’t have ever doubt whether they’re the good guys. Of course they are.
“[…] that this is the way to solve the issue—by expelling even more people—from someone who is dealing with law and international law is, again, if you face them with this astonishment about the immorality of these logical statements, […] I generally think they don’t understand what you’re talking about. They think they’re really building a logical kind of scientific argument here. No Palestinians in the West Bank = no problem [in] the West Bank, right? How the Palestinians are not there? Doesn’t matter. but they’re not there. This is very difficult to deal with because the inner logic of these people says to them that [it’s] not only logically right but also morally right.”
I have a few Israeli friends and work colleagues. I spoke with a couple of them on the First Chanukah. They remarked how the next week of planning days fell on Chanukah, to which we responded that the holiday is so long that it’s hard to avoid them all. One of them said, sure, sure, and you guys are taking off 10 days at the end of the year, and that’s somehow different? To which I responded that that is a very fair point. Touché.
Anyway, I wanted to get to the persecution complex. Look, I understand it’s not completely unwarranted. I get that. But when the other guy remarked that they had so many holidays because every holiday was a commemoration of a time when someone wanted to kill all the Jews, it felt jarring. It felt like it came out of nowhere, but I don’t think it felt like that for them—because that’s the default mindset.
That’s just something you say all the time. No-one questions you on it. The worst thing in the world is living in an echo chamber—with no-one to call you on your bullshit. They probably just forgot temporarily that the idea sounds like a massive persecution complex when you’re not suffused in that propaganda, day after day, year after year.
I didn’t take the bait. I mean, I thought it was a bit tone-deaf for an Israeli to complain about how persecuted they are when they’ve been running a literal human zoo for several decades … and they hate the animals in there. They have more weapons than God and have a giant brother who supplies more and more and doesn’t even own a leash.
I can understand thinking that situation, though, if you only read and watch the correct news. As Gideon Levy pointed out in his interview: you get nothing else on Israeli TV but IDF-supplied news. Dozens of millions of Americans manage it every day. Hell, half of Congress is still waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed American soldiers, so I understand how Israelis might fully be drinking their own Kool-Aid.
It’s just a pity because I wish my friends were smarter than that. Although sometimes smart guys don’t pay attention. I have another colleague from Argentina who doesn’t follow the news at all. He probably doesn’t even know that his home country has its very own Trump now.
At 01:12:20, Pappé talks about what he sees as the current genocide, which differs only in from what he calls the more insidious, incremental genocide that’s taken place over the last 56 years.
“The United Nation definition of genocide—contrary to what people may think—genocide is not always a total elimination of all the people of a certain identity. It’s also an elimination of people in small groups, if the elimination is because of who they are, not because of what they did. And it’s very clear that if Israelis say that everyone in Gaza—whether they are babies in incubators or doctors in a hospital or teachers in a school—are a legitimate target.
“I don’t remember who it was—one of the Israel General said, ‘you know if we kill three citizens alongside every terrorist, that’s okay.‘ Then this is genocide. This fits into the [definition of] genocide.
“What we did learn from the siege is the idea of an incremental genocide. Namely, that it doesn’t look like it if you look at it on a daily basis. The fact that babies die because there’s no food or because there’s no infrastructure in the—I’m talking about before the seventh of October—and there’s no infrastructure in the hospital or mother die at birth at checkpoints in the West Bank and only two mothers in one week, then you don’t get the picture.
“But if you accumulate these incidents, these cases, and you look over a period of 56 years, you can see that there is a destruction, there’s an elimination of people and the only reason they’re treated that way is because of who they are. And then it becomes incremental genocide, to my mind.”
Starting at 24:00, the Gideon Levy interview is just... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 11. Dec 2023 09:19:53 (GMT-5)
I was going to name this article a more serious-sounding “The situation in Israel according to Gideon Levy”, but then realized that I’d already written Amira Hass is on a tear and Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, so I put this one in the series.
Starting at 24:00, the Gideon Levy interview is just 100% gold. Katie and Aaron ask good questions, but it’s really more of a lecture on Israel, as she is in 2023.
00:00 Intro 01:43 The Four Food Groups of News 19:52 An Ode to Henry Kissinger 24:00 Gideon Levy interview 28:05 How Israeli’s live with occupation 35:27 Can the truce hold? 45:47 Is there any hope for peace? 56:15 What do young Israelis think?
The first 24 minutes are a bit uneven. I really like Aaron Maté and Katie Halper. I think they’re intelligent, witty, and have their ethics in the right place. But they drew several conclusions in the first 20 minutes that were absolutely the correct ones, but justified them with completely specious reasoning.
It’s the kind of thing that makes you so assailable. You don’t lock down your point because you made it in a way that someone who’s looking to disagree with you is going to be able to use to continue the discussion long after it should have been shut down.
I think that’s my problem with Mo Gawdat as well—his interactions have encouraged him to be lazy in his justifications for what I agree are the correct sentiments. This means I can’t really use anything he says as ammunition in my own arguments. It’s a pity.
Anyway…
This is a brilliant lecture by Gideon Levy. Katie and Aaron ask good questions, but from 24:00 onwards, it’s the Gideon Levy show. It’s just an incredible interview. I copy/pasted so much out of the transcript because nearly every word out of Mr. Levy’s mouth was interesting and pertinent and well-phrased. I’m glad he, too, noticed what great questions both Katie and Aaron asked. If you can make your friends watch one 80-minute video about Israel, this is the one.
As for the transcript? It’s OK, but needs a lot of cleanup to make it truly legible. It has no punctuation, has odd capitalization, and the poor thing just can’t bring itself to write the word “apartheid”. I’m not going to read anything into that.
I’ve cleaned up the transcription considerably, but I’ve not corrected any of Levy’s unique prepositions or formulations because I’m transcribing his speech, not translating it to SWE (Standard Written English).
At 28::30, he says,
“Look: you cannot maintain such an occupation—such a brutal reality—in your backyard without believing in some kind of of lies that you invent to yourself in order to make it easier for you. Because, finally, we are all human beings with emotions. And I don’t think that a normal human being can live in peace with such a brutal dictatorship in its backyard. Even if you don’t see it, but you know it’s there, in your backyard, just half an hour away from your home.
“So, you have to live in denial. Otherwise, you cannot stand it. So, first of all, Israel covered itself—protected itself—with all kind of walls of denial.
“Above all, the media which doesn’t show anything right now, anything from Gaza. You can hardly see Gaza on Israeli TV or [in] Israeli newspapers, and you can hardly see the occupation in Israeli mainstream media.
“But that’s not enough okay? So, you don’t see anything and you don’t want to know anything and all those agency helps you not to know. That’s not enough. You have to have also some kind of ideology, some kind of explanation, some kind of justification.
“So, the first thing you mentioned was really being the chosen people. We got it with the milk of our mothers. We were told from childhood that—even though most of us are secular or we think we are secular—that that we are the chosen people. And the examples, the expressions, are endless.
“Let’s take the international law. The international law was born after the Holocaust, after the World War II. And Israel, obviously, supports the international law. It’s something very important. It should be implemented everywhere—except of one place: Israel.
“For Israel, it shouldn’t be implemented. Why? Because we are a special case. You cannot deal us with the same tools that you deal Syria, Iraq, Russia—all kind of occupying regimes. No. We are not one of them. We are something special. And you see it again and again. You can also not tell us what to do because we know better.
“If you met Israelis, you always feel this arrogance. We know better. Why? Because we are better. Because what do you know folks? I mean who? Americans, Germans, French, Swedes—who are you to tell us?
“Secondly, is obviously this notion of victimization. As the late Golda Meir phrased it—in a wonderful way—after the Holocaust: ‘the Jews have the right to do whatever they want.’ In other words, we are the ultimate victims of history. But not only the ultimate victims. We are the only victims.
“Try to tell an Israeli that there were some other holocausts. He will be deeply offended. You cannot call the Armenian Holocaust the Holocaust because Holocaust is only ours and we are the biggest victims. Being such victims enable us to do whatever we want and nobody can stop us.
“Katie: […] and the third one is the dehumanization of Palestinians.
“Right. And that’s the most obvious one. Because you cannot colonize and you cannot brutally govern another people with the belief that they are equal human beings to you. Because then, who gave you this right to treat them like—I don’t even want to say animals, because animals, [Katie:] they’re treated better, [Gideon:] absolutely—who gave you the right?
“So the only way to live with it in peace, is to keep on telling yourself that they are not human beings like us. The Palestinians don’t love their children. Therefore, they are not—it’s not a big deal for them to see them dying. They were born to kill. They have nothing in their mind except of pushing the Jews to the ocean.
“That’s their nature. They are barbarians. I mean, that’s their nature. It’s not that it’s for a certain purpose. That’s them and they are not like us. We are human. We are human beings. And that’s the way to treat them because then they—there’s no question of human rights, if they’re not human—so why do they deserve human rights?
“You see it, by the way, in any occupation. I mean, obviously the Germans dehumanized the Jews. But, also, in many other cases, you cannot maintain an occupation without dehumanizing the other. […] In Africa look how they treated the colonies in Africa—total dehumanization. Because otherwise, how can you stand it and explain it to yourself?”
As an American, this rings true of how America ticks, as well. The U.S. also constantly speaks of itself as “exceptional”. It also does not recognize any higher authority than itself. It also dehumanizes every last one of its occupied peoples—Afghans, Iraqis, the list goes on. They dehumanize every last immigrant. Americans also think they’re better than everyone because they absolutely believe the story of exceptionalism.
This brainwashing works so well that they can visit foreign countries that are obviously running things better than in the U.S. and they will feel sorry for those benighted peoples because they don’t have the same TV programs, or they can’t drive everywhere they want to—they have to take trains! Or busses!—their food isn’t the same. The level of brainwashing is incredible.
At 34:00, he says,
“Now Israel is 24 hours, 7 days a week only in news programs. There are no other programs, so it’s an ongoing broadcast, which shows almost only either the agony of the families of the hostages or the hostages coming back or the soldiers in Gaza or telling us about the achievements in Gaza.
“Now there is the pause, so you see less from Gaza. But only the army. You will see once in a while some very small piece of one [or] two minutes showing some ruins in Gaza, just you know to—as a lip service: ‘here we showed Gaza.’ But it’s not really showing Gaza.
“We know very well that everything is also about framing. And this is always framed as something marginal, as something that we have to show you, but let’s get back to business. The bomb that fall on a house in the South and scratched the terrace—that’s the story of the day. By all means, not 5,000 children who were killed in Gaza. This is not in our agenda.
“So when it is being done systematically—that’s brainwashing.”
This also checks out in comparing with the States. The U.S. kids itself that it has two silos, but to a sane person, they look pretty much the same. They only disagree on relatively minor issues. I don’t mean that abortion rights is absolutely minor but that it’s minor when compared to a $1T-per-year military that stamps its bootprint on the world, over and over.
At 36:00, he says,
“The national sentiment right now—and polls show it—is in favor of continuing the war. And in a very clear majority. Israelis, after the 7th of October, feel that they cannot get back to normality before punishing Gaza and punishing Hamas and smashing Hamas—crashing Hamas. That’s almost common in Israeli discourse, that this should happen.”
At around 44:00, he talks about how the Kibbutzim were mostly old socialists, peace activists, who now feel betrayed by the Palestinians. The Kibbutzim are lumping Palestinians and the most militant Hamas all together, but this was inevitable. They, too, are going to succumb to some of the brainwashing.
The Kibbutzim feel that they’re helping someone, and then that someone bites the hand that feeds. This is powerful. Levy says that the core of the left, the peace movement, is breaking up and moving to the right now, as well. He says that this is not surprising, but that it’s one of the most lamentable side-effects of the attack and counterattack—there will be even less political air to breathe for anyone pushing for a reconciliation or an equitable and just one-state solution.
After that, he talks about the shame Israel feels about having been taking by surprise by a few hundred people on motorcycles. This shame and embarrassment drives the intensity of the counterattack, as well.
At 46:30, Katie asks if there is any hope for a one-state solution—with equal rights, because there already is a one-state solution, just an apartheid one. He says, “not for the foreseeable future.” He continues,
“Israelis will not wake up one morning and say, ‘oh, this occupation, this apartheid, we don’t like it so much. Let’s put an end to it. This will never happen happen. It will only happen when Israelis will pay for it, will be punished for it. And this is not going to happen because the International community basically supports the occupation. The United States supports the occupation, actively, passively […]”
Katie asks how the U.S. could end the occupation. Levy responds that,
“What is easier than this? Israel depends so much on the United States. The aid is so generous—more than any country in the world. God knows why, but Israel gets more than any other country in the world and, believe me, Israel is not the poorest country or the country that deserves…but that’s the choice of the United States and that’s your own choice. You have to decide to whom, but why not to condition? It was never conditioned. This is so outrageous.
“[…]
“Why not, for example, condition the aid by at least stopping building settlements? You want our aid? You have to stop this criminal project. What is so complicated in this? No American president, no administration, went for it.”
At 51:00, he says,
“I guess you know that in Israel there are not many political discussions anymore. In the last decades, nobody speaks about the long future. […] Everybody’s only in the present. Ask an Israeli,
“‘Where do you want to go? Where are you aiming? Where is your state aiming? What is the end game? What is your goal? What will be here in 20 years time? In 30 years time? […] What do you want to happen here?’
“You will not get an answer, except [from] the very right extremist, who will tell you, very clearly to expel the Palestinians from here, and then we’ll have a real Jewish State between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. That’s our plan—we are aiming there. But that’s, until now, a minority. All the rest have no plan and and there is no debate. There is no debate.”
At 52:00, he says,
“[…] you come and see campaigns to the elections. The occupation is not present at all. Election after election, people speak about the most minor and stupid issues—and the occupation is not on the table at all. Not in favor, not against—doesn’t exist.”
“[…] don’t forget that I’ve not been in Gaza for the last 15 years because Israel doesn’t let any Israeli journalist to go to Gaza. So most of the contacts are also much weaker now because it’s 15 years that I’ve not seen none of my friends there.”
“What we see here, that generation after generation, they become more ignorant about the conflict. They know nothing. They really know nothing. You will be surprised. I can ensure you, any average American student in University or in college—for sure. any European—knows much more about the conflict than an average Israeli. We live in denial. And therefore, we don’t want to know anything. Not only about life in Gaza today—about the whole history. the context. The context is not present.
“[…]
“I’m amazed, again and again, how little—there are obviously very knowledgeable young people in Israel, yeah—but the majority, they know nothing. And they don’t want to know nothing. And they hate the Arabs like hell.”
This checks out with Americans as well. Just the most shocking, willful ignorance about their own recent history. They just forgive themselves of their own crimes by allowing their propaganda to quickly and efficiently erase any of their home country’s crimes from their memories.
At 01:15:00,
“I say it for many years I never made a poll and it’s not systematic, but I can tell you that many more Palestinians that I met want to live together with the Jews—in equality, in justice—but are ready to live with the Jews.
“Most of the Israelis that I know—including the leftists—wants separation. We are here. They are there. So that’s, first of all, a difference in their sentiments. Obviously there is a bigger majority for the one-state solution among the Palestinians rather than among the Israelis, who, for them it’s unacceptable at
all.”
I think the really important thing to remember is that there already is a one-state solution right now. It is an apartheid one. There is only one state: Israel. There are a lot of people living in Israel who have different rights from the ruling class. This is not unlike other countries, like Switzerland, where over 30% of the resident population cannot vote because they do not have Swiss citizenship. Of course, the path to citizenship, if not easy, is, at least in principle, possible.
I just wanted to point out that most countries exist somewhere on this spectrum, from 100% perfect equality to outright apartheid. Israel is quite far out on one extreme.
Levy continues,
“Now, what any American or Israeli should know is that nothing—but nothing—in our lives—in your lives—looks the same like someone in your same age, same social-economical background in the West Bank. And we are not speaking about the cage of Gaza. We are speaking about the West Bank and we are not speaking about times of war, but the routine.
“The routine of the occupation is the most cruel one because, at any given moment, the army can penetrate to your home—mainly at night—with dogs, wake the whole house up, make a search without any legal supervision—obviously. At any moment, the army is—the raids are every night, everywhere. At any given moment, you can be arrested with reason. without reason.
“At any given moment, your parents can be humiliated in front of you and children can be beaten in front of you. This can happen in any moment and. above all. Your life is so cheap and you can be so easily shot at any circumstance. You don’t have to do much in order to be shot.”
I’m thinking that there are certain echelons of U.S. society who can absolutely understand this feeling. Mr. Levy should read more news about U.S. policing. I’m sure it’s worse in the West Bank, but man does this situation rhyme with the one facing the poor and minority populations in the U.S.
“[…] much worse than this, is the lack of dignity. You know that any 18-year-old soldier can do with you whatever he wants. And the same for an armed settler. He can do to you whatever he wants and nothing will happen to him. […] You are totally helpless. You have no one to come to save you. No, I mean everyone in every other society in the world can call a police, can call an ambulance, can call soldiers. army. someone to come and guard you, to protect you.”
I understand that he knows his own country the best, but Israel absolutely does not have a lock on police repression of minorities. Or on citizen lynchings of minorities. I’m quite sure that people all over Europe and the U.S. would definitely be able to tell of similar experiences. Do you think people are setting the banlieues in Paris on fire for fun? Does he not read any news from the U.S. about police brutality? Maybe he should read The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander (2012).
“Life has no perspectives for anything—and everything we say here is so much better in the West Bank than in Gaza.”
Katie’s final question was about why a two-state solution is no longer feasible. Levy answered,
“In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, there are over 700,000 Jewish settlers. Part of them are armed, all of them are represented in Israeli politics as the strongest political pressure group. They have ministers. They have members of parliament They have high officers in the army, in the media, everywhere. They are a very well-organized, very powerful group in Israeli society.
“There is no reality in which anyone will be able to evacuate them from their settlements. 700,000 people you cannot evacuate. If you don’t evacuate them, there is no viable Palestinian State. Anyone who had visited the West Bank understands that there is no room—no room! You cannot drive in the West
Bank more than 10 minutes without seeing another settlement. What kind of
Palestinian state will it be when in every corner there there is an armed
militant violent outpost. Who is going to to challenge it? And how will it be a Palestinian state with 700,000 settlers?”
At the very end, he addressed the de-facto one-state solution, summarized better than I’d done above.
“[…] what is lasting already for the last 55 years is a one-state [solution]. We are all living in one state. A refugee in Jenin. a shepherd in Hebron, and me in Tel Aviv, we live under the same regime, under the same authority: the government and the military of Israel. He is more under the military. I more under the government.
“But, finally, we are living in the same state. He’s using the same currency that
I use. He is registered with the ministry of interior exactly like I do. He is living under Israel, like me, under the state of Israel.“So the one state is here. The only problem is its regime and its regime is anything but democracy. I will not get into it, because it’s late, but it looks like apartheid, it behaves like apartheid, it is apartheid. I don’t know anyone who went to the West Bank, saw a settlement—the Jewish settlement—on one side, a Palestinian village next by. The Jews have all the rights in the world. The Palestinian next by have no rights whatsoever and we’ll be able to call it any other name but apartheid.”
I’ve been trying to figure out who he looks like. He’s an Israeli Robert de Niro.
In this video, there was some interesting stuff,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 17:20:05 (GMT-5)
I’d never heard of Saul Williams before, but I very much like Abby Martin’s work. I recently published an article called From their mouths to God’s ear, about a video of hers from 2016, where she interviews Israelis in the streets of Jerusalem.
In this video, there was some interesting stuff, but I felt that they accompanied each other down the rabbit hole a bit too much.
They formed their own little echo chamber. It was a fine discussion, but no progress made to figure out how to reach people who don’t already think the way that they do. They just laughed about how stupid everyone else is. I get how frustrating it can be when you see that people are literally denying a holocaust and then claim that they have no idea what’s going on, that you’re the crazy one for even believing something so horrible. Being gaslit is no fun.
But, man, you’ve got to stop cutting off friends who don’t already think right. You’ve got to stop thinking that people are evil rather than ignorant. That’s not the way to get your minority to be a majority.
Maybe they know much worse people than I do. Maybe they have much more contact with people who don’t think like them.
At one point, Saul says,
“Israel is a safe space for sexual predators.”
Um, ok. You sure about that? Or are you just believing anything that your silo publishes?
I looked it up and found the article With pedophiles seeking sanctuary in Israel, one way parents can protect kids by Melanie Kidman (The Times of Israel), which writes,
“According to Jewish Community Watch, at least 34 pedophiles in their sex offender database have moved to Israel in the past decade under the Law of Return, one of the Israel’s founding pieces of legislation, which guarantees every Jew a place in the country. An additional 12 pedophiles have moved to countries other than Israel.”
Ah, OK. 34 people over 10 years. And the “right of return” applies to everyone Jewish, regardless of your criminal record. That’s their law. How could the Jewish state have been founded on a law that rejects the right of return to Jews who’ve been judged by the societies that they are ostensibly fleeing?
I mean, can we conceive of a situation in which a society accuses a Jew of pedophilia in order to arrest them? You know, Saul, as a black man, should be able to conceive of a situation in which an ostracized minority has false charges thrown against them. But, instead, he laughs about how awesome it is that Israel turns out to be utterly evil. You really can’t give in to that temptation.
They’re veering very close to objectifying all Israelis as their country. What would they think of people who did the same to them, as Americans?
]]>“The question in the survey asks respond[ant]s whether they “strongly agree,” “tend to agree,” “tend to disagree,” “strongly disagree,” or “neither agree... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Dec 2023 16:16:58 (GMT-5)
The article New Survey Showing Public Ignorance About the Holocaust Among Young Americans wrote the following about a survey about the Holocaust.
“The question in the survey asks respond[ant]s whether they “strongly agree,” “tend to agree,” “tend to disagree,” “strongly disagree,” or “neither agree nor disagree” with the statement that “the Holocaust is a myth.” In the sample as a whole, only 7% picked “strongly agree” (2%) or “tend to agree” (5%). But among young people (age 18-29), the figure was 20% (8% “strongly agree” and 12% “tend to agree”). This is the figure that has understandably caused consternation.
“Some of that outrage is justified. The Holocaust is one of the worst events in all of human history and one of the best documented. There is no even remotely plausible reason to consider it a myth. Such claims are in the same boat as those of people who think the Earth is flat, or that the Moon landings were faked.”
The upshot is that too many people agreed with the statement that “The Holocaust is a myth.”
What a stupid question that is, though. So simplistic. It’s like the moron Congresswoman in a recent hearing who kept asking university professors to answer the question of whether it breaks the honor code of the university to call for genocide on campus. She equated intifada with calling for genocide, but demanded that they answer YES OR NO.
But Congress is filled with idiots who know nothing of history or, indeed, of words. They are busily equating anti-Zionism with antisemitism—now part of U.S. law—and now want to equate “intifada” with “genocide”. They just want to punish speech, force mindsets, control the narrative. Most of them probably have no ideas why they’re even doing it anymore—other than they’re convinced that their self-preservation is inextricably bound up in it. They don’t care at all that their stupidity is steamrolling things more worthy than they.
If one is forced to choose an answer to the question of “do you think people should be prevented from calling for genocide?”, then the answer is NO.
I know, the question was more like, “Is calling for genocide banned by the code of conduct on your campus? YES OR NO.” The presidents couldn’t say YES OR NO because they were afraid that their answer of “NO” would be wildly misinterpreted. That was silly, of course. You might as well say what you believe because those assholes that want to are going to wildly misinterpret you anyway.
Speech is free. Or, at least, it should be. Anyone can say any old dumb thing that they want.
But the requirement to answer yes or no is utterly without nuance.
On the last one, most people would want to add some examples where they think it might be OK to kill someone. You know, so no-one thinks you’re a psycho.
YES OR NO.
It’s the same with the question about the Holocaust. Is the Holocaust a myth? YES. Indubitably. It is one of the strongest, most enduring myths that the western world has. The rest of the world cares a lot less about it, understandably.
Is it based on events that actually happened? YES. Indubitably.
Is the juxtaposition of the Jewish Holocaust granted much higher precedence than the other mass killings that occurred at the time or have occurred since? Gays, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, Cambodians, Congolese, Rwandans, etc.? Of course it is. That’s the mythologizing part.
Was what happened to Jews during the Holocaust more horrific than what happened to everyone else at the time? YES. Was it exponentially worse? Debatable. Hard to say. Need more data.
This takes me to the next part, where Somin compares believing that the Holocaust is a myth to believing that the Earth is flat. That is an utterly specious comparison. The Earth is clearly not flat. There is no way to exaggerate its roundness to make it seem less flat. The myth of the Holocaust has been carefully constructed over decades to be what it is today, with the societal impact it has today.
Historical fact does not have the same character as scientific fact. The statements 2 + 2 = 4
and “the Holocaust was the worst thing that every happened to any group of people” are not in the same epistemological ballpark.
There are many other slaughters and cleansings that have no impact on modern thought, like the Armenian genocide, the Nakba, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam. What the U.S. only stopped doing as recently as 5 years ago in Iraq devastated an entire country. Libya is gone. For what?
No-one talks about that in the same hushed tones as the Holocaust, which was perpetrated three generations ago by the Germans. The one on our temporal doorstep, perpetrated by the U.S. — this one doesn’t get mythologized. Not yet.
The moon landing is like the Holocaust. It is anchored in undeniable fact, but it, too, has been mythologized, the rough edges of actual history worn smooth to ease the retelling.
I find it sad when otherwise intelligent people fail to see the traps laid by such infantile surveys. They are gotcha questions. Anyone with any subtlety of thought would refuse to participate in it, leaving only literal-minded and unquestioning respondents, eager to give the “right” answer. That shows the value of surveys such as these, to be honest.
Somin goes on, in his all-knowing way,
“Some people who believe the Holocaust is a myth really are anti-Semites, neo-Nazis, or adherents of other horrible ideologies. But many are probably just ignorant without being malicious.”
See? For him, there is no category of person for whom such a YES OR NO question is far too simplistic to express one’s position. There is no room for nuance.
“It is also important to emphasize that ignorance about the Holocaust is a facet of more general widespread public ignorance of history, politics, and economics.”
I wholeheartedly agree with him that people don’t know enough about history, politics, economics, etc.
As I wrote above, we should be lamenting the fact that U.S. citizens know nothing about the holocausts perpetrated by their own country rather than lamenting the fact that they don’t know about a horrible event that happened 80 years ago on a different continent.
Hell, as Gideon Levy says, many—if not most—Israelis have no idea what’s being done in their name just dozens of kilometers away from their homes. Things have come full circle for the Jews residing in Israel. They have become that which they despised in the Germans: they sit by while atrocities are committed in their name. Their media ensures that they cheer it on, rather than trying to stop it. Americans are no less guilty of doing the exact same thing in they myriad foreign wars fought by that Empire.
Coming back to the inquisition of the university presidents, the thing I think that too often goes unremarked is that people seem to so easily accuse others of wanting genocide, of having called for it deliberately. There seems to be no downside to making this accusation; the onus is on the accused to wriggle out from under it.
Accusing someone of wanting genocide is pretty is a very strong accusation. Does it matter what you think you’re saying? Or does it more matter what people think they’re hearing you say? That is, are you responsible for shutting your mouth because some people will misinterpret what you’re saying? You know, because they’re stupid? Or just don’t understand your language? Or they’re disingenuous and trying to shut down any statements that don’t correspond to what they already believe?
I think it’s perfectly possible that a lot of the fools I’ve seen recently would be completely incapable of understanding any line of reasoning I have, even the one outlined above. [1] They would see no reason for nuance—because they themselves are incapable of it.
Instead, we get the kinds of inquisitions that Congress is having with increasing regularity.
From Israel Supporters Would Defend Literally Any Israeli Atrocity by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix):
- Arbitrarily declare that common innocuous pro-Palestine chants are actually calls for genocide.
- Pretend there’s an emergency epidemic of university students calling for genocide on campus because they use those chants.
- Kill pro-Palestine speech on campus.
That’s a whuppin’ by Caitlin Johnstone (Twitter)
I wholly acknowledge that maybe I’m not being as clear as I think I am, but that doesn’t mean I mean what you think I mean.
That’s also why I hid this admission in a footnote, which no-one reads.
Aw, who am I kidding? No-one reads my blog.
I can be as monstrous as I like, hidden in plain sight.
These people are rudderless, adrift. They have no sense or irony, no morality, and no... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Nov 2023 22:37:12 (GMT-5)
A while back, I read the article Colorado Lawsuit’s Strategy for Keeping Trump Off Ballot Is Starting to Spread by Marjorie Cohn (Scheer Post), which is about subverting democracy in exactly the ways that the author fears that Trump would.
These people are rudderless, adrift. They have no sense or irony, no morality, and no self-awareness. It makes them so stupid. This mess is just embarrassing for everyone involved.
This gleeful horseshit where people are delighted that they’ve found some old clause of some document that seems to kind of maybe apply to Donald Trump if you take all of the allegations at face value—while reveling in the fact that the article you’ve found applies without a conviction, so you don’t have to bother with the pesky interference of a justice system—has got to stop.
These people don’t realize that their fervor in preventing what they deem to be the greatest threat to democracy ends up making them do things or support things or say things that make them actually a much-greater one. If you think your job is to stop Donald Trump from being elected, then do it by finding an alternative that people find more appealing, not by shoving a turd sandwich in their mouths and ordering them to chew.
What the hell, people? You’re perfectly happy doing something so anti-democratic in order to get your way and claim that you’re “protecting democracy”. If that’s the best you’ve got, then please shut up and sit down while the adults hash this one out for you.
If you’re interested in more detail, then the article Donald Trump Should be on the Ballot and Should Lose by Steven Calabresi (Reason) talks about how the constitutional angle is almost certainly a non-starter.
“[…] the University of Pennsylvania Law Review law review article by William Baude and Michael Paulsen, The Sweep and Force of Section Three, which argues that former President Trump is disqualified from running again for President. A draft law review article taking issue with Baude and Paulsen, co-written by Josh Blackman and Seth Barrett Tilman, entitled Sweeping and Forcing the President into Section 3: A Response to William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen makes a good case that what happened on January 6, 2021 was not an “insurrection” and that the Baude/Paulsen reading of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is wrong. I think Josh Blackman and Seth Tillman are more likely right than not. At a minimum, this is a very muddled area of constitutional law, and it would set a bad precedent for American politics to not list a former president’s name on election ballots given the confused state of the law surrounding Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Anyway, this was a couple of months back, and I haven’t heard anything about keeping Trump off the ballot anywhere. I just hear about how he’s polling much better than all of the other Republican candidates combines—and polls much better than Joe Biden.
Instead of keeping Trump off the ballot, I’ve heard that the remaining Koch brothers are backing Nikki Haley—who’s even more cuckoo for cocoa puffs than Trump. It wouldn’t matter if she ended up being the Republican candidate. Just like there is half a country full of people who would never vote for Trump, there’s half who would never, ever, ever vote for Biden.
Biden’s a shit sandwich. Even his own party hates him. God knows why they’re running him, but they are.
You know the New Hampshire primary? The first one in the nation, ever election? Yeah, that one. Well, the DNC didn’t like Biden’s chances there, so they pulled him off the ballot in the Granite State. They then announced that the first state to vote next year would be South Carolina, which loves Biden for whatever reason.
Funny story: some other dude’s slated to win the Democratic primary in New Hampshire—because the Granite State does not like to be told what to do. Now the DNC is backpedaling and, since it’s too late to add Biden to the ballot, they’re running a write-in campaign for Biden in NH. I am not kidding. [1]
It’s almost like the Democrats are trying to let Trump win.
Maybe they feel sorry for having stolen the election in 2020. [2]
This footnote is for,
For the record: I do not believe that the election was more crooked in 2020 than in any other year. I think both parties work very hard to steal every election, with varying rates of success. It is technically true that the Democrats stole the election in 2020, but that is true of nearly every election in the U.S.
Bush stole it in 2000 and 2004. The Democrats spent years bitching about having had the election stolen by Trump in 2016, until they segued into the Russiagate farce. Trump and his coterie of hangers-on are bitching about it having been stolen in 2020.
They’re all right, but that’s how it works. Election theft is baked in.
There is so much gerrymandering, obscene campaign contributions, and voter-disenfranchisement … how could you think these elections weren’t stolen? Or do you still believe that the U.S. has an actual, functioning democracy?
Published by marco on 28. Nov 2023 22:50:41 (GMT-5)
A while back, I took the following notes from the article ‘Innocent Israelis’ by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post). These comments are from an ordinarily lucid reporter writing on October 11th. We didn’t know then what we know now, but we did know that collective punishment is wrong, and that there is most certainly such a thing as the concept of a innocence. Lawrence in this article seems to be arguing for a pretty strict restriction of the definition of that word, as illustrated below.
“To assume the responsibilities that fall to us is to preserve some claim to innocence, it seems to me. To develop within ourselves a sense of empathy, or whatever is the opposite of indifference, is equally to retain or regain our innocence. Again, there is no defending the shootings at Re’im. But only those among the revelers who understood and assumed their responsibility for Israel’s conduct and all the Yoav Gallants running the apartheid state can fairly be counted innocent of what we must recognize as a criminal regime. There is an honorable movement of such people in Israel, let us not forget. It is hard to imagine any of its members partying on the Gaza border, but let us allow for the possibility. For the rest, they must be counted as complicit.”
So, if you’re a racist against Palestinians or Arabs, if you were aware of what the Israeli state was and is doing to Gaza, then you’re not innocent. So what? You’re still a civilian, right? You’re not innocent, but…what is he saying? That they deserved what they got? That seems pretty breathtakingly stupid. It is the argumentation of Osama bin Laden, it is the logic of Netanyahu and the Israeli state right now.
“To consider the Re’im attack as an event in history, it seems to me there is something very off about a group of young and privileged Israelis having a carefree weekend in the sand hard by a land of daily, incessant suffering, a place where the innocence of its children and youth has been stolen by the state wherein the partiers do their partying. Something very off: By this I mean the revelers betrayed themselves as profoundly irresponsible, so it seems to me. Maybe unconsciously and maybe not, to me they displayed that indifference toward the lives of others for which many Israelis have unfortunately made themselves well-known.”
Ok, so that’s a slightly different thing that he’s saying in the last part. It is the least-generous interpretation possible, but it unfortunately has got more truth in it than we’d like to admit. I would just like to add that Israelis are hardly unique in this regard. This is what all kinds of people do. We become very accustomed to a situation, no matter how unethical, not matter how immoral, not matter how racist and eugenic.
The situation for Israel is that they have been taught that they are the chosen people, living in relative luxury, the world jealous of them. Perhaps I can empathize because this is the story that Americans are told as well.
When you benefit greatly from a situation, when your quality of life is good, you can easily look away from the giant heap of skulls and bones on which your so-called civilization is built. [1]
There are untold places in the “civilized world” where the rich live cheek-by-jowl with wildly impoverished neighborhoods, places of to-the-rich completely incomprehensible and unimaginable suffering and desperation. Gated communities. Favelas. Slums of all kinds.
Of course, of course, Palestine is, by all accounts, much, much worse than most places. It is, as Norman Finkelstein says, a “concentration camp”, an “open prison”. Nearly all residents were born into a concentration camp and have known nothing but prison their entire lives. The majority are younger than 18 years old. The majority never voted Hamas into power.
Even if we don’t live cheek-by-jowl with the oppressed, we still benefit every day from them, casually, both in our own societies and in others.
We want desperately for Hamas and the Palestinians to be uniquely savage terrorists, alone in their ability to inflict unspeakable harm on innocents—so that we can help ourselves forget our complicity in these acts, done in our name, or for our ultimate benefit.
We need their attacks—and the attacks of all whom we deem enemies, but who are really just “other people who have stuff that we want to have for free”—to be “unprovoked”. We want to ignore all the evil that we’ve done, while highlighting the inhumanity of everyone else’s.
We can’t have done anything to have aroused anyone’s ire. We can’t be made to even consider changing anything about ourselves or our lifestyles that would prevent something like this from happening in the future. We are an unsullied people. There is nothing we have done that might be considered untoward that we should perhaps stop doing in order to prevent future attacks.
These are the only justifications for any change in our behavior: it’s getting too expensive—or difficult—(to steal stuff from others), or it’s getting too dangerous (to steal stuff from others). We never consider the path of “stop stealing stuff from others so much” because it would (A) possibly change our quality of life in a way that our lords and masters—who benefit even massively more from this whole situation—have told us would be detrimental and (B) would mean that we would have to admit that we had been doing bad things all along (i.e., stealing stuff from other people). The life of a pirate involves a lot of self-delusion.
We want the Israelis to be even worse deniers of their privilege, to be uniquely deluded hypocrites and racists, so that we can absolve ourselves of our own failings in this regard, were we to even admit them. And why admit such trifles about our excellent selves, when the others are so, so much worse?
And you can disabuse yourself of the notion that religion has anything to do with it, other than serving as a convenient and well-established reason for hating and othering. Religion is just one of many ways of justifying why it’s OK for you to steal somebody else’s stuff—be it land, food, water, physical goods, safety, or well-being. The U.S. doesn’t really declare classically religious wars—-like actually based on a holy book—-but what is the difference between Jihad and the blind, hate-filled fervor with which the U.S. pursues it’s interests, claiming to be anti-communist or whatever the flavor of the week is?
We should be careful not to let our anger and indignation get the better of us, to let our anger make us say things that are patently wrong, or wildly hyperbolic, that would threaten to distract us from the fact that we’re all hypocrites. It’s a spectrum. Some people lean hard into it, for sure. But Israelis are not unique in their hatred of the other, in their ability to dance while others suffer.
Young Israelis know nothing other than that there is a mysterious place on their border that their state has under control. They know that they’ve been told to live their best lives—because why not? It is what affluent, young people have always done. They are not unique in being wildly ignorant of or failing to be empathetic to those around them. Racism and discrimination doesn’t help. of course, but they’ve also never really known anything else. There is no advantage to be had by not being racist against Arabs. There is much to lose. It reminds me very much of the U.S. in the 50s and 60s. [2]
Israelis are heavily, heavily indoctrinated to believe that Palestinians—and Arabs in general—are sub-human animals, no more of consequence than a lizard or a goat, perhaps even less so, because animals can’t be terrorists.
Here’s a five-minute video that provides a bit of background.
This is also not unique. Perhaps Israel is at the top of the list for racism, but the U.S.‘s foreign policy is also horrifically racist. Their soldiers used—perhaps still use—the epithet “sand niggers” for Arabs while deployed in the Middle East.
Again, having grown up in the U.S., I understand how stupid and evil propaganda can make you. You have to actively resist it the whole time. You will be ostracized from some places. You might lose your job. You will feel gaslighted. You will wonder why you stand alone so much. You will doubt yourself. You will wonder why you ruin your own life for a principle no-one else seems to believe in.
Imagine a town with a square in the center. In the center of that square, there is a pit. At the bottom of that pit lives another group. The group above knows about the group below. They keep them alive, but barely. They use the pit as a sewer. Every few decades, a piece of poo flies back out of the pit. Inconceivable. The villagers above cannot comprehend the effrontery. They are terrified that it will happen again. They drop boiling oil down the pit to root out the poo-flingers.
What would we think of the above-ground villagers? Would we think it possible for them to be unaware of the morality of the situation? What if they’d never known anything else? What if they’d been told every day that this is the only way for the world to work, for God to be satiated, for society to continue as it does?
What does the average Israeli know about their country? About their government? I don’t know. Do they vote? I don’t know. I come from a country where a lot of people don’t vote, they complain all the time about the government, but they don’t vote. The largest voting bloc in the U.S. is non-voters.
Most Americans think we won the Vietnam War. That’s if they even know what the Vietnam War was. Or is, for that matter. If they don’t know what it was, then they might just as well think that we’re still fighting it. We have bases everywhere. A lot of people know that. They know that their young go to Somalia, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany, South Korea, … everywhere. So why not Vietnam? Is there a war there? Maybe. There are wars in a lot of places. Just not the U.S.
And just not Israel, where things were pretty quiet, until recently.
So, maybe a lot of Israelis don’t read newspapers, or believe what they hear, and think things are just hunky-dory. That’s maybe how they can so easily be convinced that “those fuckers [Hamas] came out of NOWHERE.”
Most people in the U.S.—of those who know about it—think that we won the Vietnam War. They’re just waiting for Vietnam to apologize for having killed so many of our soldiers. You think I’m kidding. I’m not kidding.
There are still P.O.W./M.I.A (Prisoner Of War/Missing In Action) flags up everywhere. There are V.F.W.s everywhere (Veterans of Foreign Wars … what other kind are there? Oh, yeah, the Civil War). They’re still waiting for our boys to come home. I’m not kidding.
The life expectancy of a man in Laos was about 33 years in the 1970s, and that’s for a local who’s not in prison. None of “our boys” are alive anymore, not by any stretch of the imagination. And yet they wait.
And yet a bill passed in 2019 that requires every post office in the U.S. to fly an M.I.A. flag. Bipartisan. Co-sponsored by Elizabeth Warren.
So, no, I don’t make any assumptions about what the citizens of a country might know about what their country is up to.
I watched my whole country go mad with revenge fantasies, then destroy two countries over two decades. For nothing. Nothing was gained. Much was lost.
I am familiar with all that sordid bullshit and the bullshit excuses we make to ourselves, of the horrible anti-humanistic things we say and do because we can’t contain our rage, our lust for revenge, because we are animals but want to be seen as good, but also still want to hate the other, to blame all ills on someone else.
I know that racism still exists in America—it’s everywhere and affects everything. But it’s better than it was. It just objectively is. That the statistics of wealth disparity, life-expectancy disparity, arrest and harassment disparity are still wildly off-kilter and unfair and horrifying is a fact for anyone with any sense of justice and a brain in their head. That it used to be worse is a fact. It may be just as insidious in some places, but there are far more places where it isn’t. So I said the 50s and 60s because then you could really just be openly racist against black people and you would suffer nothing. In fact, if you weren’t racist, you were suspect.
I just heard about Paul Robeson. He is, by any measure, one of the greatest Americans who ever lived. No-one knows about him in America. He’s been erased from history. He was a black socialist.
Published by marco on 25. Nov 2023 19:46:21 (GMT-5)
Normal Finkelstein has woken from a slumber, finally being interviewed and questioned about his deep knowledge of Palestine, Israel and their shared history. I’ve written relatively extensively about him recently, in Norman Finkelstein is on a tear, but also in many Links & Notes stretching back over 10 years (with several from the last six weeks), from when I reviewed the film Lemon Tree in 2016 or when I reviewed the film Defamation in 2013.
He’s usually absolutely strictly no-nonsense, but when he cracks, he has a wicked and dark sense of humor. Here is series of tweets he wrote recently, during the absolute theater that was Israel’s taking of a hospital that they claimed was a command-and-control center for Hamas.
“It is reported that Israel is about to invade al-Shifa. Don’t be surprised if they finds copies of Mein Kampf in the incubators.”
Right on cue, Israeli president Herzog reported that the IDF had found a copy of Mein Kampf in Arabic in a child’s room.
“NEWSFLASH: Entering Secret al-Shifa Passageway, IDF Discovers Kim Kardashian Blow-Up Doll in Hamas Jacuzzi”
“NEWS FLASH: IDE Discovers Saddam’s WMD Hidden in al-Shifa Basement.
An IDF spokesman stated: “It’s clearly labeled in black-and-white:
SADDAM’S WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION.””
“As the IDF busily loads al-Shifa hospital with “Hamas weapons,” the New York Times prepares its headline: “Conflicting evidence…””
““The official said that soldiers had found weapons and evidence of a militant headquarters, but declined to provide further details and said that proof would not be provided until after the raid had ended.” (NY Times)”
“Why all this digging and excavating? Didn’t the Times report just two days ago that the IDF provided them with photographs of the clearly marked entranceway inside the hospital that led directly to the Hamas command-and-control center?”
“I posted the warning on this Twitter account last night. But despite this advanced warning, Hamas didn’t take the weapons to its command-and-control center beneath al-Shifa. No, it decided to leave these weapons lying around in the radiology ward so as to give Israel a photo-op.”
“It is now 24 hours since Israel invaded al-Shifa hospital. No sprawling Hamas command-and-control center. No arms caches in the tunnels. No secret passageways. No nothing except: DEAD BABIES IN INCUBATORS WITHOUT FUEL.”
“Senator Schumer Reacts to News that Ten More Babies Died in Al-Shifa Incubators.”
“Never to Forgive! Never to Forget!
“Israel – and the Biden administration – justified the suffocation of infants in al-Shifa incubators by asserting that a ramified Hamas command-and-control center was located beneath the hospital.
“How did this sprawling command-and-control center vanish?”
That’s the tunnel. To the command-and-control center.
“Have no fear: It’s certain that Israel will figure out how to deactivate the booby-trap—after it finishes constructing the tunnel.”
According to the article Complete and Utter Carnage by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch),
“Israel found their own bunkers…
“Amanpour: “When you say [the bunker under al-Shifa] was built by Israeli engineers, did you misspeak?
“Ehud Barak: “No, decades ago, we were running the place… we helped them to build these bunkers.”
“Amanpour: “OK. That’s sort of thrown me a little bit.”
“Hours before the Operational Pause began on Friday, the IDF destroyed the electrical and oxygen generators at al-Shifa hospital, smashed MRI and x-ray machines, blew up the sub-basement rooms which were supposedly Hamas’s HQ before any international investigators could examine it, and arrested the hospital’s director, along with three Palestinian paramedics.”
So, Norman was wrong—but only because he didn’t guess that Israel wasn’t still digging the tunnels—but that they were certain that there was a tunnel or two down there because they’d built them themselves, decades ago. They had to blow everything up so no-one would find out that no-one had been down there since then.
I don’t even have anything to cite from this article because it’s so insipid. I just wanted to keep in my notes that,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Nov 2023 23:15:23 (GMT-5)
Man, I saw the title of the article Murder And Rape For The Cause by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) and my heart sank. I wrote about why in Some commentators are still MIA, where the author featured prominently. [1]
I don’t even have anything to cite from this article because it’s so insipid. I just wanted to keep in my notes that, once again, an ordinarily useful writer and thinker simply cannot keep his shit together or think of justice when his team’s been attacked.
Greenfield is Jewish. He loves Israel. He cannot stand to hear a single bad word about anything that Israel does. Every time there is a larger altercation, he comes down rabidly on the side of Israel against Palestinians. He deems the Palestinians animals, heedlessly slaughtering innocent Israelis, who’ve done nothing to deserve even reprobation, to say nothing of violence.
Read his responses to the comments on the post. Those are the comments he’s even allowed to appear, after moderation. It’s a shame, because he writes so much that is useful about law and justice and oppression in the U.S. On the topic of Israel, though, he’s an utter fool, a complete and unquestioning tool for the oppressor.
Look, two wrongs don’t make a right. Palestinians and their militant wing Hamas are humans and are thus capable of shocking cruelty and savagery when they get the chance—especially against what they consider to be an utterly demonic enemy. They also don’t recognize that civilians are illegitimate targets.
But neither does Israel. And they get a lot more chances to prove their savagery. If, like Greenfield, you only pay attention—or care—when the opposing team does it, then, … yeah, you’re going to look like a total asshole who can’t read a newspaper—who thinks that Israel heard about Palestine for the very first time on the morning of October 7th, 2023—and then you’re going to sound off in an utterly unhinged way.
In other news about unhinged support, there’s this:
This recommendation popped up about a day after what might have been the start of the next Intifada. Netflix thinks that I should watch a movie or series about heroic Israeli secret agents who are hunting nefarious Palestinian terrorists. Cool, Netflix. Nice to see where your loyalties lie.
There’s also the satirical site Babylon Bee, which often claims that it takes the piss out of everyone, published the only possible thing that it could have published: “White House Issues Condemnation Of Attack Biden Funded”.
I was confused for a second because I couldn’t figure out that the Bee was accusing Biden of having funded the Palestinians. But the picture shows what looks like a bombing in Palestine, presumably by Israel? But the text is the exact opposite? In my world, this is ludicrous—the Biden administration funds Israel nearly infinitely more. In the Babylon Bee’s world, where Biden is wrong about everything, he is a massive supporter of Palestine and probably delights in dead Israelis.
This is, again, what it looks like to be so partisan as to not be able to think straight. Biden would, of course, go on to make subsequent statements that make this accusation seem even more ridiculous. It was ridiculous from the beginning, though. Again, only if you can muster the energy to read a Wikipedia page or two.
After having noted in the footnotes of the article Some commentators are still MIA that Greenfield was once again publishing normal—not unhinged—stuff, he recently wrote the article Ceasefire Follies by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice). It shows pretty well where our long-ailing blogger is at, mentally. He writes,
“Note for future terrorists. Take some hostages atop your rapes and murders, and they give you huge leverage to stop your victims from coming after you. That, and convincing the useful idiots to march for the sake of the babies you use as shields so you can perpetrate terror but they can’t do anything to stop you.”
Once again, you can see the spittle speck his lips as he slams the keyboard in utter indignation.
He goes on to express his incredibly sarcastic indignation at thinking that anything at all could be expected of Israel.
“[…] those demanding a ceasefire from the side that didn’t break the ceasefire on October 7th.”
He really seems to believe that Israel is the sole aggrieved party and never did anything wrong and has no power to change anything other than to defend its sworn enemy into the deepest, darkest hole it can, filling it with bodies until … well, until there are no more bodies around, one way or another.
Next, he positively whines that no-one cares about Israeli lives—Jewish lives—especially in America. Dude, what? How can you possibly believe that is a thing?
“Oddly, Gazan lives matter. Israeli lives, not so much because they deserve to die for being a Jewish state. The connection there with Jewishness seems not to matter much, even as they indulge in sophistry to differentiate between Zionism and Judaism so they won’t feel like the hypocrites and fools they are.”
Differentiating between Judaism and Zionism is sophistry? What a horribly antisemitic thing to say. Does Greenfield even know what a poisonous creed Zionism is? At the very least, as it is practiced by the extremely radical Zionists who have the reins firmly in their fists right now? Has he ever read or heard an interview with actual Israelis, to say nothing of settlers? I can’t imagine he would think that he has anything in common with that worldview, but he’s using his bully pulpit to defend Zionism as the same thing as Judaism.
“As for the Gazan children, they’ll be martyrs as far as Hamas is concerned […]”
So, yeah, Greenfield’s not doing so hot.
He still hasn’t put a second of his time into finding out what has been going on in Israel over the last decades, what is going on there now, or what would be a possible solution that doesn’t involve more tragedy. He seems to be on the same page as the Israeli settlers: dead Palestinians, no matter their age, aren’t tragic. They’re just dead terrorists. Cool ethics, bro.
There is no speaking to someone who’s out of the gate with that kind of viewpoint, unless they’re family or friends or someone you need to invest time in. Everyone else doesn’t have to deal with them, can instead just back away slowly and hope that someone like this doesn’t have too much influence on anyone else.
The poor guy is still absolutely livid, incoherent, and about as grounded in reality as a Trump-Uncle at Thanksgiving. You know, the kind that sends me political cartoons of Joe Biden giving away the U.S. to China. Just batshit.
I wonder if Greenfield knows that he’s writing at the same intellectual level as the Babylon Bee these days? For example, maybe he could steal the snarky headline Hamas Offers To Release Hostages If Israel Agrees To Not Exist (Babylon Bee) from the Bee for his next post.
At issue, of course, if the failure to indoctrinate them... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 19. Nov 2023 13:32:38 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. Nov 2023 11:57:10 (GMT-5)
The article TikTok teens aren’t stanning Osama bin Laden by Ryan Broderick (Garbage Day) discusses a recent flare-up in the mainstream, western (mostly U.S.) media and governing bodies whereby there were several calls to ban TikTok because it’s radicalizing the youth.
At issue, of course, if the failure to indoctrinate them properly to be able to ignore war crimes and still sleep at night. So, what you need to do is to make a lot of noise about a world-girdling social network—😱 RUN BY CHINAMEN 😱 YELLOW PERIL ALERT 😱— is corrupting the youth, turning them to the dark side of terrorism. They are all, apparently, in love with Osama bin Laden right now, woe betide the future of our great nation, etc., etc., etc.
As you can hopefully tell from the sarcasm, this is entirely untrue. It’s about as true as the COLD HARD FACT that the IDF found an Arabic translation of Mein Kampf in a schoolkid’s bedroom. It would be comical if it weren’t part of the propaganda campaign for an unfolding tragedy—and if so many otherwise-productive and reasonably intelligent members of society didn’t just gobble it up like candy.
Anyway, Broderick argues that the usual suspects—the powers that be—are jumping on this particular myth that they just invented to ban what they consider to be a thorn in their side: not just the dastardly Chinese version of uncontrolled media streams, but any uncontrolled media streams.
“Baseless generational in-fighting, aging millennials who refuse to accept the new status quo of the internet, easily monetizable rage bait, lazy TikTok trend reporting, and bad faith political actors swirled together to create a perfect storm this week. We have invented a version of TikTok that simply does not exist and now many people in power are ready to tear apart the foundation of internet to prove it does.”
In the U.S., that means you only have to convince a couple of hundred of the most venal, stupid, and hypocritical people who’ve ever walked the Earth to pass some antidemocratic laws. It’s honestly not even that big of a job. All you have to do is shit-talk a whole generation, gaslighting them into thinking that they’re the crazy ones for finding a few kernels of truth in what amounts to a 5½-page screed / philippic / rant / diatribe / jeremiad / tirade on everything under the sun.
Which jeremiad, you ask? You can read it for yourself at Osama Bin Laden’s Letter to America: Transcript in Full by Giulia Carbonaro (Newsweek). Young people claim to have been reading this 20-year–old letter that used to be available at the Guardian before they took it down.
Why would they remove a piece of historical documentation that they’d hosted for 20 years? Because people were drawing the wrong conclusions from it, and the Guardian had to somehow stop abetting that from happening, so it threw its copy down the memory hole. Newsweek has generously and courageously republished the letter. Luckily, the memory hole doesn’t exist yet.
I know I’ve read this thing before [1]—probably around when it first came out—but I’d forgotten how long it is. I was quite pleasantly surprised for a few seconds to think that the younger generations, even though they were drawing facile conclusions, were at least reading again. But, alas, no.
As outlined above by Ryan Broderick, not all that many young people are actually reading this thing, and those who claim to have, read only about the first 5%, up until bin Laden mentioned Palestine, whereby they skimmed that sentence, misinterpreted it, and started using bin Laden to support their existing viewpoint , which is that the subjugation of Palestine is bad. Well done. I hope they at least got some fancy Internet Points for it. Right idea, wrong cite.
But how would they know that Osama bin Laden is a bad man whom one should not read? They’d probably been taught nothing in school or by their family—and they certainly wouldn’t have learned anything by osmosis either because bin Laden cannot be used to sell things or to promote a hyper-consumer lifestyle.
There are so many sections and sub-sections—four levels!—that I wish that Al-Queda had taken an HTML course—or that someone would have bothered to convert the damn thing to Markdown from what is obviously formerly a Word document written by someone who doesn’t know how to use styles.
I guess we have more in common with the terrorists than we’d like to think. Hey, maybe our utter inability to use the basic productivity features we’ve had at our disposal for decades is common ground. But I digress. Again.
There is a lot of religious gobbledegook that I suppose would be considered to be killer arguments (no pun intended) if you actually believe in that sort of thing. Otherwise, it’s pretty meaningess. Every once in a while, though, a sentence like this one bubbles up out of the froth,
“(d) You steal our wealth and oil at paltry prices because of your international influence and military threats. This theft is indeed the biggest theft ever witnessed by mankind in the history of the world.”
While pretty much spot-on—as far as it goes—to pretend that that’s the point of the document is to cherry-pick, to be honest.
For example, why wouldn’t I assume that this next citation was the most important he was making?
“Muslims believe in all of the Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus and Muhammad, peace and blessings of Allah be upon them all. If the followers of Moses have been promised a right to Palestine in the Torah, then the Muslims are the most worthy nation of this.”
While this is probably a zinger for the devout, my confirmation bias leans more in the direction of the next citation, a bit further on.
“(f) You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern. Yet when 3000 of your people died, the entire world rises and has not yet sat down.”
This is 100% accurate, but…in an essay where bin Laden says a ton of things, some of them are bound to be true—or at least be something with which the reader can agree. I challenge anyone to claim truthfully that they disagree with absolutely everything in bin Laden’s document. That doesn’t mean you approve of 9–11 or terrorism. It just means that you know how to read and you know how to separate the message from the messenger.
Or what about this one?
“(e) Your forces occupy our countries; you spread your military bases throughout them; you corrupt our lands, and you besiege our sanctities, to protect the security of the Jews and to ensure the continuity of your pillage of our treasures.”
I mean, I can agree with about 80% of it being absolutely correct, that it’s an effrontery that the U.S. empire subjugates muslim countries to guarantee its supply of cheap energy. But then there’s that part about the Jews that was wholly unnecessary, in my opinion, but which I feel might the most necessary part in the opinion of the author.
It’s like being at a bar and chatting with a fellow beer-drinker about the overbearing government. You might be in total agreement that they take all of our money and that we see nothing for it.
Him: Damned taxes are too high!
You: No kidding! And what do we get for it?
Him: Nuthin!
You: Pissin’ it away on foreign wars!
Him: That’s right! And for what? To protect a bunch of Jews!
You: …
It’s like laughing at a good zinger by Donald Trump. While you’re laughing and acknowledging that he’s got quite a flair for nicknames, or whatever, you also have to acknowledge that he writes shit like this:
“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,
we pledge to you that we will root out the
Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left
Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of
our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections,
and will do anything possible, whether legally or
illegally, to destroy America, and the American
Dream. The threat from outside forces is far less
sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat
from within. Despite the hatred and anger of the
Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our
Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
He’s absolutely not alone in his idiocy. The tweets below are the actual words of an actual human being who graduated from Harvard and is now a multi-term U.S. Senator.
“Joe Biden wants to ban menthol cigarettes,
which are favored by black smokers.
Meanwhile, he wants to legalize weed for white
college kids and mail out free crack pipes.”
“The administration’s ban is paternalistic, it’s
hypocritical, and it creates a huge black
market for Mexican cartels and Hezbollah.“And all because Mike Bloomberg told him to.”
That’s just mental illness, is what that is. That man needs help.
I’m sure I could find a statement that Cotton made with which I could agree, though. I bet I can find things that RFK, or Marianne Williamson, or Nikki Haley, or Tulsi Gabbard said that I can agree with wholeheartedly. It’s just that, if the conversation goes on just a little bit longer, I’m backing away into a hedge pretty quickly.
So, sure, bin Laden’s words get scraped off the Internet, so the kids can’t read them, but Trump, Cotton, RFK, Haley, Gabbard, Williamson, Biden, etc. get to write and say whatever they want, wherever and whenever they want. This applies to many, many more people than that handful, but I hope you understand my point. [2]
It’s the same with the bin Laden letter. He spends an inordinate amount of text explaining how, when attacking a democracy, it’s perfectly legitimate to use collective punishment because there are no innocents in a democracy. He claims that each individual is equally responsible for the actions of their democratically elected government. This is patently ludicrous because it presupposes a power that no democracy or republic has ever granted to its populace.
He is, however, absolutely not alone in this line of thinking. There are many high-ranking members of the Israeli and U.S. government and media who espouse exactly this principle, one that was so central to bin Laden’s justification for the 9–11 attacks.
Which citizens would bin Laden consider it to be OK to eliminate? In a democracy, you can be a voting citizen and still not get anything you want. If a majority decides to oppress the Palestinians, but you’re wholeheartedly against it—too bad. You don’t always get your way in a democracy.
Does bin Laden claim that his great and good Allah approves of slaughtering those civilians who were already trying to get the right thing done? To what end? Not only is this evil, but it’s counterproductive. All you’d be doing is increasing the majority that’s already enacting policy against you. This is just stupid.
Bin Laden also makes the same logical mistake that so many others have made before him, and continue to make. In trying to argue for the righteousness of his cause, he compares himself to other war criminals like George Bush and Ariel Sharon—and then justifies his own war crimes as valid and legal because they got away with it, too.
He essentially argues that anyone who refuses to condemn Bush and Sharon must also then approve of Bin Laden’s actions. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that bin Laden is right, but that he’s just as wrong as those other idiots.
After all of these dialectical histrionics, he slowly starts to wrap things up with a bit of missionary work,
“It is the religion of Unification of God, sincerity, the best of manners, righteousness, mercy, honor, purity, and piety. It is the religion of showing kindness to others, establishing justice between them, granting them their rights, and defending the oppressed and the persecuted. It is the religion of enjoining the good and forbidding the evil with the hand, tongue and heart. It is the religion of Jihad in the way of Allah so that Allah’s Word and religion reign Supreme. And it is the religion of unity and agreement on the obedience to Allah, and total equality between all people, without regarding their color, sex, or language.”
I wish this were practically true, but the Wahhabism that bin Laden practiced was absolutely not blind to gender/sex. This is just bullshit. Perhaps bin Laden is arguing from the purity of the message in the Quran that has been warped in its application to actually-existing Islam—as he himself practiced it!—but I’d be surprised.
I just think he’s lying here because he really got going on his rant and he—like so many other people—just couldn’t help himself: he couldn’t just say everything else is bad and worthy of destruction; he couldn’t just quit while he’s ahead; he had to double-down and claim things about his religion that it doesn’t even espouse.
His next plea is to “[…] reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling’s, and trading with interest.” Ok, so usury is pretty bad, agreed. And gambling is generally pretty socially harmful, sure. But intoxicants? And … homosexuality? Dude, c’mon. How do you reconcile the statement above, where you wrote that “without regarding their color, sex, or language”, but then you write NO QUEERS. Seriously—that’s just stupid.
So much of this is just like that. A little further on, he addresses the U.S. again directly,
“It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind […]”
Hey, OK. There’s an argument to be made there. There are a lot of contenders, but the U.S. Empire has certainly done its damnedest to climb to the top of the heap. The only reason people might think that this is a facially ridiculous claim is because they have literally no idea what their country is up to.
But then, just as you’re trying to come up with reasons to disagree or to cautiously agree, bin Laden follows it up immediately with this,
“(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the lord and your Creator.”
That’s just ridiculous. He argues that the problem is that the U.S. invents its own laws? That’s not the problem. The problem is that the U.S. doesn’t adhere to laws that it finds inconvenient.. Bin Laden’s advice to stop thinking for yourselves and let a thousand-year–old book make all of your decisions for you wouldn’t help because the U.S. would just ignore those rules too, even as it continued to pretend to espouse them. The problem is hypocrisy and lawlessness, not that the U.S. hasn’t found the one, true law to follow. Hey, bin Laden: maybe you should shut up and sit down while the adults are talking, ok?
He’s winding up now, but feels the need to deliver a few examples of Western/U.S. depravity. There is a wealth of history to choose from—but he spends an inordinate amount of time on Bill Clinton’s oval-office blowjob. You old horn-dog, bin Laden. That story really got to you, huh? You just can’t stop imagining that cigar and that thick, Jewish girl?
Then, in the middle of a long list of highly debatable social detriments, he whips out this one about climate change:
“(xi) You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.”
Yes! Correct!
“(x) Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.”
Yes! … no, wait!?! What is with you and the Jews, man? Back. Away. Slowly.
Deep into the last pages of the essay, there are still reasonable points being made, but in an increasingly incoherent manner.
“What happens in Guantanamo is a historical embarrassment to America and its values, and it screams into your faces − you hypocrites, “What is the value of your signature on any agreement or treaty?””
As with a lot of essays by people writing in a language that is not their native one, the prose falls apart more and more the longer the essay goes on. By the last 20%, it’s only barely comprehensible. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as his fingers fly over the keyboard.
“[…] discover that you are a nation without principles or manners, and that the values and principles to you are something which you merely demand from others, not that which yourself must adhere to.”
I mean, I get what he means, but I had to read it a few times.
It’s basically done now. Excepting a few more paragraphs of quotes from the Quran—as if anyone reasonable considers that kind of thing to be slam-dunk proof of anything—it’s over.
This thing just has way too individual points for a blog post. It’s both too long, but also too short, if that makes any sense at all. It really could have used some serious editing down, to punch it up and make sure it’s focused on its main points.
I fear, though, that then it would have just been a three-paragraph tirade against the perennially beleaguered Jews, most of whom are just like the rest of us, just trying to go along to get along.
Sure, they’ve got some raging assholes, but those are everywhere. Hell, I’m reading a long letter by a raging Muslim asshole right now, but I don’t think that means that all Muslims are raging assholes.
I’m not an idiot.
At least, I don’t think I am.
But then, who does?
You may even be smugly wondering to yourself whether I even see the irony that it might apply to me! That I’m part of the problem, not just those other bozos! That I’m an Internet bozo too!
In my defense, there should be no way that you accidentally stumble across this article. It’s reasonably well-hidden and hosted on such weak infrastructure that it would quickly no longer be accessible if it “went viral”, as the kids like to say.
So, if you’re reading this, well, you came to me.
Abby Martin Interviews people of various ages, at least half are English, but a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 13. Nov 2023 22:08:53 (GMT-5)
This 20-minute video from 2017 features a series of person-in-the-street interviews with Jerusalem residents, expressing their opinion of the living situation in the West Bank, for themselves and the Palestinians.
Abby Martin Interviews people of various ages, at least half are English, but a few are in Hebrew or a mix of Hebrew and English. They express pretty strong opinions about the reality, advantages, and disadvantages of various racial characteristics and their relation to viability or qualification as human beings.
In particular, there are a few American transplants that positively do humanity and their origin country proud. It brought a tear of pride to my eye to see them having so successfully transplanted and adapted their native racism to a foreign environment.
It’s an interesting case study in listening to people who are comfortable in their own environment, unaware that the culture in which they’re steeped, the assumptions they have about how life has to be, their ideas about race and culture, are not shared elsewhere.
Abby Martin is like a stoic anthropologist here, simply holding a microphone and watching her subjects hang themselves with their own statements. She doesn’t even use leading questions; her interview subjects are eager to expound, eager to make sure she understands that Arabs are just … Untermenschen.
Ronnie Barkan (Wikipedia) swam against the current, describing the reality of Israeli life and culture, although a bit more pessimistically than I would—but what do I know? He says that there is no left to speak of in Israel, that there are just the right-wing Zionists without conscience who want to eradicate or remove the Palestinians—and those Zionists who are still interested in reconciling what they consider to be their own basic morality with their desire to live in a racially pure country.
For this, the second group is willing to give up land, whereas their counterparts are not. As Barkan puts it: they both want the same thing; they just differ on how big the country will be when they’re finished.
I think there is a peace and reconciliation movement. When he was still alive, I read everything that Uri Avnery (Wikipedia) [1] wrote for the last couple of decades of his life, and learned much about the peace organization he’d founded: Gush Shalom (Wikipedia). There are many more [2], I think, but the ones I know who express what seem like humanistic opinions are Gideon Levy and Amira Hass [3], both columnists at Ha’aretz, a highly respected, if oppositional newspaper in Israel.
“Barkan has described himself as “among the group of the over-privileged in this struggle for Palestinian rights, acting against a system that has at its very core the Zionist principle of differentiation.” He describes the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, identifies himself as “anti-Zionist,” and refers to Israel as “the Jewish-supremacist entity…founded on the basis of ethnic cleansing and ethnic segregation.””
See, for example, some of the people featured in the following video:
If only people were capable... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 13. Nov 2023 14:15:43 (GMT-5)
I found the following talk is quite illuminating, especially the first 35 minutes or so, where Singal reads a prepared speech. He chooses his words very carefully, expressing what I think is an eminently rational and empathetic view. He’s not denying anyone’s existence.
If only people were capable of understanding words and sentences instead of imbuing and overlaying them with their own thoughts immediately. Instead of hearing what other people are saying, they end up hearing what they thought they were going to say before they even spoke—and lose opportunities for making alliances with like-minded people.
People are increasingly of the mind that anyone who doesn’t agree with every hair-brained idea they have is the enemy, instead of welcoming a debate that would prove beneficial to all. Everyone who’s not an asshole just wants safe, effective medicine for all—not half-assed studies that hide and manipulate data, but happen to agree with the foregone conclusion. That way lies not only madness, but danger. We can do better.
I’ve transcribed certain statements I liked below.
At 00:17:10, he says,
“I’ve been criticized quite harshly for writing and speaking about this the way I do, which is, from my point of view, somewhat biased. I feel like I treat it the way I treat any of the other scientific controversies I’ve written about, including in my book. But in some liberal circles, it’s very difficult to talk about this and to treat it as a scientific controversy.”
At 00:17:40, he says,
“I do want to make one point about empathy and compassion and other touchy-feely stuff. I really vehemently reject the idea that you need to be trans or gender non-conforming to participate in this conversation for all the same reasons I don’t think you need to be black to write about or study racial inequality.
“I don’t think you need to be Israeli or Palestinian or Jewish or Muslim to write about or study that conflict. There’s unfortunately been a lurch toward a very crude form of identitarianism in some liberal intellectual circles and I just don’t think this viewpoint deserves much respect. I think it’s profoundly anti-intellectual.
“We need to judge people on the basis of their ideas, not their identity, partly because […] no one who says listen to people black people or listen to trans people—they don’t mean that. [Instead,] they mean listen to the subset of that group who believes what I believe.”
At 00:20:44, he says,
“This is another argument I just don’t really respect, the argument that we can’t discuss X because people we don’t like might use X to make arguments we disagree with just doesn’t really work if you play it out.
“There are so many examples of why it doesn’t work that I I feel like I shouldn’t need to run through them, but if I criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, do you know who also criticizes Israel? Nazis. Does that mean we can’t? No one here thinks you can’t criticize Israel because Nazis also criticize Israel. Or if I criticize the federal government, you know who else criticizes the federal government? Far-right militias. It just—this doesn’t work—you’re not giving aid and comfort to a group just because you make an argument that happens to align with what some of them say in some circumstances.”
At 00:23:00, he says,
“It’s like, there was a group of folks who lost gay marriage very badly—and this is another issue that sort of brings back that strand of social conservatism, frankly—these are figures who are not in this to get to the bottom of the scientific controversy or to figure out how to best help trans and gender non-conforming kids.
“They’re in this controversy because they despise liberals or they’re genuinely uncomfortable with certain forms of what I think we would view as societal progress, or because they simply sense political opportunity.
“So, if you’re going to write about and discuss this issue, I just think you need to acknowledge the presence of some folks who have different agendas and who are exacerbating the tension and the toxicity with those agendas.”
At 00:33:20, he says,
“In fact, there has been a recent surge of coverage casting totally appropriate, well-founded doubt on a supposed breakthrough treatment for Alzheimer’s. If someone responded to that coverage by saying, well, surely you don’t care about Alzheimer’s sufferers or their families. That, if you did, you wouldn’t have critiqued this new medication, that person would be laughed out of the room because that’s a ridiculous argument.
“Yet, somehow this ridiculous argument is accepted here. If you criticize youth-gender medicine, you must not care about trans kids or you must must want them to die or suffer other horrible outcomes.
“I think the sheer moral force of this argument, and the personal and professional consequences of being labeled a transphobe in the liberal settings that produce most journalism and academic research, has led to a stalling out of a critical conversation in the United States that should be occurring in journalism and academia”
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a faithful transcription of that train-wreck of human interaction and elocution.
]]>Ramaswamy: I wanna laugh at why Nikki... [More]
Published by marco on 12. Nov 2023 12:12:59 (GMT-5)
The following video makes the point of the title of this article quite concisely; I’ve included a transcript underneath the video.
If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a faithful transcription of that train-wreck of human interaction and elocution.
Ramaswamy: I wanna laugh at why Nikki Haley didn’t answer your question, which is about looking families in the eye. [sic] In the last debate, she made fun of me for actually joining TikTok. Well, her own daughter was actually using the app for a long time, so you might want to take care of your family first. [shots fired!]
Haley: Leave my daughter out of your voice! [sic]
Ramaswamy: …before [grief-shaming?] your own daughter. The next generation of Americans are [sic] using it. And that’s actually the point.
Crowd: Booooooo…
Ramaswamy: You have her supporters propping her up. That’s fine. Here’s the truth.
Haley: [shaking head] You’re just scum.
Ramaswamy: The easy answer [wagging finger] is actually to say that we’re just gonna ban one app. We have to go further. We have to ban any U.S. company actually transferring U.S. data to the Chinese.
Haley: [continues to look sullen on second camera]
Tell me this isn’t perfect kayfabe (Wikipedia). It’s a bit hard for me to tell, but I think that Ramaswamy is playing the heel (Wikipedia) here. Listen to that crowd booing. You can almost see them standing and shaking their fists.
This is an actual debate, featuring real-life, adult human-beings who are running for the office of the president of the United States, the center of the current global empire.
This is a sad joke.
If you don’t agree, consider that your standards may have been steadily lowered by decades of awful, awful people in politics and media.
I understand that people have a different way of expressing themselves when speaking than when writing. I’m aware that grammar rules for speech are, shall we say, looser than for text. Still, there are limits. I’ve included several [sics] where the way they are speaking indicates for me not only that they’re not adhering to grammatical rules, but that they simply aren’t aware of them.
I accept this in most people around me—many of whom speak English as a foreign language—but I hold candidates for the office of the President of the United States to a higher standard. We used to have eloquent candidates. Now, we have candidates whose thoughts are not only muddled from the outset, but who cannot even express them in a manner that a third-grade teacher would consider to be correct. We’re heading toward Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho (Wikipedia) from the movie Idiocracy.
🤦♂️
In the other party, there’s this awesome statement of batshittery.
“RFK, Jr., founder of the Children’s Health Defense [sic] Network: “Israel is a bulwark for us… it’s almost like having an aircraft carrier in the Middle East. If Israel disappears, Russia, China, and BRICS+ countries will control 90% of the oil in the world and that would be cataclysmic for US national security.””
🤦♂️
So many excellent choices. The U.S. enjoys a bountiful harvest of candidates.
]]>“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a... [More]”
Published by marco on 11. Nov 2023 00:00:29 (GMT-5)
The interview Adam Curtis Talks to Jacobin About Russia, Oligarchs, and the Fall of the USSR by Taylor C. Noakes (Jacobin) is interesting and thought-provoking—as Adam Curtis often is. Of course, I had notes, which I’ve interspersed with citations from the article.
“As one Russian journalist said to me, London now does feel a bit like Moscow in 1988. My primary goal was to tell the story, but I also wanted to convey that disenchantment with democracy can have its roots in corruption. And there’s quite a lot of corruption in Britain, Canada, and the United States, especially since 2008. I still don’t think we got our heads around what quantitative easing was about, which essentially entailed a massive wealth transfer to a tiny elite, creating what is now known as the “asset class.””
I couldn’t agree more about the transfer, but disagree that we don’t understand it. We understand exactly what it is. He just described it succinctly. There’s nothing more to it than that. An elite guilted the world into giving it all the money. Having all the money allows them to sustain this situation indefinitely.
Just because they called one of the scams they’ve used “quantitative easing” doesn’t make it special. They already took all of your money; don’t give them all of your time, too. You’re only looking for deeper meaning because you have to believe that you weren’t fooled for a bagatelle.
“I think we may look back at the last ten to twelve years and say that the rise of the “asset class” was as powerfully significant as the rise of the oligarchs in Russia from about 1992 onward. They’re not the same, it’s not the same kind of society or the same kind of corruption, but it is the same extraordinary transfer of power and wealth to a tiny elite. I don’t think we’ve got our heads around that yet.”
He’s right again. It’s not the same in the U.S. as in Russia. It’s worse. There’s more to steal. I don’t think we can wrap our heads around how much they’re stealing, every day. We don’t know what billions even are. We think shoplifting by poor people is a capital offense, but then shrug our shoulders at wage theft, which is 1000 times worse.
“[…] the person in charge of creating that democracy overnight, a man by the name of Yegor Gaidar, came out of the technocratic establishment under the Soviet plan. I think he was trying to bring democracy to Russia in a “rational” way, and it was completely mad. He thought that if you got the right things in the right place it would work just like a machine. But as I’ve shown, it was ruthlessly exploited by the oligarchs for their own advantage, and it led to a total and utter, cataclysmic, disaster.”
Exploited? Or encouraged, and then exploited? With corruption and a complete lack of scruples, you never know. I don’t buy most of these “good intentions, but bad outcomes” stories. There’s almost always at least a kernel—if not much more—of personal interest that leads to the outcome that sucks for everyone but the perpetrator. At best, the person has utterly convinced themselves that a decision made in a way that is personally lucrative is also fortuitously the moral thing to do.
“It is extraordinary that politicians seem unable to stop the corruption — we all know it’s happening and they know that we know it’s happening. And they know that we know that they don’t know what to do about it. It’s absurd.”
I don’t agree that it’s extraordinary. I think it’s absolutely ordinary. It’s not true that corruption exists despite the politicians. It exists because of them. Politicians are in on it. They don’t stop it because they don’t want it to stop—it benefits them personally. I think it’s extraordinary that someone who’s made as many documentaries as Adam Curtis can still describe the world through a lens of “how can we stop these poor politicians from being corrupted despite their best intentions?”
“We all know it’s happening. We know the politicians don’t know what to do about it, but none of us have any idea of what an alternative solution would be.”
Dude, your prime minister is Rishi Sunak and you’re mystified about why he’s not part of the solution? He’s the main problem, a massive force of corruption and greed. Again, I don’t agree. We know the solution. It’s just not easy to see how to implement it because the biggest part of the problem—capitalism and its fetishization of wealth and power, regardless of how it was acquired—will actively prevent us from replacing it.
“[…] somehow it became a way of avoiding having to face the fact that none of us, whether it’s Donald Trump or nice liberals, have any idea of how to create an alternative, fair, and just society that would work. We have a lot of dreams, but we know we don’t know what to do. And we know that those in power don’t know what to do.”
No. Wrong. Those in power are not interested in fixing anything because they are doing just swimmingly. There’s nothing to fix, in their eyes. How can you be so dense, Adam Curtis? Are you trying to be an optimist? Suggesting that there’s an easier way that we’ve not thought of? There are people who know what to do, but, as I noted above, the system we have will actively resist being eliminated. Arundhati Roy knows what we need to do. It’s Utopic and perhaps Quixotic, but it’s a plan.
“While outside the theater they [the politicians] were locked in too, money and assets were moved in vast quantities into the hands of a tiny elite, and they did nothing to stop it.”
I repeat: politicians ARE the elites. They are deeply corrupted.
“Everyone performs. The politicians perform as politicians, but they’re shit and everyone knows they’re not going to do anything. Some of us perform as indignant, outraged liberals, but we know in our heart of hearts that it’s not going to have any effect. The Right does its pantomime culture war thing, but it’s all just performance inside the theater. What we seem to lack is the ability to leave the theater and understand what’s going on outside its walls.”
This seems to be his thesis statement: we don’t understand. It feels disingenuous. I think he’s trying to excuse himself for not trying harder to fix it. I don’t think the problem is that we don’t know what to do to make things better for more people and to stop building systems that enrich only a tiny elite.
I’m pretty sure I have some serviceable ideas about what we could do better. I don’t know how to put it in motion or to get people on board because they seem to fragment as soon as they think that they might become—or already be—part of that tiny elite. The problem is that people don’t really have scruples. They just don’t want to be on the bottom. I know what we should do, but I don’t know how to get us to do it.
Hell, I don’t think we can ever get people to stop pushing buttons in trains or elevators that are clearly already lit up and engaged. I don’t take elevators very often at all, but I can imagine that people push those lit-up buttons for all they’re worth—just to make it go faster. That’s what people do in trains to get the doors to open—push buttons that clearly indicate that the doors are going to open as soon as possible anyway. Click, click, click, click.
This may seem like a weird digression, but these are the same people we have to convince not to want things that would be taken away from other people. If they think they can be part of the elite pirate group, then they’ll absolutely do that. If they think that they’re not in the elites, then they’ll be against them—until they think they’re either in the elites or they could be.
If the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist, then the greatest trick the elites ever pulled was convincing their slaves that they don’t need to revolt because they’re actually in the elite.
]]>“I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 17:32:56 (GMT-5)
The article Israel Has Permanently Lost The Argument by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix) writes,
“I cannot adequately express the immensity of my respect for the many, many, many Jewish voices I’ve seen taking a firm and forceful stand against the Gaza massacre. I’m just over here getting yelled at by strangers online and I find it pretty intense; you’re having much harder arguments with family, with friends, with people you’ve known your whole lives, about something that probably feels a lot more personal for you. You’re out there protesting, taking action and moving the needle, typically with far more skill and incisiveness than anyone else in the world.
“Big, big, big-hearted love to all of you. You amaze me.”
To be clear, I think that the Israeli State has lost the argument, but it had lost it long ago. When Johnstone writes that “[t]here’s no coming back from this,” I think that’s to be interpreted as: there’s no going back to a world in which it’s possible to portray Israel as a peaceful democracy surrounded by enemies against which it valiantly defends itself.
The U.S. still gets away with most people not knowing how it treats its Native Americans; Canada also still enjoys a reputation as a “good guy”, despite its horrific treatment of its First People. Australia also somehow stays clean, despite its near-eradication of its Aboriginals.
But the world’s baleful, but mercurial eye, is currently focused on Israel’s misdoings. It has the misfortune of perpetrating its crimes in the wrong century. The atrocities in Palestine over the last 40 years—just they way they’re made to live, as stateless people within the confines of another country that doesn’t recognize them as people—can no longer be reasonably papered over.
To be clear, Empire [1] doesn’t ever have to pay any moral price for its crimes. Russia attacked Ukraine, which tarnishes its reputation as a relatively level-headed [2], designated enemy. They have to own that. The U.S. and its NATO allies have stomped a mudhole in several countries this century—and pretty much nothing happened. Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Somalia—the list goes on—all of these have been nearly destroyed or severely hobbled—but it’s Israel’s massacre and Russia’s invasion that get all of the attention.
Israel, right now, is doing a terrible job of managing its image to cover up its human-rights abuses. The people of Israel have to own this and move past it. The people of the U.S. should do the same for their country’s many transgressions. Israel has to grant full citizenship and rights to Palestinians. They cannot just take and take and take, rewarding the absolute worst members of their society with other people’s land and houses. That’s madness. It’s insupportable.
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 17:00:35 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Nov 2023 22:45:38 (GMT-5)
Amira Hass is a leading journalist (with Gideon Levy) at Ha’aretz. “Amira Hass is the only Israeli journalist who has lived in the West Bank for 30 years and has a deep understanding of the Palestinian experience.” The article Amira Hass Speaks on Gaza Slaughter by Jewish Voice for Labour (Scheer Post) includes an embedded video that is age-restricted. [1]
I hadn’t seen the video, but I found it highly unlikely that there was really age-restricted content there. It seemed much more likely that YouTube’s algorithms saw Amira’s name alongside “Gaza” and noped right out of there, applying restrictions to make sure as few people watched the video as possible.
You know what? YouTube seems to be blocking referrals from Scheer Post. It blocks not only on the query argument, but also on the HTTP_REFERRER
in the request. That is very much enforcing an agenda, but it’s also utterly unsurprising. We do not live in a free information environment. The U.S. corporations and government—entwined as they are—control the narrative ruthlessly.
When I finally got to the video, it was a Democracy Now! interview, from New York City, with journalist Amira Hass. There was absolutely no content in there that would be considered worth blocking or age-restricting in anything but an authoritarian Empire where YouTube is an arm of the State.
Her words were, of course, deeply unnerving, but that is reality. There were a few fleeting images of children being dug out of rubble—they were still alive, though.
Finally, the video is embedded from my site below. It’s still age-restricted but not blocked, if you click through.
Below is the second, longer part of the interview. This second part was, mysteriously, not age-restricted at the time I originally added the link to a draft, but it’s age-restricted now. As with part one, I can’t see a reason why this video should be age-restricted, unless it’s for the disturbing subject matter. If that’s what triggers age-restriction, then more than half of the news videos on YouTube would have to be age-restricted.
These two videos include an incredibly good interview. Amira Hass discusses honestly how Hamas made a “distinctive blow” militarily that they don’t have any follow-up for. I’ll cite at considerable length from the transcript. She puts it much better, with more emotion, and with more gravitas than my words could.
NERMEEN SHAIKH: In the piece, you write about your father, who would tell you as far […] back as 1992, he himself a Holocaust survivor, when you return from Gaza, he would say, quote,“True, this isn’t a genocide like what we went through, but for us, it ended after five or six years. For the Palestinians, the suffering has gone on and on for decades.”[…]
AMIRA HASS: Look, I mean, in 92 […], it was — we could say that it is not genocide. I want to say, I mean, I don’t — as I explain over and over again, I prefer not to talk now, not to dwell into definitions, but to describe the situation. Of course, in ‘92, in comparison to today, it was like a benign occupation in comparison to today, to what’s going on now.
“Look, Hamas proved to be very resourceful when it comes to the military operation. They knew how to neutralize Israeli surveillance facilities, how to neutralize the shooting, automatic shooting. They knew where the military bases were, etc. So they were very resourceful, in a way that I could have said impressive, if not for the atrocities that were committed later. And the atrocities were committed. And I know that it’s not the time to tell Palestinians to pay attention to this, because Israel’s revenge is a hundred times more bloodier, but still there were atrocities.
“So I feel there is a tremendous contradiction between the planning of the immediate military operation and what comes aftermath — what is the aftermath, because, for example, the civilian now — the civilian face in the West — in Gaza. If they knew they have such an operation, and they knew that Israel will retaliate ferociously, then why, for example, they did not even — I didn’t know — take care that people have water? I don’t know. I mean, if they can arrange to have so many weapons, they must have also prepared for assisting the civilian population, their civilian population. But I see that this, from what I can tell, from far, I don’t think — I don’t see that this has happened.
“I don’t think that Hamas can be erased. It can flourish outside of Gaza. But I don’t understand its political plan right now. Do they want to liberate all of Palestine, so it doesn’t matter if it will take 50 years, 80 years, and at the cost of lives of Palestinians and Israelis, that I don’t know who will return to the country? Who will live in this destroyed country, if this is the plan? If the plan is political, immediate political, is it worse to ask, demand the release of present Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, and the cost is so much? I think I know some prisoners in jail now. I don’t think they’ll be happy to be released, thanks to the death of thousands or tens of thousands of Palestinians.
“So, right now I see very — militarily, a very apt organization, that indeed gave Israel a very distinctive blow. But I don’t see that there is a political viable position that comes with it. That’s me now. I don’t know. I mean, we are waiting, because just war, just war, just bloodshed, where will it lead us to? Where will it lead the Palestinians to? Now it’s very difficult for people to criticize Hamas. There is a lot of support. But is it a political — does it have a political, logical, human perspective? I don’t see it.”
“Every Palestinian who is killed today in Gaza is registered in the Israeli-controlled population registry. Palestinians are not registered in a separate one. It’s Israel which controls. If a person is not registered, he is there — if a newborn is not registered in the Israeli registry of population, then the newborn does not exist. Israel controls still today. Palestinian Authority is obliged to give every name of a newborn and every change of address to Israel for validation of this change. So what is not responsible? It’s part of Israel. I mean, Israel controls the whole country, controls the people, decides how much water they have, what is the economy they are allowed to have. If they don’t go to universities in the West Bank, Israel decides. Israel decides about every detail of these people. So, what’s happening now is not Israel’s responsibility?”
I’m not the only one who’s noticed YouTube’s decidely pro-Israel predilection. The article YouTube’s Connections to Pro-Israel Lobby Behind Removal of Lowkey’s Infamous Song: ‘Terrorist’ by Kit Klarenberg (MintPress News), which writes,
“This dark handshake between YouTube and Zionism surely accounts for a baffling “age restriction” imposed on a May 2019 CNN interview with Lowkey regarding that year’s Eurovision Song Contest hosted in Tel Aviv. This restriction, imposed long after the video’s upload, makes the clip unsearchable. Such treatment has also been extended to a February 2022 video from Amnesty International, in which the human rights organization painstakingly elucidates its determination that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians unequivocally meets the criteria for apartheid.”
The following interview was... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 16:37:04 (GMT-5)
After years of lying quietly in his Brooklyn apartment, having given up on his 40-year career of tilting at the windmills of the Israeli occupation, the anger is back. He’s back on the scene, providing valuable insight as the world’s leading expert on the occupation.
The following interview was excellent (but the podcast linked below is even better).
As for the first hospital bombing of this latest round of war, Finkelstein says that
He thanks Aaron and Katie for having him on the show because almost no other “left” podcasts have invited him, despite him being by far the leading authority on Gaza. Other unaffiliated/independent shows have invited him, like Jimmy Dore, Chris Hedges, TrueAnon, etc.
As noted above, the podcast TrueAnon, Episode 327: It’s Not Too Late (Patreon) is an absolutely brilliant 136 minutes.
I have no transcription other than,
“If things were cut-and-dried, then our legal standard wouldn’t be ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, it’d be ‘certainty.’”
Just listen to the interview. It is positively edifying.
I’ve listened to every Norman Finkelstein interview I could get my hands on recently. A couple of weeks ago, I watched him discuss Ibram X. Kendi on the Bad Faith podcast.
Since then, the Middle East has exploded and he’s been interviewed a few times: on Chris Hedges, Jimmy Dore, Useful Idiots, and TrueAnon. This is the best of all of these interviews. TrueAnon is hands-down the best podcast I listen to. I appreciate Liz and Brace and young Chomsky very much.
I wrote the following comment on their Patreon:
“Amazing episode. Just incredible. It should be spread far and wide, preserved for posterity. This is by far my favorite podcast, but this one just clicked on all levels. Excellent production, wonderful tone. That you went to his apartment, amongst his stuff, that he started with far-reaching social context, talking about Pete Seeger and Johnny Cash, Paul Robeson, all of it lifted this show above all of the other interviews I’ve heard with him (Hedges, Dore, Halper/Maté). Thanks so much.”
I’m flattered that the crew read and liked my comment.
]]>“They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. Anyone getting this issue... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Nov 2023 15:57:40 (GMT-5)
The Moral Complexities Of Bombing A Concentration Camp Full Of Children by Caitlin Johnstone (Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix)
“They’re dropping bombs on a concentration camp full of kids. Even shitlibs and pseudo-leftists who get every other foreign policy issue wrong are managing to get this one right, it’s that obvious. Anyone getting this issue wrong can be permanently dismissed without any real loss.”
This is mostly true—except that you have to realize and accept that there are good, rescuable people out there who do not accept the reality of what has been going on in Israel for 50 years, a situations that has increased drastically in severity in the last 18, since Gaza was closed down.
Many people simply do not accept that there is a concentration camp there because they’ve not been told, or they’ve told that there definitely isn’t.
Many do not understand the term. If they think about it at all, they think that “concentration camp” means “extermination camp” (or “death camp”), whereas it’s actually a synonym for “internment camp”, which is what the U.S. generously called its own concentration camps when it stored dozens of thousands of its own citizens of Japanese origin there during WWII.
Wikipedia redirects the search for “concentration camp” to internment. It defines “internment” as,
“[…] the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without charges[1] or intent to file charges.[2] The term is especially used for the confinement “of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects”.[3] Thus, while it can simply mean imprisonment, it tends to refer to preventive confinement rather than confinement after having been convicted of some crime.”
We are likewise trained to think of “gulags” as concentration camps—or even extermination camps—when they are, by definition, much more like prisons. While many were sentenced on sham charges before kangaroo courts, the Soviets at least bothered to sentence them before interning them.
In contrast, people in a concentration camp have never even been tried or accused of anything other than being. You could argue that going through the motions of pretending to prosecute someone for a few minutes or hours before you come to a foregone conclusion shouldn’t cover one’s ass in a just world. It seems to make a difference in this world, but ours is not a just world.
By this logic, though, the Soviet gulags were concentration camps—but then so are most American prisons, which are full of people who’ve been railroaded into prison, and who are then leased out as slave labor, working for a dollar a day for U.S. corporations.
People think that just because Gazans are shown walking around in rubble with clothes on, rather than as shirtless, emaciated, and half-frozen wraiths as in pictures from Dachau or Ausschwitz, that they couldn’t possibly be in concentration camps.
Citing from the article again,
“A huge amount of western depravity hides behind the unexamined assumption that killing people with bombs is somehow less evil than killing them with bullets or blades. By waging nonstop foreign bombing campaigns, the west desensitized the public to the reality of what bombs do.”
It has also desensitized the public to the horrors of modern concentration camps—or even refugee camps.
Published by marco on 8. Nov 2023 22:10:55 (GMT-5)
The post there was an attempt at not getting caught lying (Reddit) shows a video of a Joe Biden campaign event from 1987. Joe Biden is and has always been an arrogant, lying asshole without an ounce of empathy. His personality is such that he will lie four times just to make himself look better than whomever he happens to be arguing with, not at all concerned that he will be caught out later. This is not only sociopathic, but deeply stupid. It’s the kind of recklessness you absolutely don’t want in a leader.
I wasn’t sure about the context, so I looked it up.
You can see the original video in Biden Campaign Appearance on April 7, 1987 (C-SPAN)
The article Joe Biden’s worst-ever campaign moment, revisited by Glenn Kessler on July 27, 2020 (Washington Post) corroborates C-SPAN, providing a transcript,
“I think I have a much higher IQ than you, I suspect. I went to law school on a full academic scholarship — the only one in my class to have full academic scholarship. The first year in law school, I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two-thirds of my class. And then decided I wanted to stay and went back to law school and, in fact, ended up in the top half of my class. I won the international moot court competition. I was the outstanding student in the political science department at the end of my year. I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school and 165 credits; you only needed 123 credits. I would be delighted to sit down and compare my IQ to yours, Frank.”
The fact-checker from the Washington Post goes on to point out the four main lies that Biden told.
- Biden did not go to Syracuse Law School on a “full academic scholarship.” It was a half scholarship based on financial need.
- He didn’t finish in the “top half” of his class. He was 76th out of 85.
- He did not win the award given to the outstanding political science student at his undergraduate college, the University of Delaware.
- He didn’t graduate from Delaware with “three degrees,” but with a single B.A. in political science and history.
Not only was he spectacularly boorish, but his superiority was based on nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was in the bottom 15% of his class. That’s terrible. He was one of the worst students that year. Joe Biden is a pathological, sociopathic narcissistic liar—and he always has been.
Published by marco on 6. Nov 2023 17:15:50 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 1. Jan 2024 00:57:11 (GMT-5)
A few days back, I wrote Losing the plot completely, describing several previously useful commentators who’d gone completely off the script after October 7th. As of November 3rd, the article Is “Humanitarian Pause” A Real Thing? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) reveals the current state of mind for at least one of the authors. It ends with this incoherent and clearly unedited babble.
“The newly-beloved phrase, “humanitarian pause,” seems so ripe for the moment to “do something” (remember the syllogism?) to help the Gazans suffering under the Israeli seige and whose lives are squandered by Hamas as worthless, but after the public relations value of the phrase wears off, should Israel pause while Hamas holds the hostages (whose release shouldn’t be conditions on anything), seized whatever aid the naive hope will go to the Gazans and continue to fire rockets into Israel.
“Maybe they will raid a few more kibbutz during the “pause,” or rearm their fighters, repair their tunnels, and prepare for the next round of their holy war to destroy Israel one baby in an oven at a time. After which, the phrase “humanitarian pause” will be forgotten as it will no longer serve its pretense that the Gazans’ nightmare can be wished away any more than the Israelis’.”
He’s still very firmly in the camp that Israel is on the back foot, struggling mightily against the incomprehensibly evil and raw power that is Hamas. Now he’s positing that Hamas yearns to put Jewish babies in ovens (his words), that their goal is to destroy the Jewish state. This is the stated purpose of some members of Hamas, yes. I’m not well-informed enough to say that it’s their official platform, but it’s definitely how a good number of Hamas members feel, according to their own statements.
The sharp mind of Greenfield can’t see that this is also how a good part of the Israeli population feels about Palestinians. Many high-level, very powerful, and very influential members of the Israeli government and military share this opinion. Netanyahu just had a speech citing the Old Testament, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” [1] The leader of your team quoting a genocidal God from the Bible should really be a wake-up call, but some people—even those who’d not previously identified as especially religious—see stuff like that as “proof” of the rightness of their cause.
Or, maybe, they just didn’t hear about it. It’s almost criminal negligence to not follow what one’s one side of a conflict is doing, and to continue to support that side with Greenfield’s level of unquestioning enthusiasm. Wouldn’t you want to keep your side from becoming the baddies? Or do people really not care? They just want their team to win? [2]
Israel is in a much better position for achieving their goal than Hamas is. Whereas Hamas achieving their goal of wiping out Israel is essentially a pipe dream, Israel has moved forward with a final solution [3] for their decades-long Palestinian problem. It’s very possible that, within a few months, all Palestinians will be in Egypt or Jordan—and there’s precious little that anyone is going to be able to do about it. Israel is closer to their long-sought ethnic cleansing than they’ve ever been—and they have a lot of wind in their sails from all the most important players, like Europe and the U.S.
Israel has the overwhelming power here, and doesn’t legitimately have to fear a follow-up attack with anything approaching the magnitude of the initial one. In that way, it’s very similar to where the U.S. stood after 9–11. The reaction of the recently wounded, but still overwhelmingly powerful state could have been to handle the attack as a police matter, at the international level. Israel could still pull back, beg forgiveness for its rash retaliation, and take Hamas to court for its attack. But neither the U.S. nor Israel acknowledges the ICC.
Nor do any commentators consider what I’ve outlined above—which should seem eminently reasonable in a world governed by laws—to be in any way realistic. Instead, they double down again and again.
Greenfield, for his part, makes up fairy tales about Hamas smuggling in more weapons or being able to make more raids against a still-mighty Israeli military that is in an incredibly heightened state of alertness. There’s barely any food going in—how are weapons going to get in? Or does Greenfield not have any idea of what it looks like on the ground there? The IDF and Israeli newspapers would be happy to inform him, if he’s interested. [4]
The U.S., Israel, and the IDF all freely admit to the basic parameters that Greenfield doesn’t even seem to notice. Is it deliberate ignorance so that he doesn’t have to reexamine his assumptions? That’s not usually his style. Is he really just not hearing about what even his own “side” is reporting about what’s happening in the war he supports? Did he really stop absorbing information on October 7th?
It’s a shame, but he’s still sidelined. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as he’s rage-writing those paragraphs, patting himself on the back the whole time for his eloquence in expressing how incredibly obvious his point-of-view is. HOW COULD YOU SUPPORT THOSE BABY-EATERS IN HAMAS?
Look at what Hamas has done to Gaza:
On a final note, when what can only be called a lot of people protested in Washington DC in support of Palestinians, he wrote in Holding Biden Hostage by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) that,
“For the grown-ups in the room, their cries range from childish to idiotic, recognizing that there can be no ceasefire given the circumstances. Despite the collateral deaths of Gazans upon which Hamas thrives, the alternative is the death of Israelis on perpetual terror raids and rockets that will never be stopped if Israel can’t stop Hamas. Biden gets it. Nancy Pelosi gets it. Even Blinken gets it […]”
Anyone calling for a ceasefire is a child, according to him. A puling welp who doesn’t “get it”. He’s worried that Biden “the outraged woke have figured out a way to leverage their embrace of terrorism to coerce Biden to capitulate to their whims”. “Leverage their embrace of terrorism”! Oh, my goodness are you deep down that rabbit hole. Keeping digging, brother! You’ll get there! Where? Wherever you think you’re headed with that line of argument.
He’s terrified that people are actually going to vote their interests, and that their interests don’t lie with what the Biden administration is doing, so,
“Biden either abandon’s Israel and backs the terrorists, “from the river to the sea,” or the progressive wing of the Democratic party will abandon Biden.”
This is craziness. He’s now hating on democratic pressure from below, per se, because it doesn’t press in the direction that he wants. He’s afraid that Biden will either not capitulate and keep supporting Israel in its … current behavior, which means that Biden loses to Trump in 2024, the other giant bugaboo of Greenfield’s of late. He finishes up by comparing progressives to Hamas. I kid you not. See for youself,
“[…] the schism has turned Biden into a hostage of the radical left. Hostage taking, it seems, is all the rage these days. If it works for Hamas, why not for progressives?”
He’s in a tight spot, indeed. That’s going to be a tough needle to thread. Luckily, he has ideological support! Biden, Pelosi, and Blinken are the people to whom he looks for support in his viewpoint. They “get it”. Kissinger and Cheney provide backing with their versions of the 100% doctrine. Strange bedfellows, indeed. It’s going to be a long road back for this guy.
Am I done reading him? Of course not. I’ve read him for a over a decade. This, too, shall pass. [5] Or maybe it won’t. In the meantime, it’s quite entertaining and offers insight into how a good part of the influential class thinks.
From The Dangerous History Behind Netanyahu’s Amalek Rhetoric by Noah Lanard (Mother Jones), one of the first search results citing Netanyahu’s recent speech,
“God commands King Saul in the first Book of Samuel to kill every person in Amalek, a rival nation to ancient Israel. “This is what the Lord Almighty says,” the prophet Samuel tells Saul. “‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’””
Published by marco on 1. Nov 2023 22:43:14 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 4. Nov 2023 12:19:46 (GMT-5)
The article Hamas Clarifies They Meant To Start The Type Of War Where They Get To Do Whatever They Want And No One Fights Back (Babylon Bee) is just one in a large set of really tone-deaf and unfortunately unsurprisingly one-sided headlines from this supposedly satirical online newspaper. A good satirist would somehow note that that headline may reflect how Hamas currently feels, but also how Israel was acting a few weeks ago.
There are many more irony-free and completely non-self-aware headlines from the Babylon bee like this one these days.
In the same vein, a usually reasonable and judicious Eugene Volokh goes all-in on Jews == Israelis and writes in a libertarian magazine that Some Cancellations are Justified by Eugene Volokh (Reason). Hey, cool, that’s what liberals/progressives think too! Nice to see you all have so much in common.
At the same magazine, you’ve now got the already usually fatuous Ilya Somin arguing that the problem is that Israel has been taking it too easy on the Palestinians in the article Hamas Attack Should Teach Us the Folly of Hostage Deals with Terrorists by Ilya Somin (Reason). Some people’s bloodlust is never slaked.
I can’t even read Scott H. Greenfield lately because he’s literally babbling in every article, as if he’d sustained a grievous head injury. For example, Short Take: The Death of “But For Video” by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) is only about how things that people allege Hamas has done are all true, even without any proof. When he needs horrific things to be true in order to justify the horrific things his “side” is perpetrating and will perpetrate, then his usual adherence to evidence is right out the window. And he doesn’t even seem to notice it.
I can’t imagine writing a comment gently trying to remind him of his former adherence to a higher standard, you know…when the victims weren’t Jewish. One person tried by writing “Is there any place for genuine discussion about Israel’s misdeeds in the current situation?” to which Greenfield riposted—in what he clearly assumes is a manner that he wears well—“There is a place for that discussion: a sophomore critical studies classroom. Just not among reasonable or knowledgeable people.” I.e., anyone who mentions prior, ongoing, or upcoming Israeli war crimes or tries to contextualize at all is sophomoric, a child, neither reasonable nor knowledgable, unlike Greenfield, whose opinions are so unimpeachable as to be fact. It’s his blog, but man, I miss the reasonable guy who used to run it rather than the Zionist maniac who’s running it now.
Like the Babylon Bee, he seems completely unable to see the irony of his statements, as they would apply to Israel just as well as to Hamas, e.g., from a comment of his, “It’s unclear whether or how many babies were beheaded although there is no question that they beheaded adults. After all, murdering babies by shooting, burning, dismembering or otherwise is totally less barbaric.”
All of these authors are ordinarily capable of talking about justice in relatively detached terms, when it doesn’t involve them or “their people”. Now that Israel has been attacked, they literally throw all of their principles out the window and start to bend over backwards to justify genocide or to simply not care about proof, or whatever. The point is that they are incredibly hypocritical and that I’m kind of disappointed. I’ll survive, of course, but it’s a shame. I wonder if they experience any regret about what they’ve written? [1]
I tried again with NYT Still Trying To Salvage Its Lost Dignity Over Hamas by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice), but he’s still quite resistant to knowing anything that he didn’t already know yesterday.
“On the one side, there’s the claim of Hamas, a terrorist group that had just raped, kidnapped, murdered and beheaded women, children and the elderly, and had a bit of a public relations problem on their hands, claiming Israel bombed a hospital when it turned out that the hospital was never bombed, but only a courtyard parking lot, and there is no evidence whatsoever to support any claim Hamas made.”
I’m honestly still surprised at how Greenfield still hasn’t gotten a hold of himself and started to apply his usual rigor to this topic. As he writes further down, “[…] the New York Times reported that Israel bombed a hospital and killed 200 500 800 471 Palestinians.” He writes the other numbers supposedly to show how disingenuous this whole affair is—because they can’t even get the number right immediately. He ends up at 471, which is a high number for a “parking lot”, no?
But he doesn’t think to research and find out that the hospital grounds had been converted to a refugee camp, which is what was hit in the parking lot. He does no research to try to find out whether Israel bombing a hospital and then lying about it is something that has happened with depressing regularity.
He doesn’t even change his opinion when Israel just quickly admitted to having bombed a church just the other day. He probably won’t even reconsider once Israel admits that it was one of their bombs (because only they really have that kind of firepower; if Hamas had it, Israelis would be in a good deal more danger than they currently are). Greenfield considers none of this because he’s been in a blind rage for weeks now. It’s unclear whether he’ll ever come back. He’s doubling down again and again.
Just to show that I’m not just cherry-picking his articles, here is the very next one he published, called Short take: When Terrorism Goes Mainstream by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice). He’s clutching his pearls that people are now all of a sudden supportive of terrorism, not because of the entire western leadership’s enthusiastic support of Israel’s obliteration of Gaza, but because the hoi polloi are shockingly willing to be critical of it, especially those dastardly—nay, amoral—young people.
Although the poll asked whether people were “willing to be critical of Israel”, he generously extends that to mean “supportive of terrorism”—presumably because of their callous ability to consider all acts of terror reprehensible rather than just those of Hamas. [2]
He ends his article with,
“Up until now, no matter what the cause or how righteous the goal, the use of terrorism was wrong and unacceptable. Terrorism was never the answer.
“Terrorism is, at least to a cohort of the young, now the answer.”
Jesus. Sanctimonious and hypocritical much? Greenfield is an American citizen, and is pleading Israel’s case. He is representing so much terrorism and he ignores all of it, pretending that only Hamas terror counts as terror, that state terror doesn’t exist. He didn’t used to be like, even quite recently. It’s like reading a breakdown in real-time.
Greenfield’s only defense to the accusation of being a n”OK for me, but not for thee” person is that he is woefully, shockingly, and suspiciously ignorant of his beloved Israel’s tactics—to say nothing of his own actual home country’s tactics.
He exhibits a complete and utter lack of irony, zero knowledge of what’s happened in the last three weeks—to say nothing of the last forty years—just whispering “I’m in my happy place” over and over to himself. I don’t think he’s happy, though. I hope he gets there soon. [3]
The actual numbers for which, just as with 9/11, have been walked back over the last several days. After 9/11, the numbers of dead were, at first, much, much higher, and slowly came down over the ensuing weeks and months to land on 2996, just under 3000 casualties.
After many Israeli military debriefings of their own soldiers, as well as an examination of the evidence on the ground, even Israel’s numbers are starting to include a much higher percentage of on-duty soldiers, police officers, and armed settles in the tally for October 7th than initially thought. Not only that, but a lot of people killed that day seem to have been killed by weapons that only Israel has.
The baby-beheadings stories were useful at the time, but were insupportable without evidence and have gone the way of the “Elite Republican Guard of Iraq throws babies out of incubators” story—believed by true believers, but debunked in the official history. Even the many claims of rape are being walked back as the evidence for those is also flimsy to nonexistent. This may change again, of course.
Greenfield knows none of this, and doesn’t care to learn. He needs to keep the fires of his rage stoked and pure.
As of November 3rd, the article Is “Humanitarian Pause” A Real Thing? reveals his current state of mind, which ends with this incoherent and clearly unedited babble.
“The newly-beloved phrase, “humanitarian pause,” seems so ripe for the moment to “do something” (remember the syllogism?) to help the Gazans suffering under the Israeli seige and whose lives are squandered by Hamas as worthless, but after the public relations value of the phrase wears off, should Israel pause while Hamas holds the hostages (whose release shouldn’t be conditions on anything), seized whatever aid the naive hope will go to the Gazans and continue to fire rockets into Israel.
“Maybe they will raid a few more kibbutz during the “pause,” or rearm their fighters, repair their tunnels, and prepare for the next round of their holy war to destroy Israel one baby in an oven at a time. After which, the phrase “humanitarian pause” will be forgotten as it will no longer serve its pretense that the Gazans’ nightmare can be wished away any more than the Israelis’.”
He’s still very firmly in the camp that Israel is on the back foot, struggling mightily against the incomprehensible evil and raw power. Now he’s positing that Hamas yearns to put Jewish babies in ovens (his words), that their goal is to destroy the Jewish state. This is the stated purpose of some members of Hamas. I’m not well-informed enough to say that it’s their official platform, but it’s definitely how a good number of Hamas members feel. The sharp mind of Greenfield can’t see that this is also how a good part of the Israeli population feels about Palestinians.
Instead, he makes up fairy tales about Hamas smuggling in more weapons or being able to make more raids against an Israeli military in an incredibly heightened state of alertness. There’s barely any food going in—how are weapons going to get in? Or does Greenfield not have any idea of what it looks like on the ground there? The U.S., Israel, and the IDF all freely admit to the basic parameters that Greenfield doesn’t even seem to notice. Is it deliberate ignorance so that he doesn’t have to reexamine his assumptions? That’s not usually his style. Is he really just not hearing about even his own “side” is reporting about what’s happening in the war he supports? Did he really stop absorbing information on October 7th?
It’s a shame, but he’s still sidelined. You can almost see the spittle dotting his lips as he’s rage-writing those paragraphs, patting himself on the back the whole time for his eloquence in expressing how incredibly obvious his point-of-view is. HOW COULD YOU SUPPORT BABY-EATERS?
]]>“Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest. For example, drugs that were on the market for under... [More]”
Published by marco on 9. Sep 2023 22:46:32 (GMT-5)
The article Drug makers have tripled the prices of top Medicare drugs by Beth Mole (Ars Technica) writes,
“Overall, the average lifetime price increase for the top 25 drugs was 226 percent. The highest increases were seen in drugs that have been on the market the longest. For example, drugs that were on the market for under 12 years had an average lifetime price increase of 58 percent, while those on the market for 20 or more years had an average lifetime increase of 592 percent.”
These are medications to help people. Their primary purpose now is to help the shareholders of the companies who own the patents on them. If someone gets a medical benefit from them, then, sure, I guess that’s OK, too.
But society and the economy absolutely don’t care if that happens, else we wouldn’t have allowed the prices to rise that high. That it’s paid for by a government program that’s funded by all of our taxes is even worse.
The companies are simply milking the government, while enjoying a reputation for business savvy among the exact same people who think that the government should stay out of business, instead letting those companies just handle things directly—and, supposedly, more efficiently.
But those companies don’t function at all without these government subsidies. It’s the only reason they’re successful at all: their government-granted monopolies called patents, together with a government insurance program that is legally required to pay whatever price they ask.
“In 2021, Medicare Part D prescription drug plans spent $80.9 billion on these top 25 drugs, which were used by more than 10 million enrollees. AARP noted in its report that Medicare Part D enrollees take an average of four to five medicines each month, and 20 percent of older adults report using cost-coping strategies like skipping doses or not filling prescriptions to save money.”
Mission accomplished: provide the semblance of trying to care for the aged, while implicitly encouraging them to kill themselves sooner by skipping medications—incurring discomfort, if not suffering, along the way—but the primary goal remains achieved: lots of profits for shareholders of pharmaceutical companies. It’s a gold mine. You should totally invest in these companies. They guarantee a good rate of return.
Just don’t ask how they do it, because it’s a highly immoral business model—or perhaps amoral, since these entities don’t actually comprehend a model of the world that includes wishy-washy concepts like morality. Why not? Because there’s no money in morality. There’s literally no upside for being good in this society.
“The report lands amid drug cost-cutting measures in the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). The act requires drug companies to pay rebates to Medicare when they increase the price of drugs faster than the rate of inflation. And, under IRA provisions, Medicare will soon begin negotiating prices of drugs directly with manufacturers. On September 1, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services will announce the first 10 drugs selected for price negotiations. Some of the drugs expected to be announced are among the top 25 costliest drugs analyzed in the AARP report.”
The party may be over, though, but I wouldn’t count these companies out. I’ll believe the hopeful formulation above when I see it.
“The Biden administration has said it will defend the IRA’s price negotiation program vigorously.”
Sure, sure, buddy. I’ll believe it when I see it. Go for it, though! Die Hoffnung stirbt zuletzt.
]]>“[…] there are schools like Yale or Princeton, frankly, that have the latitude such that they could pretty much send people to school for free. But in spite of that, they continue to overwhelmingly enroll... [More]”
Published by marco on 6. Sep 2023 22:39:42 (GMT-5)
The article US Colleges and Universities Are Becoming Giant Exploitation Machines by Daniel Denvir & Dennis M. Hogan (Jacobin) writes,
“[…] there are schools like Yale or Princeton, frankly, that have the latitude such that they could pretty much send people to school for free. But in spite of that, they continue to overwhelmingly enroll wealthy students.”
And it’s not merit-based; they’re laundering privilege into credentials. That’s their business.
“They’re going to end up graduating students with more debt who also have comparatively less-elite credentials when they’re done.”
Well, isn’t that just perfect. What a completely predictably pathological result.
“[…] they’re spending a fraction of their endowment on the university’s operations, period. So what good is an endowment if it’s not being spent on the university? Maybe this gets to a more philosophical question about capitalism. I’m lying awake at night thinking, why do people like Jeff Bezos want and need more money than they can ever spend by orders and orders of magnitude? What drives this pursuit of a larger and larger endowment as an end unto itself, almost?”
Everything about the system in the U.S. drives it. Literally every facet of that culture drives the mindless acquisition of more, regardless of how many others suffer for it. I’ve got mine, Jack might as well be the national motto. Ethics, morality, principle—they’ve all been ground to dust and washed away. They are useless hindrances to the personal accumulation of capital.
Other people don’t matter. Other people are “other”. They deserve to lose. Everything is a game to be won.
Bigger. Better. Faster. More.
Actually, “better” doesn’t really matter. It’s a nice-to-have, I guess.
“But you hire financiers to invest your money and make money for you. That’s what they’re going to do. They’re not particularly worried about what you do with it afterward. Their job is to make it get bigger. They are simply doing their job.”
The heck with that. Why do people like these “financiers” even exist? Brcause the system promotes their creation. Why is a society OK with that? They’re like ticks or mosquitos or serial killers: they do not serve a purpose that is beneficial to society. In fact, they are actively harmful. We should be trying to limit or eliminate the damage that they do, rather than shrugging our shoulders and treating them like an unstoppable, unalterable force of nature.
“Because ultimately, who would you rather be? The person who’s living off spending 7 percent of $1 billion or the person who’s living off spending just 1 percent of $5 billion? It’s an easy choice.”
What the hell kind of question is that? NEITHER. Neither of those should exist. No wonder other socialists shit on Jacobin’s socialist cred.
“Once you start to open the door to saying you can’t invest in this because of that reason, then all of a sudden, it’s like, well, where can you ethically and equitably invest? And the answer starts to be nowhere, because there is no real ethical finance capitalism in a world where capital’s need to accumulate is causing endless depredation across the planet and has been for centuries. That’s where the need to have an endowment at all intersects with the purported mission of social good and the very liberal values that these colleges proclaim to hold.”
Yes. That is exactly correct. There is no way to reconcile those. Stop wasting time trying to find one. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.
“Here in Providence, Brown has been expanding downtown and across the river, all while being exempted from property taxes, either largely or entirely.”
“Brown would like to begin to get into the game of owning a medical center because . . . what federal student loans are to colleges and universities, Medicare and Medicaid dollars are to medicine. So if you can combine those income streams, you can become very well-resourced very quickly. That, ultimately, is the goal, and I don’t think it’s entirely speculative to say that.”
So giant, tax-free endowments seek to grow by corralling even more government money into their maws. And we are powerless to stop them. We are not even ideologically equipped to consider this a problem. To the contrary, we consider this behavior to be the epitome of how the system should work: take what you can; fuck everyone else. Alpha-predator, top-of-the-food-chain stuff. Who can argue with success?
“[…] creates an environment in which the kinds of workers and students you hope to attract will feel comfortable. These things are all enabled by the kind of resources that only extremely wealthy schools have.”
No. It’s enabled by the kind of money that states have, but we choose to launder it through the wealthy, trusting in their beneficence when they redistribute a tiny fraction of it in what we hope we will consider fruitful and just directions. He’s just described trickle-down economics in what reads like very approving terms.
“These two things are intimately related: the ability of labor across the university to exercise some form of leverage to begin to contest top-down administrative decision-making, and the increasing centralization of administrative decision-making power among a small handful of extremely empowered technocrats. Which is not a term of derision; it is a term of art. These are highly trained, highly competent people. I’m not merely lobbing invective.”
This constant kowtowing to the people ruining everything is grating. They are good at a job that shouldn’t exist. Fantastic. The work they do consolidates wealth and power tremendously, and harms everyone else. It’s like admiring an assassin—you’re fine with it until they take out one of your own.
On the same topic, the article Management at California State University Is Living Large While Faculty Struggle by Matthew Ford (Jacobin) writes,
“Budgetary shortfalls are the most common justification for denying faculty salary increases, yet administrator salary increases miraculously continue to roll out regardless of budgetary constraints.”
This is the way of the world. Management tends toward an amoral criminality where its sole purpose becomes to defend its own lifestyle, salary, and pension, treating the actually essential employees of an organization as a necessary evil whose labor needs to be obtained as cheaply as possible. This is the exact opposite of how it should be: administration should be obtained as cheaply as possible, but it controls the pursestrings, so it just gives itself all of the money and hires all of its friends. There is nothing special about this. It’s just the same level of corruption that has always existed.
“If anybody is unsure where CSU management’s priorities lie, a brief glance at the new compensation package for new chancellor Mildred García should make things clear: García will receive an annual salary of $795,000, another $80,000 in deferred compensation, $8,000 per month for a housing allowance, and another $1,000 per month for a car allowance.”
There you go. She doesn’t teach, she provides no value to the actual mission of a university. She is probably really, really good at ensuring that money keeps getting shoveled in the direction of people who already have more than they know what to do with.
Good for her. America loves people like her.
]]>“Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior. I don’t know what that is, but it’s... [More]”
Published by marco on 5. Sep 2023 21:55:49 (GMT-5)
The article Let Me Reiterate the Questions I Asked in My AOC Essay by Freddie de Boer (SubStack) writes
“Ocasio-Cortez is not treated like a legislator, but like an icon, a sacred cow who can’t be criticized where any back-bench fifth-year representative would be for similar behavior. I don’t know what that is, but it’s not progressive.”
This is a not unusual idolization of a person who is seen as a bulwark against things ostensibly even more evil. But, as listed in concise detail in the linked article, there are innumerable examples of how she is very hypocritical in her support of the issues she’s claimed to care for, and how her behavior is indistinguishable from a legislator whose only goal is to increase the power of the Democratic party, no matter which issues are actually promoted.
There was a lot of hope that she would be the person who would stand up for all of the issues, but, seemingly for a lot of people, it suffices to be the person who once could have been that person, even though she never materialized as that person, in any way whatsoever.
Somehow, she has achieved a sort of reputational orbit. Nothing she has done since she earned her reputation as someone who could be a rabble-rouser—when she had no power to change anything—will shake people’s faith that she actually is that rabble-rouser, despite the utter lack of evidence, despite, in fact, the large amount of evidence to the contrary.
The article AOC and the Squad’s List of Left-Wing Accomplishments Is Quite Long by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin) is one of those articles, chiding us all for our lack of faith.
“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the Squad are elected officials. There’s any number of criticisms of their time in Congress that are fair, reasonable, and necessary, including over key votes they’ve been on the wrong side on, times they’ve failed to stand with unions, and their failure to, as promised, fully take advantage of the leverage they had under the Democrats’ formerly slim House majority.”
Bla, bla, bla. This is a really long article that emphasizes a handful of mostly incidental legislative improvements while ignoring the fact that AOC has voted on the wrong side of all of the large, important issues.
Tlaib has been better, but she, too, seems to sometimes be more interested in remaining elected than in actually taking a stand that will risk her electability. As Marcetic points out, this is not surprising … but it doesn’t make it admirable.
It’s not the low bar to which we should aspire. The only end to that sort of legislating is to end up constantly conceding on principle simply in order to remain elected so that we have someone in office with those principles that we admire—but who never acts on them.
It’s a catch-22, all right. You can only get re-elected when you don’t act on the principles for which you were elected. I haven’t seen any American politician who’s ever decided to stand for a principle that would endanger their re-electability. AOC is no different. It makes her effectively useless. It also makes her annoying because she’s constantly going on and on about the principles she constantly fails to enforce.
I have no use for a legislator who is so dedicated to her party that she won’t fight the military budget or the re-election campaign of a geriatric Alzheimer’s patient. It’s ridiculous to even talk about any other minor details of her legislative record, honestly, unless Marcetic is trying to get with her. Who knows? He goes on,
“The left pessimism embodied by New York magazine’s profile — which argues explicitly that socialists have nothing to show for five years of electoral victories and that the whole experiment should be abandoned — is a recipe for despair, apathy, and in the end, demobilization, which may already be having a trickle-down effect. It’s a self-defeating, possibly self-fulfilling prophecy that threatens to undermine socialist gains.”
Bullshit. Take your lesser-evil horseshit and stuff it. AOC doesn’t stand for socialism in any real way. Bernie Sanders has capitulated so many times that he’s also useless. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. I like him more, it’s true. But, we have no use for socialists who promote war and the military and who capitulate to state demands for strike-breaking. None of these people is willing to put their political necks on the line for our principles. Why should we continue to waste time with them? I just don’t understand how you can make that argument.
I just opened the article The Uselessness of Bernie Sanders by Peter Bolton (CounterPunch), which, as I noted above, is a hard thing to read—but it’s true. He says the right things, but he can’t. Get. It. Done. He ends up voting for the exact opposite of the thing he was saying—for … reasons. Always the wrong reasons.
Just vote against it, Bernie. Make a statement. What have you got to lose? You’ve been a senator for fifty years. You’re over 80 years old. You’ve got literally nothing to lose.
The article In New Hampshire speech, Bernie Sanders seeks to give Biden “progressive” credentials, comparing him to FDR by Patrick Martin (WSWS) reports on Sanders’s latest disappointment. The article basically provides detail for what it says on the tin.
Specifically, he said this:
]]>“The... [More]”
Published by marco on 29. Aug 2023 22:33:37 (GMT-5)
Oh, c’mon, Bernie. Really?
The article In New Hampshire speech, Bernie Sanders seeks to give Biden “progressive” credentials, comparing him to FDR by Patrick Martin (WSWS) reports on Sanders’s latest disappointment. The article basically provides detail for what it says on the tin.
Specifically, he said this:
“The Democrats, once and for all, must reject the corporate wing of the party and empower those who are prepared to create a grassroots, multi-racial, multi-generational working class party in every state in this country. Democrats, through words and action, must make it clear that they stand with a struggling working class, a disappearing middle class, and millions of low income Americans who are barely surviving.”
This is good. This is fine. This is what Bernie always says. It’s what he has always said. It’s the stuff they let him say because it doesn’t matter that he says it.
Why doesn’t it matter?
Because the then immediately endorsed Biden for president.
The war machine must stop, but he endorsed Biden for president.
We need a principled leader to stand up to the weight of the last four decades of U.S. history and economic shithousery and war, but he endorsed Biden for president.
About Cornel West he had this to say:
“Sanders expressed his personal admiration for West, while claiming that re-electing Biden was essential to preventing Trump from returning to power. On “Meet the Press,” he said, “at the end of the day, I think the progressive community in general and the American people have got to make a decision as to whether we stand for democracy or authoritarianism.””
Ok, Ok, Bernie. You sure you don’t want to give any support for your theory that Biden is the lesser evil? That you’re really going to just ride that hobby-horse that any third-party candidate is just going to get Trump reelected? That this would somehow be worse than Biden’s having embroiled the U.S. in the Ukraine conflict?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me ten times, shame on me.
The third-party-candidate-cost-Democrats-the-election trope is just that: bullshit. The Democrats are a dumpster fire of corporate greed and immorality. The Republicans are the same.
Instead of doing anything that the populace might want, they chastise and admonish and browbeat their potential voters into voting for them.
Bernie said:
“On “State of the Union,” he said he disagreed with “my good friend Cornel West” because “there is a real question whether democracy is going to remain in the United States of America,” and it was necessary to support Biden to keep Trump out.”
So Cornel West should shut the fuck up and campaign and vote against Trump, if not for Biden. Biden is the only thing standing between the U.S. and not having a democracy anymore. Can you imagine believing something so foolish? Wouldn’t you be terrified that this doddering old man is the only hope for the nation?
Maybe Bernie should sit down and shut up while the grown-ups talk. He’s been a worn-out useless stooge for the Democrats for too long. He says so many nice things sometimes, but he is politically useless. It’s hard not to think that he’s a deliberate distraction, bleeding away energy that would be better invested elsewhere.
It’s astonishing that he not only forgave the Democrats for having torpedoed him not once, but twice—he’s actually now out-and-out stumping for them, without reservation. As usual, he asks for nothing in return.
Of course, the article is from the WSWS, so they’re going to shit on Cornel West as well, but for different reasons. For example,
“West himself offers no genuine alternative to working people.”
That is a pretty broad brush they just painted West with. The man hasn’t even had a chance to describe his platform yet. I guess the WSWS is going to be preemptively disappointed in him.
Why shouldn’t Sanders support Biden? There are myriad reasons, but the article 115 dead and hundreds still missing in Maui wildfire disaster by Kevin Reed (WSWS) provides an excellent, recent example,
“After spending six hours in Maui feigning sympathy for the families of those who died and those who have lost everything in the wildfire disaster, President Joe Biden and wife Jill took a direct flight on Air Force One back to Nevada to resume their vacation at a billionaire’s luxury mansion in Lake Tahoe last week.”
That’s about all you need to say about Biden.
Well, there’s also this photo caption:
“President Joe Biden speaks with reporters after taking a pilates and spin class at PeloDog, Wednesday, August 23, 2023, in South Lake Tahoe, California. ”
Truly a man in touch with the people. He might as well be living on that Elysium space station. You can see why Bernie loves him so.
From the article, US Moral Authority Is Dead And Buried by Caitlin Johnstone,
]]>“[…] when people try to frame Assange’s persecution as a matter of public perception and fighting foreign narratives about the US, they are incorrect.... [More]”
Published by marco on 12. Aug 2023 17:03:18 (GMT-5)
The western world doesn’t have a moral leg to stand on unless or until this happens.
From the article, US Moral Authority Is Dead And Buried by Caitlin Johnstone,
“[…] when people try to frame Assange’s persecution as a matter of public perception and fighting foreign narratives about the US, they are incorrect. The issue is not that Assange’s persecution makes the US look bad, the issue is that it proves the US is bad. (Emphasis in original.)”
The letter [1] writes,
“The prosecution of Julian Assange for carrying out journalistic activities greatly diminishes America’s credibility as a defender of these values, undermining the United States’ moral standing on the world stage, and effectively granting cover to authoritarian governments who can (and do) point to Assange’s prosecution to reject evidence-based criticisms of their human rights records and as a precedent that justifies the criminalization of reporting on their activities.”
To which Johnstone replies,
“[America’s history of oppression and war] will all still be the case even if Assange is released. The US empire will still have spent years imprisoning a journalist for the crime of good journalism, will still be the world’s worst warmonger, and will still be the world’s most egregious violator of human rights. Its moral standing is dead and buried, and the world should stop following its lead in creating a just and ethical world. It simply does not have the qualifications to do so. In fact, no power structure on earth is less qualified.”
That’s a direct link to a CloudFront cached document. I’m not sure that these buffoons in our Congress intended that this would be the canonical place to get this document. See the original announcement (Tlaib House) if that link fails. That URL might be a bit more stable.
It’s actually not surprising that the people running this official, government site don’t have any good idea of canonical URLs: the letter itself—which is only 2½ pages long—has at least one pretty glaring typo in it, one that would have been caught by a grammar-checker, should they have seen fit to use it.
The sentence “[…] has highlighted conflicts between the America’s [sic] stated values of press freedom and its pursuit of Mr. Assange.” seems to have been changed from “the American” without removing the article when converting to the possessive.
]]>“What’s known as a “balance of payments” crisis is eroding standards of living in a country still reeling from devastating flooding last year. It could “reverse the poverty gains achieved in the last two... [More]”
Published by marco on 3. Jun 2023 22:19:25 (GMT-5)
The article Pakistan’s political crisis will deepen its economic misery by Julia Horowitz (CNN) writes,
“What’s known as a “balance of payments” crisis is eroding standards of living in a country still reeling from devastating flooding last year. It could “reverse the poverty gains achieved in the last two decades and further reduce the incomes of already poor households,” the World Bank warned last month.
“Pakistan’s ability to maintain payments on its debt has also been called into question. Ratings agency Moody’s downgraded the country’s credit rating in late February, noting that foreign currency reserves were “far lower than necessary to cover its imports needs and external debt obligations over the immediate and medium term.””
The World Bank speaks as if there were no money in the world to help Pakistan. No-one considers donations or a redistribution from those who have far more than they need. No-one considers favorable borrowing conditions despite an unstable political situation—how is a country to exit the such a situation if it is being ruined financially as well? A country can’t go bankrupt. A country can’t be “repossessed” by the bank. Can it?
Why is Ukraine a good investment? Well, the U.S. just recently said that money spent on weapons for Ukraine is the “best money they’ve ever spent.” Why is Greece a good investment? Because the ECB has guaranteed every bond issued by Greece for 100 cents per euro, just like they did for Deutschbank eight years ago. Greece is a great money-laundering scheme—they launder public money into private profits. The same in Ukraine. Pakistan doesn’t have anything to offer the western elites, so it can collapse, for all they care.
Our moral standard is incredibly low. The only way that we’ll offer funds to Pakistan is if it shows a willingness to neglect its population in order to pay interest on its existing debt. That is, it needs to borrow more money because it doesn’t have enough money to help its people.
However, it’s already borrowed money in the past, so it must show a willingness to pay interest—otherwise, the same lenders will be unwilling to lend more money (which will, presumably, also not be paid back, and will also not yield interest payments). So, it actually needs more money in order to—most importantly—cover the costs of past borrowing.
This all makes logical sense from a merciless economical standpoint. It’s horrifying from a human standpoint.
The people of that country suffered massive flooding in the last year (1/3 of the country was underwater at one point) and is now suffering from a massive parliamentary/constitutional crisis. It looks very much like there will be yet another military putsch—as there was when Musharraf took power in 1999. Pakistan has only since the partition in 1947 and has had 4 verifed military coups (Wikipedia).
Published by marco on 11. Mar 2023 22:42:44 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 15. Mar 2023 22:36:01 (GMT-5)
I’ve been following and reading Matt Taibbi’s journalism for quite some time. The first reference to an article of his I can find is from Lies, Damned Lies and The Media, in which I cited an article of his called Punish the Right-Wing Liars, published on AlterNet. He’s been on right side of justice for a long time. He’s been chastising the press for lying and forsaking its journalistic duties for just as long.
Whereas he used to hammer exclusively on the more right-wing press during the Bush and Obama years, he’s been forced to take the (supposedly) left-leaning press to task for doing the same.
Most recently, he’s been publishing part of the Twitter Files, which exposes a deep violation of civil liberties on the part of nearly all levels of elected government officials as well as members of agencies ostensibly charged with defending these same rights. The problem he points out is without “sides”, but it’s damning that the Democrats are not only doing it, but denying it, or, when caught red-handed, just don’t seem to care.
I think it’s fine to focus on the party that’s historically taken the moral high ground on first-amendment rights when it’s strayed so far from the path that it’s literally going in the opposite direction. We already know that right-wing politicians and media don’t care about our rights or about telling us the truth or about letting us think what we want.
It’s important to strongly and stridently note that the high-and-mighty self-selected elite are just as bad. That focus doesn’t mean we think the other side has stopped doing it. No, it means that we have a much bigger problem: everyone does it—and no-one seems to care. They don’t even think it’s a problem. They instead choose to attack the messenger and make noise until the problem goes away.
Anyway, here’s Taibbi debating a few points with Brianna Joy Gray. It’s about 30 minutes long.
Brianna is asking what sounds like a valid question, but I think Taibbi answered it best at around 15:30, when he asked why she was berating him for not having written the story that wasn’t there. He saw some documents. There may be other documents. The documents he saw tell a story. They are verifiable. That story is true. He’s telling that story.
There may be another story, one possibly hidden by a selective procurement of documents. That is irrelevant to whether the first story is newsworthy. You can’t write a speculative story about whether other documents might exist or whether you’re being manipulated into writing a certain kind of story.
Journalism doesn’t prevent you from writing a true story. It may be that it shifts the balance—because the other story hasn’t been written. But the argument that Gray is making is tantamount to ignoring a murder of a right-wing individual because there might have been murders of left-wing individuals that we don’t know about.
That is, reporting the story we have means that people might draw the conclusion—wholly on their own, based on the absence of reporting on left-wing murders—that only right-wingers are being murdered. That’s not how journalism works. You can’t just sit on a story until you have the whole picture. You have to report on it as it appears. Your only obligation is to determine to the best of your ability whether it’s true—and to drop it if it’s not. (Most of the mainstream media skips that last part.)
If Matt is focusing on the (true) story that’s right in front of his nose, it’s not like he’s ignoring the other story just because he’s not reported it on it in the three months he’s been working on the story. Jesus Christ. He’s not a machine. And he’s not a puppet for people to manipulate into working on the stories they feel are important. He’s the reporter. He’s been selected by a source. That source might close up at any moment.
Taibbi does a pretty bad job of articulating this, but Brianna is certainly showing her lawyerly side by not really giving him any room to breathe and think. It’s fine; it’s her show, but I think it’s taking a long time to get to the point that there’s no obligation to not report a story when you can’t report all of the other potential stories. As noted: that’s not how journalism works.
By the way, I’ve read a bunch of Taibbi’s work on this, and the claim that there was no left-wing suppression comes mostly from others. He says that he hasn’t seen nearly as much suppression of left-wing sources, but I think he means mainstream liberal sources.
In his testimony to Congress (detailed below), he mentions that there is suppression of true left-wing sources like Consortium News and CounterPunch. Those don’t really count for the argument, though, because both sides are suppressing these. This is not news. Neither side even denies it or tries to hide it. They trumpet their suppression of these sources from the ramparts, in the name of anti-Communism (or whatever).
What is interesting is that outlets like Fox News have seen a lot more suppression that CNN or MSNBC. That’s the point that Taibbi fails to make eloquently enough for people to stop berating him about it.
It’s also kind of obvious that being in the spotlight is extremely uncomfortable for Matt Taibbi. He has to visibly collect himself at a few points.
He very rightly says, “I’m not going to be prioritizing Donald Trump’s stupid requests just because idiots at the New York Times and Washington Post want it.” He’s using his limited time in the treasure trove to find out information about the FBI, the Congress, and the justice department trying to suppress speech at Twitter. Donald Trump trying to cancel another celebrity’s tweet—even though he was president at the time—is utterly irrelevant.
Taibbi is shouting to the world that the FBI is suppressing speech—and providing proof—and the left is doing what the left always does: eating its own. letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Matt assumes that people understand how journalism works, while Brianna is describing exactly how useless she would be as a journalist. I’m glad that Taibbi is doing it, and not her. It’s obvious that she doesn’t have any instincts about how to collect information. She’s used to being a lawyer, with infinite time, and infinite resources, and a legal obligation for the opposition to provide information. Journalism doesn’t work like that. Sources dry up. You have to get the good stuff while you can.
At one point she asks why Taibbi’s not interested in left-wing suppression when “85% of historical suppression has been of left-wing groups”. It’s fine to ask that, but Taibbi notes correctly that most of that suppression was not in the area he’s focused on, which is in the last five years. Most of that the historical suppression is from the 1970s, 80s, etc. Much of it is ongoing but, as noted above, no-one on either side of the establishment media cares about that suppression. It’s an important issue, but it’s not the one at hand.
And it’s kind of clear that the U.S. suppresses left-wingers. That’s a soft target journalistically. That’s why there’s no left-wing to speak of in America. Everyone in the media is basically right-wing, even the so-called liberals. So why investigate that further? We already know that the U.S. government has a right-wing bias and actively suppresses left-wing voices. Just try being a communist FFS.
The interesting story here is that the so-called liberals, the Democrats are doing it too and just as much, if not more. And they’re quite thorough about their suppression. This is interesting journalistically because they also take the moral high ground over the right, which has long since admitted that it will suppress whatever the hell it wants.
Taibbi is also one man with limited time. He has chosen his story and it’s an important one. He has verified the information to the best of his ability—he’s done his journalistic due-diligence. It’s up to people to disprove his information, but he’s rightfully not interested in defending himself against ad-hominem attacks or in arguing about other stories he could have worked on while he was getting some sleep, like the lazy fuck that he is. He says this again and again.
It’s evident that he’s overworked as it is, just with the stuff that he’s done. He’s focusing on the government running a subversive program to deprive people of their first-amendment rights. And she’s berating him for not investigating a different story. She seems a bit butt-hurt that he’s not investigating the story that she wants: finding out whether Bernie was torpedoed. I kind of get her point, but she’s absolutely ruthless is not acknowledging that one man can’t report on everything at once. And also we know the Democrats torpedoed Bernie: Biden’s president. Duh.
But, yeah, Taibbi is pretty terrible under pressure. Here he is saying something incredibly important—testifying before Congress—but delivering it in a way that will allow detractors to shred him to pieces, even claiming that he’s deliberately lying—because his body language is so bad.
The transcript is here: My Statement to Congress by Matt Taibbi (Racket News). It’s only a six-minute speech, so watch or read the whole thing, but here are some good excerpts.
“A focus of this fast-growing network is making lists of people whose opinions, beliefs, associations, or sympathies are deemed “misinformation,” “disinformation,” or “malinformation.” The latter term is just a euphemism for “true but inconvenient.””
“Ordinary Americans are not just being reported to Twitter for “deamplification” or de-platforming, but to firms like PayPal, digital advertisers like Xandr, and crowdfunding sites like GoFundMe. These companies can and do refuse service to law-abiding people and businesses whose only crime is falling afoul of a distant, faceless, unaccountable, algorithmic judge.”
“[…] instead of investigating these groups, journalists partnered with them. If Twitter declined to remove an account right away, government agencies and NGOs would call reporters for the New York Times, Washington Post, and other outlets, who in turn would call Twitter demanding to know why action had not been taken.
“Effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.”
“Jefferson’s ideas still ring true today. In a free society we don’t mandate truth, we arrive at it through discussion and debate. Any group that claims the “confidence” to decide fact and fiction, especially in the name of protecting democracy, is always, itself, the real threat to democracy. This is why “anti-disinformation” just doesn’t work. Any experienced journalist knows experts are often initially wrong, and sometimes they even lie. In fact, when elite opinion is too much in sync, this itself can be a red flag.”
“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”
He followed up this appearance with a post-mortem article called The Democrats Have Lost the Plot by Matt Taibbi (Racket News), in which he had a bit more time to reflect on the experience and discuss what was going through his head. He was largely just flabbergasted and disappointed at the duplicity and stupidity of the Democrats. They were unwilling—or intellectually unable—to grapple with the issue. They seem not to have understood anything at all, even when he laid it out in very simple terms in his introductory speech.
In particular, you can see a video where a Representative Goldman is absolutely badgering and belittling him, about which Taibbi writes:
“A longtime editor once cracked that the Democrats have been stuck since the mid-sixties trying to run Kennedy clones in elections, cranking out one toothy, tallish facsimile after another, from Gary Hart to John Kerry to Beto O’Rourke. Goldman is one of the latest, a literal handsome Dan who’s an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, worth over $250 million, and who opposed Medicare for All and the Green New Deal while marketing himself as “tough on crime.” All of these qualities make him the kind of quintessential born-on-third-base triangulator the party loves.”
“The irony is that what Goldman was doing, confusing accusations with proof — as Thomas Jefferson said, the phenomenon of people whose “suspicions may be evidence” — was the entire reason for the hearing. Michael and I were trying to describe a system that wants to bypass proof and proceed to punishment, a radical idea that this new breed of Democrat embraces. I think they justify this using the Sam Harris argument, that in pursuit of suppressing Trump, anything is justified. But by removing or disrespecting the rights to which Americans are accustomed, you make opposition movements like Trump’s, you don’t stop them.
“Yesterday was memorable for other reasons, but a depressing eye-opener as well, forcing me to see up close the intellectual desert that’s spread all the way to the edges within the party I once supported. There are no more pockets of Wellstones and Kuciniches who were once tolerated and whose job it is to uphold a constitutionalist position within the larger whole. That crucial little pocket of principle is gone, and I don’t think it’s coming back.”
Published by marco on 11. Mar 2023 20:55:24 (GMT-5)
Lately, I’m seeing a lot of otherwise solid news sources start sniping at each other for no other reason that they disagree on some issues—or agree on issues, but disagree on how to address them. It’s really sad to see, but there it is. I know that this is how standard media works, but it’s starting to bleed more and more into the world of my more esoteric newsfeeds.
For example, Jeffrey St. Clair at CounterPunch will not stop sniping at Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, and Jimmy Dore as right-wing shills—even though there is no truth to this whatsoever. It’s basically just purity tests: anyone who deviates too far from the orthodoxy—as established by the writer—is branded right-leaning, or right-adjacent, or “drifting rightward”, or just “fascist.
This has to stop.
And, for the record: Chris Hedges is not right-leaning, or right-adjacent. That is so over-the-top ridiculous that David North of the WSWS should be absolutely ashamed of himself for even writing such a thing. And his newspaper should bar him from ever using Twitter again.
And it’s not just David North at that newspaper. The article White House and US media revive the Wuhan lab lie by Andre Damon (WSWS) takes a non sequitur potshot at some of the only independent journalists left,
“The public advocacy by the FBI of the Wuhan lab lie has exposed individuals like journalist Glenn Greenwald, comedian Jimmy Dore, and journalists Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate of the Grayzone, who are orienting ever more openly to the fascistic right.”
What the fuck does that even mean? Why shoehorn this patently untrue disparagement in here? It’s not a competition, numbnuts. I don’t know that the FBI pretending to agree with these journalists (and one comedian) suddenly makes them fascists. I’m growing a bit tired of the WSWS screeching about fascists everywhere—sometimes suspiciously when their targets disagree with them on certain facts, while agreeing mostly on a lot of policy positions. It smacks more of online pissing contents—of Twitter bullshit bleeding over into the pages of the newspaper. I think Andre Damon and David North need to take a deep fucking breath and quit Twitter. It’s turning them into morons.
This is not to say that I haven’t cringed at Max Blumenthal and Jimmy Dore at times (see Homo Ignoramicus), but I’ve also seen them doing good work (see Max Blumenthal and Mnar Adley on Ukraine). Dore has also done good interviews (see Boogaloo = Boogie Man), although the cited interview made the WSWS fill its pants right up. If you read the linked article, then you’ll see that it did: Eric London of the WSWS went out of his mind at Jimmy Dore daring to purport that he’s a leftist while interviewing someone who the WSWS had deemed right-wing. If you listen to the interview, though, the guy doesn’t sound very right-wing at all. He sounds … kind leftist.
Some writers at the WSWS see fascists literally everywhere. It’s a good newspaper with overall very high-quality reporting, but their opinion stuff is absolutely cringe-inducing, at times.
The problem with the WSWS is that their approach is a complete dead end. You don’t have to go all the way to meet people, but you have to be at least willing to meet them halfway—to talk to them and try to convince them of your ideas. How the fuck does the WSWS propose to build a movement when they’re screeching at 90% of the populace about what useless bags of fascist shit they are?
That’s not how you win support. That’s not how you build a movement. You don’t have to convert to their ideas, you morons; you pretend to listen while converting them to yours. Trust me: I have a family whose politics are nothing like mine, but they love me, and I shame them into pretending to have my politics while I’m around. I bludgeon them with logic, counteracting their FOX News.
I hope that I’m annoying enough that people end up carrying a mini-version of me in their heads—one that pipes up when they’re lazily accepting some bullshit argument without evidence. It’s really the only way. It’s not easy and it takes practice, but I despair at the hard-line intolerance I see in like-minded people at places like the WSWS. David North is taking a run at Chris Hedges for being a fascist. What fucking planet is North even on?
“Particularly over the past year, Blumenthal and Mate have fully embraced the pandemic policy of the far right, promoting Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, leading authors of the Great Barrington Declaration,”
That makes them wrong on that issue, but not fascists, you indentitarian, nuance-free Spassbremse.
Although sometimes I feel that there are just a bunch of otherwise good writers and journalists who are simultaneously petty enough to carry grudges for decades, constantly dredging up somewhat minor details about their chosen enemies in order to try to convince their enemies that that person could never ever possibly be capable of having a good idea or of promoting an useful opinion or idea.
The article Lots of Twitter Files and Nowhere to Go by Yasha Levine (Immigrants as Weapons) provides such an example, where he takes a run at his former colleague Matt Taibbi (they’d worked together at least 25 years ago) by making a completely ludicrous argument about an action being useless because it not action led to immediate change. In this case, he declares the Twitter Files DOA, but then also throws Assange and Snowden under the bus for good measure.
“And even if there was some kind of coherent politics in the fight surrounding the Twitter Files, there’s still a bigger problem: More information doesn’t cause political change by itself — not if there isn’t a strong political organization that can turn this information into action and political empowerment. Wikileaks — Julian Assange’s project to change the world by letting state secrets flow — was a great example of this failure. And so were Edward Snowden and his leaks.”
What a dumb thing to say. Assange and Snowden did change things: just so significantly that the author can’t remember what it was like before we all knew that the U.S. government couldn’t be trusted. The erosion of trust in the U.S. didn’t happen by itself. It was pushed by people like Assange and Snowden. I think Levine is butthurt because he wrote an entire book about Surveillance Valley and no-one is citing him.
In the same vein, Yasha still seems to be wicked butt-hurt over Matt’s Substack doing much, much better than his own. Yasha generally comes off as butt-hurt these days. So, instead of acknowledging that some people seem to have managed to get at least some people to listen, he has to disparage everyone else’s work in order to pretend that no-one could possibly garner attention for the issues that he’d reported on. This probably makes him feel better about himself—and, hey, whatever helps you sleep at night—but it’s bullshit.
It’s quite a piece of work. I had to check a few times to see whether I was reading the state of the union of the U.S.A.
... [More]
Published by marco on 8. Feb 2023 21:16:15 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 28. Feb 2023 23:19:54 (GMT-5)
I read through the Full transcript of Biden’s 2023 State of the Union address by Biden Administration (CNN). Since I read it, it’s now been annotated to death. When I read it, it was just a transcript.
It’s quite a piece of work. I had to check a few times to see whether I was reading the state of the union of the U.S.A.
Joe Biden describes a country with policies that I don’t recognize. He describes a functioning democracy that is surging with greatness and getting amazing things done for everyone. And, at the same time, he’s apologetic about how bad things still are—but everything will be better soon.
You literally couldn’t publicly disagree with most of what Biden said in at least the first half of the speech. He talked about amazing social programs that are either already underway—or are coming very soon. As expected, his foreign policy—which took up only a small portion of the speech—was purely warlike, but equally fantastical as the rest of it.
Like any other SOTU, though, absolutely none of this fairy tale will come true.
To save you the trouble of reading through it, here’s my summary.
]]>“[…] confident Ukraine will get everything it wants. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give... [More]”
Published by marco on 29. Jan 2023 22:54:27 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 29. Jan 2023 23:02:59 (GMT-5)
The article Ukraine Expects to Get All the Western Weapons It Wants by Dave DeCamp (Scheer Post) quotes Yury Sak, an advisor to Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, who is
“[…] confident Ukraine will get everything it wants. “They didn’t want to give us heavy artillery, then they did. They didn’t want to give us HIMARS systems, then they did. They didn’t want to give us tanks, now they’re giving us tanks. Apart from nuclear weapons, there is nothing left that we will not get,” he said.”
But why stop at nuclear weapons? That doesn’t make any sense, does it? It certainly doesn’t gel with the argument that we must do anything we can to help Ukraine win their war against Russia.
How does that not include nuclear weapons? Are we not serious about helping? If we’re really on Ukraine’s side, shouldn’t we let them benefit from the deterrent effect of having nuclear weapons? In the worst case, they would be able to retaliate against a potential Russian attack, no?
Are we chicken? [1]
Or … do we not support them that way? Do we only support them in a hopeless war of attrition with conventional weapons? If we really believe in Ukraine as much as and for the reasons that we say that we do, then we should avail them of the same weapons that prevent us from invading Russia outright.
We did it for Israel, why not Ukraine?
For the irony-impaired who are in an outright panic, the title of this short essay is taken from Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, an essay that suggested,
“[…] that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food to rich gentlemen and ladies.”
It was satirical hyperbole—also known as reductio ad absurdum—a category in which this essay attempts to be included, with success that can only be judged by the reader.
Published by marco on 12. Jan 2023 21:13:57 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 12. Jan 2023 21:17:05 (GMT-5)
Max Blumenthal can be a pain in the ass because he’s so harsh sometimes and he expresses such disgust with things that don’t seem that disgusting, but the man has seen things. So, when he says that a staged a-cappella in a Kiev subway makes him sick to his stomach, it’s because he knows that it’s a staged operation funded by think tanks funded by the CIA, deliberately made and promulgated by the U.S. government to retain support for the war in Ukraine.
He says at 17:20,
“Every war or color revolution now plays out on Instagram. If you’re not on Instagram or you’re not following it, then you won’t understand how these wars or regime-change projects are being marketed. They’re all marketed through influencers and, I think, one of the most important things an investigative journalist who’s anti-imperialist or concerned about these kinds of events, can do is to look at how these influencers are being recruited. And that’s why you’re seeing, among young people, so much suppression of their traditional anti-war tendencies, [instead] you see support for these kinds of operations. You have experts doing the data-mining and the psychometric research to understand what soft spots to hit in the minds of millennials and zoomers and then they just pound it again and again.”
At 39:00, Max says that Exxon Mobil’s main offices in Dallas light up in yellow and blue every night in solidarity with the country whose conflict has gotten them fat revenues for European LNG contracts.
At 55:00, Max says that there are definitely factions who don’t believe that Russia will go nuclear and that we can keep provoking them until we’ve defeated them. This may actually be true! It might take a lot longer than they think, but Russia is not going to expand the war and Russia is not going to use its nukes. I think too many people know that.
So, they will take advantage of knowing that Russia is weaker militarily and it is more principled in that there are lines it won’t cross. NATO, on the other hand, thinks nothing of blowing up the bridge to Crimea, cutting off a whole country from its food supply, or blowing up gas pipelines (haven’t heard a thing about that since, so … we know who did it), cutting off a whole continent from its energy supply.
What if it succeeds? What if, because Russia would be unwilling to sink to NATO’s level, NATO prevails and succeeds in dethroning Putin and shoving Russia back into 1993? Will it go better for them this time? Will it be at all beneficial for us? Will China allow a large resource supplier to be taken over by the U.S.? Will India? When you cheer for Ukraine fighting until “all of Ukraine” is taken back, you’re cheering for the dismantling of Russia, because, if Russia is forced to pull back, then NATO will chase them home to Moscow. And then you might want to have thought about what will happen next. Then you might want to consider whether you’re supporting the good guy or just another pirate interested in taking what it doesn’t think it needs to buy.
At 36:20, Rebecca says,
“People’s passion is being weaponized to facilitate their... [More]”
]]>Published by marco on 12. Jan 2023 21:12:05 (GMT-5)
The following video was quite interesting and not just for observing the sartorial style of the San Fransisco author set. They are very thoughtful and passionate revolutionaries for a sane and just society.
At 36:20, Rebecca says,
“People’s passion is being weaponized to facilitate their exploitation.” These are the so-called “thankless” jobs where the pay sucks, but it’s morally and/or societally important: health-care, education, old-age care, care for the poor. All of these need to be done. Capitalism decides to pay them as little as possible—as usual—but, in this case, as little as possible is even less because the job has to be done.
Like when my mother-in-law worked for decades in old-age homes. Those ladies were her friends and they needed her to show up or they would suffer and die. A capitalist society, instead of being thrilled that someone is willing to do that work, pays less because of that “weird premium we assign to labor that means something” (Cory Doctorow citing David Graeber).
At 36:45, Cory says,
“[…] where we say to people who have a meaningful job, ‘why do you want to get a fair wage for it? Isn’t the satisfaction of doing the job enough? Surely, a fair wage should be reserved for people who have to do the soul-deadening work of representing a box and a dotted line in an org chart for a princeling in a Fortune 500 company. […] Those people need incentive for showing up to work! But if you get the intrinsic satisfaction of helping toddlers, you should be OK with going to the food bank twice a week.”
That’s how capitalism works. It minimizes outlays. If it can convince workers to produce for less, it will. If it needs workers for shitty jobs, it has to pay more.
This is an amoral and stupid way to run a society, of course.
It makes everyone bitter. It makes people bitter who just wanted to do something useful. It makes people miserable who take jobs that they hate in order to make more money. This is a clusterfuck and we should knock it the fuck off.
I continue to be shocked at how terrible Žižek’s take on the Russian attack on Ukraine is. This video is very long and he spends most of the time... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Dec 2022 22:35:47 (GMT-5)
The following video is almost two hours long. I have not summarized it, but address the general tenor of Žižek’s argumentation and presentation.
I continue to be shocked at how terrible Žižek’s take on the Russian attack on Ukraine is. This video is very long and he spends most of the time fighting foolish strongmen, mostly people he calls his “friends”, who all seem to have the absolute worst reasons possible for not supporting Ukraine wholeheartedly.
I heard absolutely nothing about any of the reasons anyone that I read has given for wanting to bring an end to this war. Žižek seems to think that being contrarian means somehow making it look like people who want to end the war are the truly violent people and those who sell weapons are not. This is ridiculous on its face—and even upon reflection.
Perhaps he thinks that the unending war in Ukraine or the total annihilation of Russia is a necessary evil, which we have to endure in to have even more peace? Is this Žižek’s Christopher Hitchens moment? Perhaps we finally found the bugbear—Russia—that turns Žižek’s brain off. He spends a considerable amount of time somehow equating Russia’s attitude toward LGBT as being worth any other sacrifice. He’s in fantastic company in the U.S. (that’s sarcasm)—I just wonder if he’s aware of what he seems to be saying.
Or maybe he just got sick of being called a Putinist all the time and this is just a long troll. Jesus, he does a good job, though. Check out 1:00:00, where he sounds like he’s presenting to a Women’s Studies class. In the second half, starting at 1:05:00, he posits that Russia’s purported position of siding with the third world can be nothing but Russian propaganda, that too many countries believe without question.
What I find missing is that Žižek fails to compare this at all with the fact that so many other countries do exactly the same thing with American propaganda. The more interesting analysis would be to see the whole conflict as a battle between high-level powers for allies, each deploying propaganda measures to win friends.
More interesting would be to think about what we would do if not only the revolution were to come from the “wrong type of people” (as with Jan. 6th in the U.S.) but also countries would learn to fake being helpful and democratic so well that you could no longer tell the difference—like the androids in Blade Runner. What if China or Russia were to learn how to fake being nice so well that they were actually beneficial? What if the U.S. did?
At least Žižek understands Russian and claims to listen to a lot of Russian media. So, he’s bathing in the awfulness of that media. It’s like listening only to FOX News, I imagine. Now he says that Russia’s media must be taken at face value and that “words matter”. I suppose they do, but we also have to consider who’s saying them and why they’re saying them. Like, the Democrats say they are anti-racist, but all of their policies are implicitly racist—so do words matter there? They say one thing and do another. Do those words matter? Or do words only matter if you say you’ll do something bad? Does it matter if you actually follow through or have the capability of following through on it?
I wonder what happened to Žižek (as I’ve done before from one or two of his recent articles). It’s not because I happen to disagree with him, but I’m saddened to see that the slyness and playfulness is gone from his argumentation—and he loses not a word on who his bedfellows have become in taking such a strong stand against (only) Russia.
At least he doesn’t waste any time rehashing the history of NATO’s encroachment. That is important for determining how to avoid this situation again—perhaps here Žižek would disagree, saying that pure evil like Putin cannot be avoided or appeased, to which I would shake my head and wonder if he literally doesn’t see that the same argument applies to NATO and the U.S—but is not important for getting fewer people killed and suffering and wasting power and time with a war. Perhaps the history will be important to a rapprochement, but it’s not necessarily important right now.
What really shocks me is Žižek’s seeming lack of nuance and seeming complete disregard for his lacking nuance. He describes the situation as extremely black-and-white, as if arming Ukraine is unequivocally the only possible moral solution—and then brooks no disagreement. I cannot distinguish his position from that of any other moron who thinks we should just push on through and win the war and destroy Putin, as if that were a remote possibility.
He batted the nuclear fear aside—just like anyone else on MSNBC—but didn’t address the possibility that the war could go on for another decade. He seems to think it will be over quickly. Either that, or he’s completely faking his empathy for Ukrainians. What if it’s not over quickly? What if it happens exactly as all of the far more qualified forecasters are predicting? I can’t tell the difference between Žižek and Biden on this.
If he thinks that we just have to push through in Ukraine in order to rid the world of the awful Russian empire, what does he see coming after that? A solidification of the beneficence of American empire? Wouldn’t it be just as easy to use the same logic to consider the Russians having invaded to be the monkey wrench in the works that we need to begin to topple NATO and the American empire? Wouldn’t that be a thought worth entertaining? Or is he really so in the tank for NATO and convinced that there is a definite good guy/definite bad guy here that he can leave his usual ambivalence by the wayside? Or does Žižek really think that his hoped-for socialist flowers will bloom in the garden of American empire?
The second question was very good:
“You said ‘words are not just words. They should always be taken seriously, especially in Putin’s case’ and he has brought up mutually assured destruction on many occasions now. How is it, in your mind, considered moral, to advocate for a confrontational stance against Russia when the possible consequences are so high i.e. mutually assured destruction.”
Žižek was absolutely swimming in a way that I’ve rarely seen him do. He was at a loss for words and his analysis was not good. He fell back to straw-manning people who knee-jerk diss on everything NATO does but not automatically what Russia does. Hey Žižek: there is no need to keep hammering on the crimes of a criminal who admits to being a criminal. It’s the one who commits crimes but claims holiness whom we should keep an eye on.
Instead of answering the guys question, Žižek returned to answering questions his left-liberal friends asked instead. He went on to harangue Yanis Varoufakis for celebrating the blow to American imperialism that was the retreat from Afghanistan. Of course, the people of Afghanistan will not be better off under the Taliban (maybe). Of course, you shouldn’t celebrate necessarily, but it was a good thing that America finally left.
Žižek thinks Russia would not have stopped at Ukraine, so he’s totally in the tank for the theory that Putin’s goal is to take all of Europe. The guy from the audience was great, asking just the right questions. I wonder whether Žižek isn’t just getting old? Or whether he had a shitty run of COVID? He seemed very muddled. Žižek kept repeating the well-worn propaganda elements (e.g. Putin’s saying that he wants to bring back the Soviet Union, which he never said, at least not if you include his full quote).
He kept fighting his leftist friends (who were not there) who think that “they are on the side of good if they oppose NATO.” It’s not about being good or bad, you old fool. It’s about trying to figure out which causes you should support in order to put an end to this war, to increase stability, to get us focused again on the real problems. Nobody serious is saying that one side is all good or all bad. There is no point discussing those viewpoints. The idea is how to realistically stop this and prevent it from getting worse and maybe figure out how to avoid it happening in the future (which involves paying attention to the actual history).
He did not answer the question. He did not justify how his simplistic “words are not just words” applies in one case and not the other.
We want a solution. Constantly saying Russia is bad is useless. Could we have prevented it? Do we care? Girlfriend scratched up the car. Why? Is she really just crazy? Or did we drive her crazy? I she too sensitive? Does it matter? Will our car keep getting scratched by girlfriends if we don’t change? Are we sure enough that we’re not the asshole that we prefer to keep getting our car scratched rather than to change our behavior? Or do we just beat the shit out of her before and/or afterwards to make sure it never happens again? Will that really work? Do we still have the moral high ground? Do we care?
Published by marco on 4. Dec 2022 22:00:40 (GMT-5)
Since at least July, I’ve been following the story of the railroad workers in the U.S. Their situation is awful. Their working conditions are extremely strict. They are not commensurate with those of a civilized society. It is only because of the extreme death of labor in the U.S. that there is even a discussion. But there is—because there is no support for labor in the U.S., only support for capital.
The U.S. is far from covering itself in glory, as we’ll learn from a spate of articles, starting with President Biden intervenes in rail talks in last-ditch effort to head off national strike by Tom Hall (WSWS),
“Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg underlined this in comments to News Nation yesterday. “We’ve got to get to a solution that does not subject the American economy to the threat of a shutdown,” he said. “We don’t have enough trucks, or barges, or ships in this country to make up for the rail network.””
Then concede to their very reasonable demands! They are essential. What is the actual fucking problem? Are the profits of the railroad companies not obscene enough? Can it really be that they’ve bought off every last legislator and functionary? Or is really that the hatred of the poor and the underclass in the U.S. rivals that of even the Indians for lower castes like the untouchables? The fervor with which the U.S. political class—the elites—refuse to even consider conceding even a morsel to the unwashed masses is nigh-religious.
Is it that the elites can’t be shown to have given in to the demands of the working class? Is that it? Is it that the elite politicians are in the back pocket of the private transportation corporations and nearly literally can’t conceive of a solution that involves them actually serving the citizens who elected them rather than the corporations who fund them?
They are more afraid of losing funding for the next campaign—and, almost certainly, huge personal kickbacks from their funders—than they are of the people who ostensibly elected them. These are functionaries who have no responsibility to the people. They care more about the profits of U.S. corporations than about the well-being of workers who the politicians, in the same breath, describe as absolutely essential.
It’s just that, when you’re at the bottom of the heap and essential, no-one ever thinks that the solution is to pay you more or give in to your demands. Instead, they lead these poor people on and on, over months and months, then threaten them with being responsible for taking down the nation. As if that’s not the politicians’ responsibility. As if it’s not their inability to conceive of doing the right thing that’s the problem.
Instead, they do things like this,
“In fact, through the veneer of “collective bargaining” with a union apparatus totally integrated with management and the state, the strategy of Biden has been to prevent a strike and impose a sellout. Meanwhile, Biden and the Democrats—together with the Republicans—have been preparing for months behind the scenes for congressional action to block a strike and unilaterally impose a deal if necessary.”
Because they only understand force when it comes to the working class. They absolutely fucking hate the working class. They hate the poor. The elites absolutely resent the fact their hallowed lives are bound up with these unwashed masses, that the unwashed masses can even conceive of having opinions of their own, instead of just suffering in silence and obscurity, while they provide the underpinnings of a society enjoyed by the 1% and suffered by everyone else.
This is the concession that they’ve made so far:
“The only change was the addition of three unpaid sick days per year for doctors’ appointments—up from zero—which had to be scheduled between Tuesday and Thursday, at least one month in advance.”
Read that again. It’s madness that this is even considered a concession.
Their union agreed to this. As I’ve told a colleague of mine who works as a teacher in the U.S.: if you’re getting fucked over like this and you think you have a union, then think again. You’re paying union dues, but you don’t have a union. You’re paying a union to work for your employer.
“A strike in the leadup to the Christmas holiday would have a particularly powerful effect, stopping the 40 percent of freight which is shipped on the railroads and costing roughly $2 billion a day.”
No kidding, really? Then do your job and give them what they want. They are not asking for the moon. They are asking for justice.
Instead, they get the rod, as detailed in Biden calls on Congress to impose rail contract, in a major assault on workers’ democratic rights by Tom Hall (WSWS), where Biden and the Democrats and all of Congress will join in just denying labor rights to what they deem to be essential workers. They are essential, but we will not pay them more nor give them sick days.
Instead, there is no difference between the U.S. and a corporate dictatorship. The corporations make policy and treat the populace as a captive work-force. Those railway workers should be happy that they’re getting paid at all! They should feel lucky to have a job, whether or not it pays anything!
“Biden justified the move on the basis of the major economic impact that a strike would have, which he claimed “would hurt millions of other working people and families.” This could be resolved tomorrow if the railroad industry, the most profitable in America, agreed to workers’ reasonable demands, including paid sick leave and schedules that leave them time to spend with their families.
“{…}
“Dripping with contempt for the railroaders, Biden concluded: “I share workers’ concern about the inability to take leave to recover from illness or care for a sick family member. … But at this critical moment for our economy, in the holiday season, we cannot let our strongly held conviction for better outcomes for workers deny workers the benefits of the bargain they reached, and hurl this nation into a devastating rail freight shutdown.” In other words, the democratic will of workers should not be a barrier to their “enjoyment” of the terms of a sellout contract that they rejected.”
“Monday night, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement cynically feigning concern for railroad workers while running roughshod over their right to reject a pro-company contract. “As we consider Congressional action, we must recognize that railroads have been selling out to Wall Street to boost their bottom lines, making obscene profits while demanding more and more from railroad workers. We are reluctant to bypass the standard ratification process for the Tentative Agreement,” she claimed, before declaring, “we must act to prevent a catastrophic nationwide rail strike.””
So, order the companies to concede to the workers’ demands. It really is that simple. It’s not like those companies will go out of business if their profits dip just a touch. They are making money hand-over-fist. They have never had better years. They are profiting massively. They will not be made to share this wealth with the workers who have made their companies so productive. Congress doesn’t care. No-one does. No-one who matters.
The article Democrats Were Dithering on Railworkers’ Rights. The Left Just Forced Their Hand. by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin) writes,
“The political malpractice on display here became clear when several Republicans used it as an opening to posture as pro-worker. Ted Cruz called railworker demands for sick leave “quite reasonable,” while, more significant, Marco Rubio put out a subtly union-bashing statement calling for both sides to “go back and negotiate a deal that the workers, not just the union bosses, will accept” and affirming he would “not vote to impose a deal that doesn’t have the support of the rail workers.”
“Likewise, Josh Hawley, who has moved to brand himself as a pro-worker populist in advance of a planned 2024 run, stated that workers “said no and then Congress is gonna force it down their throats at the behest of this administration.” Even Colorado Democrat John Hickenlooper, hardly a progressive firebrand, saw which way the wind was blowing and affirmed that “any bill should include the SEVEN days of sick leave rail workers have asked for.”
“In other words, several Republicans and a guy who drank fracking fluid were to the left of the “most pro-union president” in history.”
And The Railway Labor Fight Is an Object Lesson in Democratic Party Hypocrisy by Luke Savage (Jacobin) writes,
“Earlier this week, the Biden White House issued a statement of thanks to Democrats and Republicans in the House of Representatives who had just voted to impose a contract without sick days on railworkers and override their right to strike.”
“[…] legislation to impose a contract on railworkers meanwhile passed by a whopping margin of eighty to fifteen. Never let anyone tell you that bipartisanship is dead.”
They are all criminals. Utterly amoral criminals. Are they not afraid? They are not. They have literally no fear that their ordering “essential workers” to shut their fucking crybaby mouths and go back to work doing their essential things without a pay raise and without sick days and without any improvement in their abysmal working conditions.
They are not afraid. They are the kind of people who annoy the waiter and are not afraid that anyone would every dare to piss in their soup. Oh, how we need Tyler Durden and his crew right now. There seems to be no other way. The arrogance of the elites is unbounded. Their support of corporate rights over basic human decency (and this, right before Christmas), is absolutely infinite.
The only unions allowed to function in the U.S. are for firemen and police officers. What do the police do when they don’t get what they want? They slow down. They stop doing their jobs. Are any of them ever fired? Of course not. They get what they want. Honestly, this is how it should work. But it only works like that for the hyper-militarized enforcement arm of elite America. Everyone else has to shut the fuck up and get in fucking line.
I really, really hope these rail unions follow up on their statement to not follow the edicts of the Congress. By what right can Congress order them back to work? They conceded to none of their demands and told them to go back to work. This was Congress’s answer:🖕 It should be the workers’ answer to Congress as well. Slow down, don’t show up, fucking ruin Christmas for everyone. Lose that $2B a day. Congress thinks they’ve avoided it because they sincerely believe that the world has to do what they say. Prove. Them. Wrong.
Published by marco on 21. Nov 2022 23:03:26 (GMT-5)
I think that one of the main things that sticks in my craw about the war in Ukraine is the absolute speed with which so many people capitulated to the idea of its inevitability. We acted like Liam Neeson in Taken, Sylvester Stallone in Rambo, Arnold Schwarzenegger in Commando, Mel Gibson in Payback, or, most recently, Keanu Reeves in John Wick .
Look, you could still enjoy the movies, but you must be aware of how manipulative the initial scene of massive injustice toward our hero or his family is. It’s a fairy tale set up deliberately to eradicate all thought or opposition to the idea of wholesale vigilante slaughter. It engenders the utter opposite of justice, getting you to cheer for a simple world, in which everyone is absolutely good or absolutely evil and moral judgments can be made in a fillip.
Hell, the guys in those movies all showed more reluctance to enter battle than the western world did, which spends so much of the rest of time congratulating itself for the absolutely glorious view that it has from the moral high ground.
Instead, they didn’t even look back. They just sprinted toward war, excited to spend billions and test weapons and fight an enemy that they’d spent decades telling everyone practically had a tower with a fiery eye in the middle of Moscow. There was and is little discussion—just full-throated support of unfettered bellicosity as the only possible solution to any problem.
As luck would have it, I’ve just finished reading War is the Greatest Evil by Chris Hedges. On page 160, he cites Kant,
“Immanuel Kant called absolute moral imperatives that are used to carry out immoral acts ‘a radical evil.’ He wrote that this kind of evil was always a form of unadulterated self-love. It was the worst type of self-deception. It provided a moral façade for terror and murder.”
This, of course, applies not just to the countries and media I know intimately [1], but also to Russia—whose intentions and explanation and media landscape I can only guess at, but which I surmise are also unable to avoid acting in just this way. [2] China’s propaganda to its own citizens will also tend to be quite one-sided, though their lust for war seems to be much more tempered than that of the former colonizers [3] of the entire world in the west.
Citing Hedges again, from page 167,
“There are days I wish I was whole. I wish I could put down this cross. I envy those who, in their innocence, believe in the innate goodness of America and the righteousness of war, and celebrate what we know is despicable.”
Damn, Chris. He’s not wrong, though.
I spoke with a friend the other night who said that I was quite cynical about America and that he’d rather have America in charge than China or Russia.
I was taken aback, but rallied and asked him whether he wasn’t the more cynical one, who couldn’t imagine a world without a boot on our collective necks. He had so internalized the idea that there must be an empire that he’d limited himself to choosing which one. “None of the above,” didn’t enter into it.
I told him that it sounded to me as if he’d resigned himself to the profession that had been chosen for him, and that he thought his agency was limited to being able to vote on who was going to pimp him. We’re friends, though, so he laughed, albeit a bit nervously.
A couple more quotes from Chris Hedges, here citing the inestimable James Baldwin, who grappled with the same problem as Kant did, in his time, and as we continue to do, today.
“[…] as James Baldwin wrote, that ‘people who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.’”
This is one of the powerful final paragraphs,
“I cannot impart to you the cheerful and childish optimism that is the curse of America. I can only tell you to stand up, to pick up your cross, to keep moving. I can only tell you that you must always defy the forces that eat away at you, at the nation—this plague of war.”
A friend sent me a video of Trevor Noah in a segment on the racism experienced by Rishi Sunak. I could only find the original video on Facebook, of all places. YouTube is chock-full of reaction... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Oct 2022 21:11:11 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Oct 2022 21:12:11 (GMT-5)
…is not that he is Indian. The problem is that he is a neoliberal class-warrior against the poor.
A friend sent me a video of Trevor Noah in a segment on the racism experienced by Rishi Sunak. I could only find the original video on Facebook, of all places. YouTube is chock-full of reaction video to the original video. Trevor Noah plays a call-in show from England that features a racist caller saying that Sunak can’t represent England because he’s not white. That’s just basic maths, right? [1]
I wrote the following about my initial reaction to the video.
“I mean it’s cute, and he’s right, on the level that he approaches it, but Trevor Noah is the king of taking inoffensive positions and grabbing low-hanging fruit.
“I wish he had the courage to examine what’s really wrong with Sunak rather than lazily defending him from the most racist morons in the country, who are allowed to voice their opinions on the air precisely because it makes everyone else angry and makes those angry people feel superior and, most importantly, keeps them watching through the adverts.
“Give it six weeks and let’s see whether a born-rich Goldman Sachs alum who made all of his money in 2008 when he benefitted mightily from a financial collapse that ruined millions of lives and who viscerally hates the poor is going to do anything useful.
“Maybe his cash giveaways to the rich will be more subtle than Truss’s were, and won’t immediately destabilize the bond market so drastically that the BOE has to restart quantitative easing AT THE SAME TIME that they’re raising interest rates, which is like slamming your foot on both the gas and the brake and expecting to get anywhere.
“It’s absolute amateur hour over there in Great Britain and I expect Sunak to fit right in. But, sure, let’s reemphasize that his skin color is the last thing people should be focused on, either as a negative OR a positive.”
When I searched for the original video for this article, I learned that Great Britain had quite a problem with American liberals (and I guess Noah is one now?) projecting literally everything through an American lens. E.g. they assume that Great Britain is just as racist as America, when it’s actually a good deal more integrated and chill. It’s not perfect—it’s not like there are no racists—but it’s not America.
God help me, but I’m going to cite an article from The Sun, ’SIMPLY WRONG’ Downing Street blasts leftie comedian Trevor Noah’s weird claims that Rishi Sunak experienced racist backlash as new PM by Natasha Clark (The Sun)
“The ex-Chancellor hit back: “Simply wrong. A narrative catered to his audience, at a cost of being completely detached from reality.
““Britain is the most successful multiracial democracy on earth and proud of this historic achievement.”
“Internet users accused him of “projecting” his American views about race onto Britain.
“Historian, author and podcaster Tom Holland also responded to Noah’s claims, writing: “As ever, the inability of American liberals to understand the world beyond the US in anything but American terms is a thing of wonder.
““The likelihood of the right-wing party in the US choosing a Hindu as its leader is, I would agree, effectively zero.””
Well, shit, when you’re right, you’re right. The American so-called liberal-left is so far up its own ass that it doesn’t even bother to check in with reality before it starts spouting opinions. It honestly feels like how people discourse on Twitter now dictates how they do everything. This is an awful, awful trend.
It’s rich when the U.S. leads the charge to talk about how bad it is when one of its official enemies invades a country.
Was there provocation in Russia’s... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Oct 2022 22:23:36 (GMT-5)
We’ve definitely heard that Invasions Are Only Bad When Russia Does Them by Ted Rall. Is this true? It seems to be. No-one else gets shit for invasions.
It’s rich when the U.S. leads the charge to talk about how bad it is when one of its official enemies invades a country.
Was there provocation in Russia’s case? Yes, there was. Is that justification for the invasion? No, it is not. There is no justification for any invasion.
Was there provocation in Panama, Grenada, or Cuba? In the case of Cuba, yes, there was provocation. In Grenada and Panama, it was just meanness, on the part of the U.S.
To paraphrase the classic phrase a bit, that is what the United States keeps on being able to do with the rest of the western world.
My theory is that it’s because the rest of the world is cynically focused on their own short-term self-interest. Nothing... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 2. Oct 2022 11:32:31 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 2. Oct 2022 11:45:49 (GMT-5)
…was convincing the world he was God.
To paraphrase the classic phrase a bit, that is what the United States keeps on being able to do with the rest of the western world.
My theory is that it’s because the rest of the world is cynically focused on their own short-term self-interest. Nothing much has changed in that regard. They simply continue to pretend that they’re doing whatever they do for wholly virtuous reasons, but they really have no principles at all.
Look at a country like Switzerland, which has capitulated the least of the continental countries:
None of the European countries seems to care that they have joined the U.S. in playing a giant game of chicken with Russia and China. China and Russia want to continue to exist and grow and use their resources and strengths. The United States wants a unipolar world. Europe and Switzerland have fallen in with the U.S. on wishing for a unipolar world, because that is the world from they currently benefit the most (or so they think). They cannot see beyond simply keeping the world going exactly as it is so that they, personally, can reap the giant rewards that this arrangement has historically provided to their elites.
The threat of COVID barely moved the needle. The same for the threat of the climate crisis. They are moved to care for a fleeting moment and then just drop back to the default position of grubbing money and power for themselves.
This is clear. It is unsurprising. It is also wildly unprincipled and completely uninterested in the welfare of the other 99.99% of the planet’s people—to say nothing of the untold trillions of as-yet unborn people.
Do not believe a word that anyone says about taking a principled stance against bad behavior on the part of nations. That is not what they are doing. You cannot ignore all of the bad behavior on the part of your allies and focus only on the bad behavior of whichever enemy your Lord and Master has directed your ire at.
No, what is happening is that the U.S. has, once again, selected the countries they would like to take control of next, and sicced its hounds upon them. And its hounds sprint across the field, heedless of their own well-being. That is Europe. That is, sadly, also Switzerland, at least for now.
The U.S. is too late, of course. It has capitulated all of its manufacturing power. All of its infrastructure is in a shambles. Its economy is a hollow joke, running on fumes. Everything it accuses China of—being a surveillance state, being a carceral state—it does even more. It’s a terrible, awful joke.
Still, the corpse of the U.S. empire twitches. It will cause a lot of damage on its way down, its thrashing limbs mimicking the motions of a healthy empire, but really just a faded shadow of them.
The people in charge of the western world—the existing empire—are nearly shockingly stupid. Not just stupid—incapable of comprehension or reasoning at a higher level—but ignorant. They either ignore obvious things that they should know (e.g. the machinations of NATO over the last 30 years) or they are simply unaware of them.
They just literally don’t know that the president of the U.S. essentially declared war on Russia 10 days ago on a nationally aired American news show. He said that the U.S. (he didn’t even bother say NATO now) would continue to arm and financially support Ukraine until all its territory had been wrested from Russia. That includes Crimea.
That is a declaration of war because Russia very much considers Crimea to be part of Russia, just as it now considers the freshly minted easter oblasts of Ukraine to be Russian territory as well.
It may not be right or just for Russia to feel this way, but it does, and it is prepared to back up its beliefs with military force. It has even recently re-stated that it will use atomic weapons, if necessary.
These are the ravings of another mad and fading empire. However, we are forced to take them seriously because the Russian corpse twitches just like the U.S. one. We can’t ignore the rabid bull in our midst. It is mad, but still powerful enough to cause a lot of damage.
NATO (Europe and the U.S.) is focused laser-like on its hypocritical stance: when we do it (e.g. with the destruction of Yugoslavia and extraction and immediate recognition of Kosovo, all without a security-council resolution or as much as a by-your-leave from the UN), it’s a morally sacred endeavor to bring the light of democracy to peoples long benighted by the pall of communism.
When Russia does the same thing to “free” culturally Russian people in the east of Ukraine from a very Russophobic government installed by a coup in Kiev, it’s the epitome of evil and against all principles. However, NATO is also very willing to do the exact same thing with Taiwan and China.
There is no principle here. There is only the self-seeking madness of empire, the absolute bloodlust of elites blinded to everything but the arrogation of more lucre and power to themselves.
That goes not just for Europe and the U.S, but for Russia as well. They are all children, playing at war games to distract us from how much power they have—and want.
We have to recognize that it is the U.S. that could have prevented this from ever having started—and which has the power to end it all overnight. It simply chooses not to, because the situation right now is very much to its liking—or, at least, to the liking of the mad, stupid, historically and strategically ignorant elite that is currently in charge.
If the U.S. were to call for peace talks, Ukraine and Russia would both attend. It would get done. There are points of agreement. We know this because, in late April, they had a 14-point agreement already, but the U.S. and England torpedoed it, in favor of continuing the war and pressing their purported advantage. Many, many more people have died and much, much more has been destroyed.
The West does not care because it pleases itself thinking that it can blame everything on Russia, but the world is not convinced. The rest of the world knows that the West could end this anytime it wants. Instead, it promulgates for the benefit of a mad, tiny elite.
That is not either one of your jobs.
You each have one job.
You are not doing it.
Stop censoring knowledge and... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 19. Sep 2022 22:24:23 (GMT-5)
Not only is Cloudflare getting opinionated about what kinds of site it deems worthy of hosting, but now the Internet Archive is also deciding which sites are worth remembering.
That is not either one of your jobs.
You each have one job.
You are not doing it.
Stop censoring knowledge and history and information.
Published by marco on 19. Sep 2022 22:10:39 (GMT-5)
I’ve read that a so-called special master has been appointed to oversee the dissemination of information from the files seized in the raid of Trump’s Mar-el-Lago resort. I’ve also read that this will significantly delay the release of information. I think it’s ok in the sense that I’m interested in justice being served for Trump as well as anyone else. That is, if the information were to be disseminated by an extremely unfriendly press and Twitterati, then it would be very likely that we would be subjected to yet another trial-by-media rather than an actual trial. Those kinds of trial tend to confirm what people already believe—or want to believe—rather than actually coming up with anything like the truth. If the conclusion of a trial-by-media also happens to be true, then it’s purely a coincidence.
I’ve also read from some who should know better that it’s unfair for Trump to get a special master to manage the information resulting from the investigation into his affairs when nearly no-one else in the country is afforded the same benefit. Anyone who’s not rich and famous gets their face plastered all over Facebook by local police departments as soon as they’re arrested. They have their names dragged through the mud even before they’re charged, arraigned, or convicted.
The answer to this isn’t, for me, that we should apply this same unfair system to Trump—and his rich/famous colleagues. The answer is that we should apply the fair system to everyone, not just the rich and famous. This seems highly unlikely, so people settle for demanding that everyone be treated unfairly and unjustly, rich or poor.
I was thinking today what I’m going to say when someone in my family asks me what I think of America.
Maybe something like:
I think that you’re lost control of your country. And I think you need to stop worshiping the people... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 3. Jul 2022 17:08:58 (GMT-5)
I’m going to be there soon for the first time in almost four years.
I was thinking today what I’m going to say when someone in my family asks me what I think of America.
Maybe something like:
I think that you’re lost control of your country. And I think you need to stop worshiping the people who’ve taken it from you.
I think you’re all fighting over what amount to minor differences relative to the actually major issues on which you mostly agree. You get lost in the weeds on issues like abortion because you end up stupidly yelling at each other without even discussing the details of the actual laws on the books.
I think you’re all right about some things and shockingly, tragically wrong about most things and I think the things that you’re the most passionate about are exactly the things that you’re the most wrong about.
I think most of you have lost any empathy for admitting that the people with other ideas might have a point about some things, which is obvious if you acknowledge how complicated and complex issues actually are. The only people who are certain there are simple solutions are the ones who don’t need them. They’ll be just fine if nothing gets done.
I think you have to stop hating the poor when it’s super-obvious that being poor isn’t even close to being someone’s own fault these days. There are so many external factors that “personal laziness”—the go-to reason and explanation—doesn’t even show up in the top-ten list.
I think you really need to dial back the violence and the militarism and the wars and the empire. It’s killing you, it’s killing everyone else, and it’s killing the planet. It’s also just plain immoral and unethical and hypocritical.
I think you’re all wrong to focus laser-like on the presidency when it doesn’t matter who’s president if legislatures are the ones passing the actual laws. Someone like Trump or Biden will convince you that the president is the most important thing, but that’s because it’s the most important thing to them. They want to be president, but they don’t actually want to accomplish anything.
What you all should be focusing on is figuring what you need most and then getting it. Living wages, health care, infrastructure, industry are all a good start. Instead, the NYS governor gives away $1B to a football team when upstate New York is dying, and no-one bats an eye.
The 0.1% have yoked the media into keeping you all fighting each other instead of banding together with torches and pitchforks to get your country back.
The way most of you are being screwed over from day to day, I’m honestly surprised there isn’t an attack on the capitol building every day. To be more effective, you should be storming the state legislatures and putting the fear of god into them.
Everybody else shows up in the classic garb of the European upper-class. Zelenskyy shows that he’s got them by the balls by showing up in a grotty, old, army-olive T-Shirt. He’s at war, you see.
In this next picture, we see... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 24. Jun 2022 18:19:42 (GMT-5)
Zelenkskyy’s wardrobe of 100% T-Shirts is pretty clearly a power move.
Everybody else shows up in the classic garb of the European upper-class. Zelenskyy shows that he’s got them by the balls by showing up in a grotty, old, army-olive T-Shirt. He’s at war, you see.
In this next picture, we see him thinking about what he’ll ask for next.
Apparently, it was for them to not only let Ukraine into NATO, to have Sweden and Finland give up their neutrality for Ukraine, but also to fast-track Ukraine’s entry into the EU.
Neat. What would possibly go wrong?
There are no contrarian positions, there are no mentions of Hegel or Lacan, no mentions... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 22. Jun 2022 22:13:36 (GMT-5)
I skimmed through a recent article called Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine by Slavoj Žižek (The Guardian). I’ve read a lot of Žižek. I’ve heard a lot of interviews with him. This article doesn’t “sound” like him at all.
There are no contrarian positions, there are no mentions of Hegel or Lacan, no mentions of psychiatry. He made absolutely no pop-culture references. He told no jokes. He usually talks of being a realist communist—nothing of the sort here. No mention of Ukraine’s absolute war on communism. There’s no subtlety at all in this article—just vaguely hawkish and unsubtle good-guys-vs-bad-guys rhetoric.
A search of earthli.com for Žižek yields a wealth of interviews and articles I’ve covered over the last couple of years. Read any excerpt or transcription from a video and see whether the style in the Guardian article matches his prior style at all.
The summary can’t possibly have been written by him, unless he’s recently struck his head quite badly, “The least we owe Ukraine is full support, and to do this we need a stronger Nato”. This is woefully less nuanced than he used to be. I suspect a ghost-writer or that he’s been taken hostage. Maybe this topic finally drove him around the bend, though; I must remain open to this possibility.
I haven’t seen any writing of his for months. He interviewed frequently at the beginning of the incursion and was much more nuanced and balanced in his views—but he hasn’t interviewed in quite some time. Now, an article appears “out of the blue”, as it were, wherein he espouses an opinion that wouldn’t be at all out of place on major U.S. cable-news channels.
The whole article is full of realpolitik references that Žižek has historically glossed-over in favor of more interesting philosophical ruminations. This article could have been written by any of dozens of other people—and I fear that it was. Perhaps something of what Žižek submitted survives a bit—if he submitted anything at all. I wouldn’t put it past the Guardian to publish something in his name.
The final, somewhat contrarian paragraph, seems possibly to have been written by Žižek, though,
“From the rightist standpoint, Ukraine fights for European values against the non-European authoritarians; from the leftist standpoint, Ukraine fights for global freedom, inclusive of the freedom of Russians themselves. That’s why the heart of every true Russian patriot beats for Ukraine.”
However, directly after this ending paragraph is a section that explains who Žižek is, followed by a much-longer section that starts with “I write from Ukraine, where I’ve spent much of the past six months […]” and is signed “Luke Harding”. Did he write the article? Or did he just write the blurb requesting donations?
The article Slavoj Zizek Does His Christopher Hitchens Impression by Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch) has a more to-the-point, if less-charitable, title. His analysis is quite astute, but he also seems to be negatively predisposed toward Žižek, whereas I am very positively predisposed to Žižek. Hence, where Jacobs is willing to believe that this article represents Žižek’s denouement, I am much more willing to believe that he didn’t write the damned thing at all—or that he wrote it while tied to a chair with a gun to his head.
The Congress even threw in more than the Pentagon... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 6. Jun 2022 08:59:32 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Jun 2022 17:21:46 (GMT-5)
Earlier this year, seemingly inside of a day, the normally deadlocked U.S. government approved an $800B+ budget for the U.S. military. That’s the base price, not including money for actual wars and not including “black budgets” for spy agencies.
The Congress even threw in more than the Pentagon had asked for, just for shits and giggles. [1]
A few weeks ago, the ruling classes of the United States decided to spend an additional $40B on the Ukraine conflict, over ¾ of it for weapons and military support.
On Friday, Joe Biden signed an 8.5% increase in Medicare premiums, mostly to pay for an Alzheimer’s medication from a private-sector company that didn’t even end up being covered.
This is maddening, no?
Even if you don’t believe in conspiracy theories that make you even madder, this is maddening enough.
Enough for what?
There are so many foolish people who can’t believe that people stormed the Capital Building on Jan.6th, 2021.
I can’t believe it isn’t happening every day.
“After mass shootings, liberal opponents of gun rights love to say that violence is never the answer. But their messaging on war, violence, militarism, even assassinations, sends a completely different message about their hypocrisy.”
This one got me thinking... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. May 2022 22:11:47 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 29. May 2022 22:13:54 (GMT-5)
The cartoon We Come in Peace by Ted Rall writes,
“After mass shootings, liberal opponents of gun rights love to say that violence is never the answer. But their messaging on war, violence, militarism, even assassinations, sends a completely different message about their hypocrisy.”
This one got me thinking that America’s refusal to pass gun-control/background-check measures to stem the violence is one place where we’re not hypocritical! We are the world’s largest arms merchant, flooding one disadvantaged nation after another with high-powered weapons. It only stands to reason that what we do to them, we should do to ourselves. At least with violence at home, we can pretend that we think gun violence is ok — which is why we export it. Does that give us an ethical leg to stand on? Of course not. But, it allows us to pretend that we do.
I’ve seen cries for new gun-control laws. Honestly, though, I think it should be “improve your care for the mentally ill, and also take measures to address the toxic nature of your culture that leads so many people to become mentally ill in the first place.”
I know we’re not supposed to blame the shooter, we’re supposed to blame the gun. I don’t blame the shooter. I blame the culture that was the petri dish in which he grew. Did you read any of his manifesto? He was 18! He was so far gone already. It would have been a long road to reintegrating him into anything resembling a normal society.
You have to understand that, from the viewpoint of a society in which these things don’t happen all the time, pretty much most of the population seems mentally ill or ill-adjusted or morbidly unhappy and, therefore, strongly susceptible to the kind of toxic stew of hare-brained ideas that this guy had.
Published by marco on 18. Apr 2022 23:21:16 (GMT-5)
The following is a collection of essays, notes, and ideas I’ve written over the last several weeks, all loosely associated with the war in Ukraine. I’ve tried to edit the notes into some coherence, especially since some have been chronologically superseded, but I’m neither a journalist nor a scholar, so YMMV. I don’t even necessarily stand behind everything here—some of it is or was just food for thought. The lower you go, the older the notes. The title refers to one of the essays, which posits that our dialogue is at the level of George W. Bush, intellectually.
At a very high level, what we are witnessing in Ukraine is a unipolar power (the U.S.) teaching a harsh lesson to an upstart (Russia) that thinks the world should be, at least, multipolar. Russia has posited that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander and gotten its leash yanked very severely. Sitting on the sidelines, taking notes, is China. Europe has very clearly indicated where it is in the pecking order by immediately aligning its interests with those of the United States, without question or modification.
So, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, we have the following situation.
If we’re honest about where we stand, morally and intellectually, then the entire western world (the U.S., Europe, and NATO allies) is wholeheartedly that of George W. Bush. The patron saint of their religion might as well be Junior now. They “don’t negotiate”. They chirpily regurgitate “you’re either with us or against us” to shut down any form of argument or inquiry.
And these people are still fighting the “Axis of Evil” with an ever-changing roster of countries. The original was Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Now, it’s Russia, China, and probably still poor Iran. George W. Bush is now a painter. It’s always the painters stirring up trouble. [1]
There seems to be no end of people who are dumb enough to think that an opposition to Russia will not have to concede anything whatsoever in order to make the violence stop. They want to beat the invasion into submission, no matter what the cost or the risk. They don’t care how many Ukrainians will have to die, as long as they can blame Russia for it. They don’t care whether nuclear bombs are dropped as long as they can blame it on Russia. They are mental midgets, children.
People grasp at good guy/bad guy narratives. They think that condemning everyone involved in a war amounts to kowtowing to one side or the other. The message we’re told is: Russia is an evil empire; there are different rules for them than for NATO nations, especially the U.S. Anyone who claims neutrality or seeks compromise—it’s the only way to end a war short of total destruction of one side or the other or both—is evil. Diplomacy is evil. That’s where we are now. Every attempt at diplomacy is undermined because one cannot treat with evil.
These people are willing to concede nothing, not even the tiniest thing, because they think that this is a game. They think that they are fighting an ancient and unbending evil that must be shattered, destroyed to the last atom. Anyone who even considers any form of concession or compromise with Russia, as Chomsky does, notably, is a traitor and hates the freedom-loving Ukrainians. How outmatched would Ukraine have to be for these people to consider the struggle hopeless?
Demilitarization in Ukraine is the sensible thing to do, that results in the least amount of suffering for everyone. This is not what will happen. The world has been primed to first want to destroy Russia and to “save” Ukraine, without any clear idea of what that means—because most people live in a world with a plot about as complex as that of a Stephen Segal movie. They want revenge first and think that they can “win” peace through war without any more suffering. Or they think that they’ll be able to justify any suffering by blaming it on the enemy, so that’s all good. Those pushing the hardest are those least likely to feel the brunt, as usual.
De-escalate the situation. Give Russia what it wants and they’ll go home. They would have stayed home if you’d given them what they wanted before they invaded. You can’t have what you want—that option doesn’t exist. It never did. We’re were we are now because one rogue superpower dictates to the world, using its economic and military might to enforce its empire—and weapons manufacturers control that superpower.
Ask yourself where do you think this is headed? Are you for peace? At what cost? Are you for this war? Are you for de-escalation? You might know what you’d like to happen next; where do you think it will lead? How likely is your desired outcome? Do you even have a desired outcome? Or are you just lustily supporting “the good guys” with no idea of what it would even mean to win?
Ask yourself: cui bono? Russia certainly doesn’t. Russia the country had already been pushed into a very uncomfortable corner, forcing its power toward all the worst parts of their society—and now it’s 10x worse. Dissent will be crushed there, as is also happening in Europe and the U.S.
There is only one way to think: victory. That’s the only acceptable thought in any of these supposedly enlightened societies. Ukraine is absolutely fucked. It will host the war, which is like hosting an Olympics, but far, far worse. Its leadership is also consolidating power and trying to drive to—you guessed it—victory. Europe is going to suffer from a massive disruption of energy, but at least it’s no longer winter. Europe is also dropping its veil of openness and progressivism and going for full-throated unison on—you guessed it—victory.
The U.S. has high gas prices and may have overplayed its hand in the same way that Russia did. However, the U.S. is thousands of kilometers away, its favored businesses are selling weapons like mad, and it’s watching Europe and Russia beat the shit out of each other, while egging them on. The U.S. has the least to lose directly from the conflict. The perturbations may end up toppling an already-shaky economy, but I wouldn’t count on it. If Russia has a long way to fall, the U.S. has much longer.
Ukrainians are suffering. It is within our power to make that stop. We could negotiate with Russia, stop delivering weapons, guarantee neutrality, and make it all go away. I care about Ukraine and would be willing to capitulate a bit. Are you willing? Or would you rather have revenge?
It deeply offends me to see the world allow itself to be sicced on a nation (Russia) for transgressing on another nation (Ukraine) by the nation (U.S.) that’s done the same thing a dozen times over, always without punishment.
As Felix said on 608 − The World’s Mack (3/7/22) by Chap Traphouse (SoundCloud),
“Yes, Russia is doing terrible things and I’m glad that that’s the one country doing terrible things to whom we’re not sending weapons.”
I’m not arguing that the ruling class in Russia is right to spout their horseshit about “national security” or “de-Nazification”. It’s moderately more plausible than when the U.S. was talking about Iraq because it’s right on their doorstep, but it’s still horseshit. What’s the difference between Poland and Ukraine? Poland probably has U.S. nukes right now…and has probably had them for a while.
Russia went in foolishly believing its own invincibility myth. NATO is slowly starting to return the favor. Believing that Ukraine can be armed out of its inferiority is a fool’s errand. As Katie Halper said on Extended episode: How the Ukraine War Helps US Empire by Katie Halper & Aaron Maté (Useful Idiots),
“Ukraine cannot arm its way out of this.”
That won’t stop them from trying, though.
The starvation of Afghanistan is at least as bad as the invasion of the Ukraine, but no-one cares. Nearly literally no-one. We can round down to zero and lose no real accuracy. The U.S. was not banned from the Olympics for needlessly and senselessly and brutally stepping on the neck of a country it only recently stopped occupying after 20 years. No-one said a fucking word. No exclusion from SWIFT, not sanctions. Literally, nothing happened. America is allowed to occupy countries while Russia is not.
Even if Russia’s reasons are more credible than those of the U.S.—it doesn’t matter. The U.S. literally stopped occupying Afghanistan less than a year ago and now stands there, telling the world that occupying other countries is super-bad and all of those fucking idiots just nod their heads in approval and adulation and masturbatory glee, hoping that the U.S. will shower them with some exports. WTAF.
The U.S. and NATO seem hell-bent on teaching everyone the lesson that no-one fucks with them. They are the absolute rulers of the world and the world chimes in with its full-throated approval, lapping up its propaganda and regurgitating it as it were its own thoughts. They even think that they can teach China a lesson as well as Russia. NATO acts like its indomitable and hopes that the world buys its bullshit.
NATO sanctions wherever it likes, it sells weapons wherever it likes, and it thinks that there will never be any blowback. Maybe it won’t be another 9-11, but for a country deep in an inflation at the same time that it’s in an asset bubble of epic proportions, it seems like it might think about possible repercussions of its financial activity abroad.
The Soviet Union agreed to dissolve itself in 1991. This came after a decade of Glasnost and Perestroika and Gorbachev.
The president of Russia after Gorbachev was Boris Yeltsin. He was chosen and heartily approved by the West. The West promised Gorbachev that it would help Russia and the other former SSRs democratize and integrate into the privatized, capitalist world. They also promised that the Cold War was over and that NATO would not encroach militarily closer to the SSRs.
None of this happened. Instead, Yeltsin was encouraged to sell the resources of Russia for a song, either to local oligarchs or directly to western companies (Credit Suisse did amazing business in those years, unlike now). The country was divided up and was sold for a song to its former enemies. Democracy was a sham.
The West didn’t care about that. It cared about getting the vast resources of Russia under its control. It cared about making a tremendous amount of money at the expense of a country making the transition from a form of communism (the Soviet Union had drifted considerably far from actual communism by the 80s) to the all-out, rapacious, casino capitalism that was the only thing that the West could offer.
The life expectancy of Russia citizens plunged in a wholly unprecedented way in those years (men’s life expectancy went from 67 to 60 in just a few years). The economy was in such a shambles that the first ten years is compared to the Great Depression × 4. The ruble was flat, as it is now.
Watching what is happening to Russia right now seems like a replay of that, but possibly even worse. In the early 90s, people pretended to care about Russia’s fate while plundering it. The atmosphere now is very much hating Russia and Russians openly while plundering it. That means they can go full-bore on plundering and dismembering and, possibly, taking it over—and no-one will chastise NATO for it. Instead, they’ll be praised for having defeated Sauron.
I know, I know, we’re all supposed to be focused laser-like on Ukraine’s suffering, but those guys have gotten a lot of help from a lot of very powerful friends. Those friends will abandon Ukraine in a second as soon as it has served its purpose of acting as bait for Russia, but still, right now, they are the beneficiaries of more humanitarian aid and weapons and global goodwill than at any time in their history. Russia, on the other hand, is being disintegrated from all sides, without remorse or restraint. That is how one treats enemies that are absolutely evil. One eradicates them like the cockroaches that they are.
Do not delude yourselves into thinking that the American government or NATO cares at all about Ukraine or the Ukrainian people. They are delivering weapons because that serves two purposes: Western arms manufacturers make a lot of money, and Ukrainians will use them to shoot Russians. This is what they call a win-win for the West.
The entire purpose of this exercise over the last decade or so has been to prime people to support a “suicide by cop” story about Russia. When the history is written, the victors will triumphantly write how the evil empire Russia brought the holy wrath of the righteous West down upon it with its own hubris. That Russia alone is to blame for what happened to it. Their story will follow the lines of Iraq, which deserved everything it got because of Saddam’s intrusion into Kuwait, or Libya, which deserved everything it got because it never got rid of Qaddafi.
In many other situations—Hollywood films, for example—Russia would be portrayed as the spunky underdog, down but not out, valiantly fighting against the overwhelming power of a rabid adversary. Perhaps the film 300 expresses it best: a bunch of bastards fighting off even bigger bastards to the death. The bigger bastards will be left over, as always. The smaller bastards didn’t deserve to win either. No-one does. That’s why it’s a clusterfuck.
If you were to look at the events of the last 30 years through a Russian lens, you see: the country was plundered via a puppet government headed by Yeltsin, the world increasingly denying that Russia even had any role in ending the second world war. Obama said that all Russia makes is vodka and Kalshnikovs. The U.S. advanced militarily on its borders through NATO. The dickishness is breathtaking.
How do you think history will judge the behavior of the West? Are we sure we have the moral high ground? Or do we just assume that we’ll be able to write that history and cover up our moral crimes? Do we care about how cynical that is? Do we care how the future judges us? We obviously do not: we continue factory farming, we do nothing about climate change. Those are even bigger moral issues.
The propaganda in America is so strong and people so vastly under-informed that they don’t even see that their renewed and vigorous support for a war that they, even as recently as a month ago, overwhelmingly did not support, is 100% opposed to their own interests. Only the usual suspects will get richer. We really don’t have time for this shit, but sure, let’s run out the clock on climate change. Why not? Again, Russia shouldn’t invaded, but it’s only really a cornered, wounded bear that eventually just starts to think “hey I’ll just take as many of you with me as I can, if it’s going to go down this way.”
Ukraine means “borderlands”. Maidan means “square”. We think their words are place-names. Ukraine has a Jewish president. There are at least some Nazis in their military. There was a coup. The U.S. helped or caused the coup. There is a civil war.
Until recently, Ukraine hated its president for not carrying out his campaign promises. They are now 100% behind their president. The U.S. is evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, but Ukraine is not like that, we are told. They do not have complexity, like we do. There is no way for people in Ukraine to support conceding to Russia’s demands without being traitors.
The U.S. is training anti-insurgency troops. This worked terribly in Afghanistan and nearly everywhere else. This is supposedly going amazingly in Ukraine. The U.S. and NATO are not involved militarily. Instead, they are flooding the country with weaponry and “advisors”. You see the difference, of course? I’m sure Russia does.
The story of the Russians is that they are a bloodthirsty, conquering army. They are inept. They have old equipment. They are threatening nuclear war. We ignore it as if we know they wouldn’t dare. We pretend to be terrified, to get support, but act as if we don’t believe them. We consider nearly no information about these people and this country when we talk about them in such super-simplistic terms.
It’s almost like they’re incredibly excited to be able to do so. War is exciting! There’s money to be made! So fortuitous that they had all of this materiel ready and waiting!
Let’s rely on Putin to be the sane one: we won’t give an inch and will call his nuclear bluff. If he doesn’t back down, we all die, but it will be his fault. If he does, then we get all of his stuff and win the game. Once again, we are in the uncomfortable position of hoping that Putin is not a madman and will back down and lose face—because we know our side is not willing to do that at all.
NATO allies are buying and selling weapons at a prodigious rate, they are screaming for war from the hilltops, they are excited about the prospect on nuclear annihilation—or they are so naive as to believe it will not happen (they know Putin wouldn’t do it) or too stupid to understand what it would entail.
In order to bring about an end to the conflict, it’s incumbent on those not directly affected by it to not take sides. As soon as you’ve taken a side in an armed conflict, you’ve committed to seeing that armed conflict come to an end with a single victor. If you’ve taken a side, then you are for the espoused goals of that side and against those of the other.
If you don’t take a side, you remain in a position to balance the needs and desires of both sides. Unpalatable as it may seem, this is something you have to do when there is a massive disparity of power. In the case of Ukraine/Russia, this is heresy. In a similar situation in Palestine/Israel, those who consider themselves to be good and moral are on the exact opposite “side” in that conflict.
Even those who would side with the Palestinian plight acknowledge that one must treat with Israel’s desires because of the massive power disparity. That reality is acknowledged. How could it be otherwise? It would be madness to think that you could arm the Palestinians into winning a conflict against Israel. So why do people think arming Ukraine against Russia will work?
The best possible outcome in Ukraine is an end to the violence. The Russian Army is highly unlikely to just pick up and leave. Russia is unlikely to just give up, having lost much and gained nothing. That’s not to approve of Russia’s behavior, but it’s reality. So the fighting will continue until one side “loses” or until they can agree to stop fighting or until we all lose (nuclear conflagration).
Russia will not lose a military conflict with Ukraine, no matter how much CNN and its cheerleaders wish it to be so. Or at least they won’t lose not anytime soon. There will be much more destruction before that happens, let us at least agree on that. With NATO funneling a tremendous amount of weaponry to Ukraine, they will be able to hold out much longer than originally thought. This is not good for Ukraine because it will encourage Russia to intensify its efforts—which have been relatively tepid so far, as modern asymmetric military conflicts go. They will ramp up, though. At the very least, Russia has pulled back to its original ambitions of taking eastern Ukraine, though that region has already suffered greatly.
But where is the compromise? Who will help them agree to stop fighting if everyone has “taken a side”? You need neutral diplomats for that. The world has decided that the moral high ground is to denigrate anyone who would try to bring an end to the violence early, before the Ukrainians have “won”. They do this without acknowledging how illusional that victory is.
The article I’ll Be Against the Next “Good War” Too by Freddie deBoer (SubStack) writes,
“[…] as a democratic citizen, my primary responsibility is my own country. And (conveniently or inconveniently, I’m not sure) my own country also happens to be the greatest threat to the self-determination of other countries in the world.”
I agree with this 100%. This was always Chomsky’s answer to people questioning his focus on American crimes.
“[…] why is the United States allowed to ceaselessly extend its military dominance to more and more parts of the globe, where Russia is not? Why can NATO expand indefinitely, where the United States would never allow other countries to form strategic partnerships with Russia or China? If Canada wanted to develop a strategic partnership with Russia − which is not really fantastical, given their geographic and economic entanglements − the United States would never, ever permit it. So why must Russia permit Ukraine to join NATO?”
Because we cheat all of the time. No-one expects the U.S. or NATO to behave honorably or well, so everyone else has to. If no-one annoys the big seething bully in the room, nothing bad happens. Sure, we’re all under his thumb, but it’s better than war.
However, if someone irritates the beast, then the beast does not back down. It flips the table and starts throwing plates. It’s everyone else’s job to appease and deescalate. Stop whistling, stop filliping, stop wearing squeaky shoes, whatever it takes. Just get out of the way and calm down the beast. Give it what it wants.
And we certainly can’t have two seething bullies. That’s why we support the destruction of anyone who tries to stand up to the bully. We can’t envision a world without bullies, so we help the bully we have maintain his peaceful, if repressive reign. At least there’s no open war. It’s literally the best we can imagine happening, at this point.
So that’s why everyone wants Russia to back down: because they already know that NATO won’t. Russia can be reasoned with, no matter how many imprecations we throw her way. We know that our “side” cannot. It’s like living next to a volcano: you can’t make it go away. You can’t move the village. It demands sacrifice? You throw in a virgin. The volcano demanded Russia.
Also, it’s not a surprise that people are against Russia. They’ve been primed for it. Everyone hates Russia and considers them subhuman in the same way that they consider Middle Easterners to be subhuman and incapable of real civilization. The Chinese as well are considered to be an alien race, incapable of western-style empathy. What a joke.
The no-fly zone is the same kind of thing: it doesn’t mean no-one gets to fly there. It means NATO threatens open air-war and expects Russia to back down. Then only NATO gets to fly there. It doesn’t mean that “no-one” gets to fly there, despite the name. NATO and the U.S. will be flying all over that zone.
We are cheering for the devil we know to win, out of fear or to curry favor.
My fervent hope is that Russia will be allowed to deescalate when they choose to. I fear people will want to exact 100% damage, press their advantage, reap their pursued reward, and they won’t even notice when their side becomes the overt aggressor. They won’t care because destroying evil is justifiable, no matter what happens.
I don’t see many people concerned about a solution. They’re prioritizing punishment and revenge. If they can only have one, they’ll take revenge. All without bothering to even think of their own interests. We are a primitive, stupid species, still acting like we were on the Serengeti, picking up a stick and look for something to swat with it at the slightest provocation. This is a useful tool for those whose agenda led to this situation in the first place.
Germany just promised to grow its military by leaps and bounds. They’ve been trying to get support for this for years, but when were refused by clear-headed citizens. After five days of doom-scrolling Twitter, Germans are now indoctrinated and softened up enough to approve it with wild enthusiasm and self-righteous jubilance.
The right thing to do is for Russia to leave. The right thing to do is for NATO to disband. The right thing to do is for everyone to stop selling weapons to everyone else. For that, we would need diplomacy. And we no longer have diplomats, nor patience for them. War is literally the only answer we know. Sanctions are war on civilians, so, no, that’s not not war.
I just saw an article called Russia’s Money Is Gone by Matt Levine (Bloomberg) and I wonder how that impacts the world economy, right? The world has now seen that the financial system is not as safe it purported to be. They are also seeing that the U.S. is not only willing to upset the whole financial system for its purposes, but is actively toying with blocking media sources as well. “My way or the highway” has never been clearer than now.
It’s so sad to see what’s happening with Ukraine/Russia. The bear is goaded and stabbed and then, when it lashes out, we all cheer, as it is killed. We cheer despite its lashing out having taken victims. Toreadors do the same with bulls. But Russians are real people. Ukrainians are real people. That gets lost in the mix.
Russia attacked Ukraine, yes. But you have to see that attack in the context of a bigger picture where a multitude of attacks on the Russian state—none of which would ever be acknowledged as an attack—led up to it. Now Russia has given the West the excuse it needs to weave its own special history of how this all went down, dumber than a Michael Bay movie. It literally doesn’t matter what the context is, because they’re going to get Russia. They’re destroying the banks and starving the people and their businesses and their livelihoods and everyone cheers! So good! They all deserve it because Ukraine! We are truly monsters without principle.
The U.S. doesn’t take any responsibility for having created the situation we have now. It doesn’t acknowledge that it’s been in Russia’s role many times before. It just sanctimoniously says tells everyone the way it’s going to be and no one says a word. They all parrot their support for its chosen plan.
Watching the West’s reaction to Putin’s invasion makes me wonder something. We hear very much that Putin grossly underestimated the response and that he’s made a huge miscalculation and that he’s stupidly and blindly failed to foresee this situation. Maybe, maybe. But, maybe he did see this more-or-less coming and anticipated the west undermining all of its own principles to fall all over itself attacking Russia in all the ways that they can.
Who’s going to trust the western financial system anymore, when it can just be turned off? Who’s going to trust western media when they transmit only transparent lies? Things are happening now that will be very difficult to take back. Things have come, as they say, to a head. It’s like when the attack on 9-11 pales in comparison to what America did to itself afterwards. Perhaps this will be a bit like that: the ostensible retaliations will turn out to be a series of self-owns that, while inflicting significant short-term damage to Russia, end up harming the western countries themselves much more, in the long term.
I’ve heard many complain about how disappointed they are in the Swiss leadership because it has not shrugged off its neutrality to take a side, as so many Swiss citizens have unquestioningly done. I hope they continue to consider their options carefully and to only act when they have adequate and accurate information. People are welcome to express their opinions and evince their support without any or with unsubstantiated evidence. No-one cares about their Twitter feeds or their stupid LinkedIn posts. But I hold the government to higher standards. Their decisions have long-lasting effects.
Update 2022-03-07: Switzerland has broken neutrality. Fucking morons. This was such a dumb thing to give up neutrality for. The rest of the world’s jumping off of a bridge! It must be a great idea. Let’s do it, too. No downside! YOLO.
Why don’t you just go ahead and fucking ask to join NATO while you’re at it? You’re already buying jet fighters from the empire. Why not? It’s not like you have any principles left.
Maybe we can also kick all Russians out of Switzerland? Would that help?
No other indignity visited upon the world was worth doing it, but now, finally, something terrible enough has happened that Switzerland broke neutrality and issued sanctions. The Palestinians, Iraqis, Yemenis, Afghans, Congolese, and so on would like a word.
There are no adults in the room anymore.
As for Germany: I think Angela Merkel got an encrypted e-mail from Putin over the weekend that just read “Gern geschehen”.
No-one is more relieved than Angela Merkel right now. Watching the Greens approve a tripling of their defense budget, though. I wonder if Angela would have done it.
The following was written at the beginning of March. Just before Easter, we heard that Finland and Sweden are seriously considering applying to NATO.
Is Putin Considering Using Nukes on NATO? by Patrick Buchanan (Antiwar.com)
“The world is rallying to Ukraine.”
“The world”. Except for China and Africa, sure, yeah. But they don’t count in our eyes anyway. Never have. Might that be part of the problem? So, the western media says unequivocally that Ukraine (and, by implication, NATO) is the good guy and Russia is the bad guy. Full stop. No more questions.
“Eventual defeat is becoming visible, and Putin probably cannot politically survive such a defeat.”
So now the story is: Putin planned horribly. Ukraine fought valiantly. Putin won’t “win” (we defined for him what it means to win) in the short-term and “faces defeat”. He will respond by dropping a nuke in order to avoid defeat (as if dropping a nuke isn’t admitting defeat in a very real way). Sure, sure, I guess … that’s how Roland Emmerich would write it.
“Finland, and Sweden, it is now being said, should be invited into NATO.”
You don’t “invite” anyone to NATO. They apply. Finland and Sweden have had that option for decades and haven’t taken it. Are they likely to be swept up in the propaganda of the moment and change their decades-long military policies because of an invasion in Ukraine? Sure, why not? Maybe I can buy an NFT of it. Nothing makes any sense anymore. It’s like people want a nuclear war because it would be cool to post about.
The article NATO goes to war against Russia by WSWS Editorial Board (WSWS) writes,
“The non-membership of Ukraine in NATO is, and has been for several years, largely a fiction. Already substantially armed and with weapons pouring in, Ukraine is the front line in a war aimed at regime change in Moscow and the complete subordination of Russia to NATO.”
“German Chancellor Olaf Scholz announced Sunday that $110 billion in additional funding would be provided for the German military, nearly twice the amount of its annual budget, and that Germany will also be supplying direct military aid to Ukraine.”
This is literally the reason they did this. This was the end-game for goading Russia into acting. 🍾 in Germany and to whomever supplies them with weapons! No-one is talking about diplomacy (other than rumors that Zelenskyy and Putin are meeting somewhere): the first and only reaction is to fight. First we fight, then we talk. Sure, sure, Putin invaded. But whatever happened to not sinking down to the enemy’s level? Oh, right, we need to sell a fuck-ton of weaponry first.
“UK Foreign secretary Liz Truss said Sunday that she “absolutely” supported British citizens traveling to Ukraine to serve as combatants.”
OMG, like ISIS? Or, wait, what? No? Is that not the same thing? You know, citizens traveling to fight in other countries’ armies? The virtue-signaling is strong in this one.
I think that the world’s reaction to Russia is good? Like, it’s all virtue-signaling and feels a bit overblown, but it’s also good to show what happens when one country invades another. There are consequences. Unfortunately, most of the damage inflicted is, as always, on the people themselves, who had very little do with the invasions plans.
Still, consequences. But only for Russia. Literally no other country has paid anywhere close to this much for an invasion or occupation. Not France (Libya, Mali, etc.), Britain (Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan), the U.S. (OMG Everywhere), Israel (West Bank, Gaza, a little bit of Syria), Saudi Arabia (Yemen). No, this feels like a battle in a war. It doesn’t feel like the people exacting punishment on Russia are doing it because they really care about countries not invading other countries. They seem to be all roped in to NATO’s war on Russia. They would like us to believe it’s for moral reasons, but the same people couldn’t care less when it’s not Russia doing the invading, so that clearly can’t be it.
It also feels a bit like they all couldn’t care less if they burn Russia to the ground. Elites everywhere are rejoicing as the online-idiot clown-parade does its work for them. Will there be a war when a cornered rat/bear doesn’t see a better way out? Who knows? Who cares? Consequences are for others! Diplomacy is for pussies! Let’s all get down on Putin’s level, in the mud.
The article YouTube blocks RT and Sputnik as Russia tells media not to say “invasion” by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica) writes,
“Google said today that YouTube is blocking RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik throughout Europe. “Due to the ongoing war in Ukraine, we’re blocking YouTube channels connected to RT and Sputnik across Europe, effective immediately,” Google Europe announced on Twitter. “It’ll take time for our systems to fully ramp up. Our teams continue to monitor the situation around the clock to take swift action.””
Yes, yes, yes, dogpile! Brigade! All in! We don’t want to listen to a word that Sauron and his minions have to say! Eliminate them all! BLOODLUST!
I f#*@ing love this so hard. Google is censoring entire channels as punishment for those channels censoring words. If only we could figure out how to generate electricity from irony and hypocrisy, humanity would be saved.
Now I just saw the headline that Apple halts all device sales in Russia in response to invasion of Ukraine by Andrew Cunningham (Ars Technica), which will be taken to mean that Apple is taking a principled stance. It is doing no such thing. It is taking sides in a war. If it were taking a principled stance, then it would halt device sales in all countries that have encroached on other territory, like Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the Unites States, for starters.
But they’re not doing that. They’re brigading and virtue-signaling. They made a calculation that it would be better for business to do this at this moment, in this climate than not to do it. They don’t really want to stop selling phones to Russians. It’s just that they know that the PMC (Professional Managerial Class) in the West is very likely to generate more sales than Russia in response to this move.
Microsoft and Google have responded in the same way.
“Microsoft has removed RT and Sputnik’s apps from the Windows Store and limited their presence on its Bing search engine, while YouTube has blocked RT and Sputnik content in Europe and demonetized their content elsewhere.”
Canceling an entire country. Amazing times we live in. I’m sure it beats negotiating, talking to them, or any other form of diplomacy. Russians can’t be reasoned with. They’re like the bugs in Starship Troopers: they can only be eradicated. Perhaps we won’t wipe them from the face of the Earth, but we can wipe them from people’s minds. Next up: Wikipedia removes their entry on Russia.
From Sanctions produce chaos in Russian financial system by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“Yesterday, the French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire was even more explicit. He said the West was using sanctions to wage “total economic and financial war against Russia, Putin and his government. We will provoke the collapse of the Russian economy.””
Culture blocked. Finances blocked. Exports blocked. Burn that fucking country to the ground. Do NOT talk to them. Do NOT ask questions. They—and only they—deserve it! Direct your anger eastward, toward Emmanuel Goldstein.
Why doesn’t the West just promise Russia what it wants and then renege, like it always does? It’s not like Russia doesn’t know they’re going to do exactly that anyway. It’s not like there’s a downside for reneging on a deal with a known ultimate evil like Russia, is there? Let’s be serious here: Russia is to NATO as the new Native Americans were to the U.S.: an unqualified evil entity that lived on resources that were rightfully the U.S.‘s (or NATOs, in the recent case) and that you could endlessly fuck over and scapegoat and gaslight until they just fucking died already. All of them. Genocide is too good for that kind of evil, no?
How is this not war yet? How has NATO maintained plausible deniability that they’re not at war with Russia? Their actions will lead to more suffering and isolation for the Russian people than an outright attack would engender.
Russian assets are obviously not worth nothing all of sudden. This price move has as little to do with fundamentals as the soaring value of massively overvalued startups and IPOs. What’s interesting is that traders that want to virtue-signal and get out of Russian securities right now will be forced to do so at pennies on the dollar because they can’t trade on the Moscow exchange, where the companies would presumably be trading higher.
What does it mean for these companies to be at pennies now instead of hundreds of dollars? Who knows? Who even knows why prices are where they are anymore? Is it because people genuinely believe that these companies will be worth nothing in the future, that Russia is doomed, and that all of its companies will be destroyed and none allowed to continue extracting the natural resources on which their value is based? Maybe? Do people believe that they will all be abolished and that new western companies will be gifted those resources instead? As in old Iran? Maybe? Or is this a reverse meme-stock craze where certain stocks are flattened instead of raised up, but for totally stupid reasons that have nothing to do with the value of the companies? That’s a bingo.
This might very well end up cutting off the nose to spite the face. Good. Break everything. At this point, I hope these fools tear their financial house down on top of themselves.
France is only just pulling out of Mali. What the hell where they doing there? No-one knows and no one cares. Probably humanitarian stuff. It’s easy to be 100% for Ukraine and against Russia when you’re utterly ignorant of world affairs. It’s not a principle if you apply it only to one country, but not any of the others. That’s just punishing an enemy and has nothing to do with principle.
Oil at 110$ per barrel and russia out of the LNG market. Looks like we saved fracking, everybody!
This is discrimination. Replace the word Russians with any other demonym or epithet (e.g. Jews) and you’d be shocked at the NYT home page.
A country should be punished for invading another country. Immediate and merciless punishment is the easy way out, for sure, especially against the official enemy of the civilized world. You get to feel good about your intrinsic moral goodness without any hard thinking or reading. No-one can fault you for siding against the country dropping the bombs. But the world stage is more complicated than a Michael Bay movie, despite most people’s complete lack of desire to grapple with that complexity, to say nothing of their lack of mental acuity for and practice in doing so.
This current punishment of Russia is wildly out of proportion with anything that’s ever been done before. It’s like curb-stomping someone for jay-walking. How was Russia to know that the blowback would be so vicious when literally no other country has been punished for doing the same thing since … (checks notes) … Iraq for invading Kuwait.
That the world is gleefully dogpiling Russia now shows two things:
I am being wildly sarcastic above. I am saddened to watch the world be capable of such blatant and wild hypocrisy while praising themselves in the mirror for being so awesome and upstanding. They’re breaking their arms patting themselves on the back for being the heroes in the simplistic story that they believe is the actual story. They’re mostly too dumb and uninterested and ignorant to even try to learn what the actual context is.
The over-the-top gusto with which Russia is being economically sanctioned sets a very interesting precedent, of course. If they can do it once, they can do it again. Maybe this time, you agree with the reason. Maybe next time you won’t . The point is, they’ve shown that they can freeze anyone’s money on a whim and are willing to do it. Maybe the final effect of Russia’s invasion will have been to give the world a chance to show what self-interested, vicious hypocrites the powers-that-be are, in stark relief.
Maybe Russia’s intent was to get the West to kill itself, as it nearly did after 9-11. This is an opportunity to behave badly while virtue-signaling. The West has taken it with gusto. It’s unclear who’s going to end up costing the world the most. Climate change also wonders why no-one’s resisting it anymore.
Capitalism is eating itself. Good.
As for any nations that think “this couldn’t happen to us, we’re good guys. We’re in NATO,” … Ohmigod hahahaha. Sure, right. What are the odds of the U.S. punishing anyone mercurially? Where have you been? The U.S. is a giant dick. A knob. A bell-end without peer. It has never not fucked over a “partner” because it doesn’t consider anyone else to be an equal. Putin puts it this way, “The U.S. allows only vassal nations.”
As far as Russians being excluded from the financial system, not because of any explicit bans, but because the cost of doing business with them is not worth the trouble: This is the same thing that’s happening with American/Swiss dual citizens living in Switzerland. Banks in Switzerland don’t want anything to do with people like that and disallow investments.
Zelenskyy is a manipulative idiot who doesn’t give a shit what happens to the rest of the world, as long as Ukraine is defended. He was elected to bring peace and brought NATO weapons in instead. Maybe Russia predicted that this would happen and they would bring a conflagration down onto themselves. Who knows? Zelenskyy and the US seem to be goading each other into making this war much, much bigger.
JFC. These allies seem made for each other. He’s right about the blood being partly on NATO’s hands. He probably sees how badly his country has been fucked by NATO, but he should be negotiating with Russia, not pleading for the U.S. to escalate even further. An escalation will lose even more lives.
I wrote the above several weeks ago; it’s only gotten worse since then
And now we have supposedly pacifist, progressive voices lending their full-throated support to censorship, loyalty oaths, and no-fly zones. Bin ich im falschen Film? Some people’s employment is now contingent on a loyalty oath. Very modern, Germany, very modern. I hear loyalty oaths are huge in authoritarian governments: let’s do those.
Russia invades Ukraine. Europe responds by dismantling its civil society. Switzerland responds by joining the EU in all sanctions, present and future.
There are no adults in the room.
And this has happened all so quickly. We are two weeks into a rapidly developing situation with a tremendous amount of propaganda, lies, scams, and so on, but everyone should have formed the same simplistic opinion and joined ranks to fight the bugs in Starship Troopers. There is no room for thought, for even the slightest difference in opinion. Online, at least. In private, I’ve had no small amount of success with providing context to friends and colleagues.
Six weeks later, and the information situation has only gotten worse. Loyalty is demanded; information is censored.
That their... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 18. Apr 2022 13:34:48 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 21. Apr 2022 21:16:42 (GMT-5)
If we can agree that calling Stephen Pinker right-wing is factually if not wildly incorrect, then are we not also intellectually obliged—in some part, at least—to look more carefully into other accusations of right-wing association or white-supremacy made by the same crowd?
That their accusations are wrong in the case with which we are familiar should make us suspicious that their other accusations might also be incorrect or exaggerated—and that they are perhaps motivated to do so for reasons other than their expressed goals of justice and moral goodness. Any belief built upon a mendacious base is definitionally suspect.
For example, when the NYT consistently comes out against SubStack as a home to right-wingers and anti-vaxxers and other ilk of nefarious nature, it’s no wonder: SubStack is a direct threat to their business model, their income stream, and their hiring pool.
The NYT may wrap itself in high-minded and lofty rhetoric about wanting to protect the public from being misinformed [1], but that isn’t the only reason for attacking SubStack. In this case, too, we should probably be suspicious of their motives—especially since doing something “for the good of the public” has nearly never been the real reason a larger company does anything.
I know, I know, I’m an incorrigible cynic and free-speech absolutist. I just worry about constraining thought, especially when it’s constrained by a self-elected holier-than-thou cabal. I worry about the level of acceptance for constraining thought. Who chooses who we get to listen to, who we get to read? Who draws the line between acceptable and not?
How do we tell the difference between where we’re headed and “real” totalitarianism? Is there one? Or are we only pretending there is, to make ourselves feel better about it? Do dissidents in other countries weigh the pros and cons of their own governments (essentially giving them the benefit of the doubt), while condemning the suppression they see in other countries as absolutely evil?
I don’t fool myself into thinking I can learn the capital-T truth, but I’m satisfied with approaching it asymptotically by eliminating things that can’t be the truth. We have to be satisfied with that. There’s nothing more suspicious than someone who knows all the answers and thinks that everything is simple.
I am far from an identitarian, but whenever I read or hear something, I do think of the context—of the person or entity delivering the news. What is their motivation for getting me to believe this information? How much effort do I have to put into trying to disprove it? How much of my existing information does it purport to supplant?
As another example, people who are doing well under a given status quo are extremely loath to accept any information where they would be morally obligated to support a large change to the status quo, very likely endangering their privileged position within it. It’s the “tsar” problem, right? The Russian revolution made things better for pretty much everyone except the 1% of the nobility, for whom it made things much worse. If you’d asked them, the revolution was a mistake. If you only asked them, you’d start to believe it, too.
If you’re in a bubble, talking only to people who are very well-educated and relatively well-off, it doesn’t matter that they’re technically from some country or other, they don’t really represent that country.
I am, for example, not really representative of an American. The answers you get to questions about America from me are vastly different than those you would get from most other well-off, well-educated Americans (which are the ones you’re most likely to meet, statistically). Those Americans will tell you about completely different things that are the problem, but they won’t talk about the military budget or the two-party system. Instead, they’ll most likely insinuate that we’d be better off with a one-party system.
The people who cheer injustice when it’s practiced against others simply can’t conceive of how the same injustice may someday be used against them. Go ahead and cheer that oligarchs are getting their property seized, that countries are having their reserves impounded. It will bite them in the ass, of course, but they’ll never put two and two together.
They’re banning people and censoring people now for what the elite and elite-adjacent consider to be “good” reasons, but what’s to stop anyone from just coming up with other reasons? Maybe reasons that don’t quite fit for you personally anymore? Nothing. Literally nothing is stopping them, once you’ve already accepted that all justice is vigilante justice and that no rules abide anymore. No rules of evidence, no trial, nothing.
The world is in thrall to the greatest purveyor of violence, terrorism, and human misery (the U.S.) as it shines the spotlight on its sworn enemy. It demands that the world condemn and destroy this enemy for perpetrating crimes that it itself has perpetrated many, many times before, always without consequence. There is nothing wrong with asking yourself whether you want to help them do this.
I was thinking today that it’s ridiculous that the United States defense budget has gone from under $300B in 2001—already an obscenely high number—to the inconceivably obscene ~$800B it is in 2022. Not only that, but the U.S. sells well over half of the world its weapons. And this is the country that elects itself to the moral high ground and people believe it. My God, it’s breathtaking.
Domestically, it’s even worse. They fight and dispute about everything under the sun but what would actually affect quality of life and justice and equality. The U.S. is maddening full of distractions that seem to be eagerly taken up as a welcome relief from the unrelenting misery of life, a misery that might be relieved were anyone to spare any attention to doing so.
This graphic sums up how we should really take the exhortations of the U.S. with a grain of salt. It shows the U.S. forging its own path, with dropping life expectancy (before COVID!) while spending twice as much per-capita as other nations whose citizens enjoy at least five extra years of life.
No nation has the moral high ground. We should be suspicious of anything any nation purports or any demand it makes of us, be it Russia, Ukraine, the U.S, or any of the other usual suspects who demand our attention, our loyalty, our unswerving faith. We can’t know the truth, but we can stop unreservedly believing their untruths.
Published by marco on 18. Apr 2022 13:19:37 (GMT-5)
YouTube doesn’t actually remove videos from your lists. I suppose that makes them better than truly totalitarian systems, which would make a greater effort to erase knowledge. Instead, when a video is unavailable, YouTube automatically hides it from you, removing its pesky presence from your lists, replacing these videos with a subtle notification at the top of the list.
If you’ve got more than a couple of dozen videos in a list, then you’ve probably scrolled down far enough in the list that you cannot easily see the notification.
That’s what happened to me when, in late February, RT was taken off-line, censored into oblivion by a holier-than-thou Western world, high on its sense of self-satisfaction. I only recently discovered that there were videos in my “Watch Later” list that I’d meant to watch months ago, but that YouTube had decided, in its gentle and all-knowing benevolence, to help me forget about.
I had to dig them back from YouTube’s clutches. Obviously, I could no longer watch them—that would be madness!—but at least I could copy the titles to search for the videos on platforms either don’t censor content or, at least, aren’t censoring that particular content.
If I refresh the page, the “unavailable” videos are, once again, hidden. This cannot be anything but deliberate. The content is still technically available—OMG not as bad as China or, God help us, Russia—but it’s still out of reach of most people, so it will, effectively, be censored.
The blocked videos are interview shows, with well-known and renowned journalists. They’re just collateral damage in the holy war for global domination. Oops. Just a coincidence that true-left, anti-war voices were accidentally removed from YouTube. All of the war-hawking bullshit from mainstream, acceptable sources driving the desired narrative continue to be available in full HD (looking at you, CNN). If you want to hear about how we should go to WWIII over Ukraine, you can fill your whole weekend. Thanks, YouTube, for trying to help me get my mind right.
The following video is an interview with the legendary journalist and documentary filmmaker John Pilger by Lee Camp. They made the mistake of holding the interview on RT, which means that nearly no-one in the western world will ever find it again, as was surely the intent. Some may call this “collateral damage”, but it can hardly be a coincidence that anti-war voices are consistently pressed to the margins—and then erased from those as well.
You can watch the video above [1] at Legendary Journo John Pilger by Lee Camp / Redacted Tonight on January 28, 2022 (Portable.TV).
The next interview is also by Lee Camp, this time with Adam McKay, the director of “Don’t Look Up”. There is literally no non-ideological reason (e.g. RT BAD) why this video is banned.
You can watch the video above at Adam McKay! by Lee Camp / Redacted Tonight on February 4, 2022 (Portable.TV).
Also, once you no longer have a direct link to the video, you will never find it again. I was going to link to one of Chris Hedges’s last On Contact shows on YouTube, which has likewise disappeared, but I’d already removed the link from my “Watch Later” list. Now, even if I enter the title directly into YouTube’s search, it doesn’t appear. It’s also not in my “Watch History”.
That’s moving a bit beyond “soft” censorship, but perhaps I’m being too sensitive. I’m sure there are those who could defend this behavior as being materially different from what China does, but I’m skeptical I’d be willing to entertain such an argument.
At any rate, you can watch Hedges’s interview with John Pilger at On Contact: Assange can appeal UK Supreme Court by Chris Hedges on January 26, 2022 (RT).
Yes, you saw that correctly: now you can only watch Chris Hedges interview on RT—and most people reading this article won’t be able to watch videos there, either, because their countries are blocking the Russia Today domain name entirely. That’s all in the name of freedom, of course. Wave that flag. We have to protect people’s brains from getting the wrong ideas. This is not to say that RT isn’t spreading propaganda—it most certainly is—but that people should be able to decide for themselves.
Banning RT doesn’t stop propaganda; it simply amplifies the remaining propaganda that hasn’t been blocked. For example, you can still watch the full compendium of content provided by CNN. You can inhale every breathless and uncritical recitation of every word that comes out of Zelenskyy’s mouth as if it were the unalloyed truth, as if to ask for evidence were an affront to all that is good and holy on Earth. But at least RT is gone.
Portable.TV is good at streaming videos but, like another recent video platform, Rumble, isn’t quite as useful a research tool as YouTube. In particular, neither Portable nor Rumble allows playlists (e.g. “watch later”). You also don’t have auto-captions or scrubbing with the arrow keys. The user experience on YouTube has become quite good for research. More’s the pity that they’re so aggressively censoring content. [2]
Portable has particularly terrible navigation and direct-linking to videos (everything is done with just JavaScript). It’s quite frustrating. The only way I’ve found to get a direct link is to “share” the video via email and then copy the link from the generated mail.
Portable does not support embedding and Rumble supports it only through an iframe or direct JavaScript (instead of allowing the video element, like YouTube does).
No-one has the right to host videos on YouTube, but we should be concerned nonetheless when the primary means of hosting videos online—nearly the only, near-monopolistic place—wields such strong editorial control. Especially when it’s done to such starkly political purpose.
I’ve recently discovered that my company’s internal network works with YouTube to block certain videos, presumably those that might contain—GASP! 😱—curse words. For example, this video does not appear in the “Restricted Mode” enforced on that network,
.
Or maybe it’s because the poster shows a woman smoking a joint? It’s an hour and twenty minutes of trip-hop audio. The poster doesn’t change. This is not offensive by nearly any sane measure.
In restricted mode, the video-blocking is even more aggressive:
The screenshot above was taken from my private desktop at home, with “restricted mode” enabled manually.
This is somewhat different behavior than I observed when YouTube was working hand-in-hand with the corporate network. I went back to the corporate notebook but now have access to those music streams, even with ZScaler enabled. Whereas before I was unable to toggle the “restricted mode” and have it “stick”, now I’m able to do so. I’m also not in the office, so maybe there’s something different between the office network and the “extended office network” enabled by ZScaler.
I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but now I’m loath to manually enable restricted mode on my work laptop, lest I lose access to my now-available music playlist. 🤷♀️
Europe has done it. Great Britain has done it. The U.S. has de-facto done it (it’s not by government decree, but by the corporations that de-facto run that country’s media).
Viola Amherd of Switzerland said something about following their... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Mar 2022 23:07:35 (GMT-5)
I just heard that Switzerland is thinking of banning RT.
Europe has done it. Great Britain has done it. The U.S. has de-facto done it (it’s not by government decree, but by the corporations that de-facto run that country’s media).
Viola Amherd of Switzerland said something about following their lead.
So, let me get this straight: Viola’s principles allow her to buy JSF35 jet fighters from the U.S. and have no problems running U.S. state propaganda (CNN everybody; pay attention), but she has no problem with banning RT.
Once the precedent is set, you can ban whatever else you want. Just anything you disagree with, you just ban it. Just ask the Russians and the Chinese. Oh, you can’t—because you banned them! What a world.
And, hey, now that Switzerland has shitcanned its neutrality, and pledged to follow Europe in all of its sanctions, what else do you have left to lose? Why not go whole-hog and just join the EU, drop the CHF for the Euro and join NATO? YOLO.
Those are some principles you’ve got there, Switzerland.
Principles are rules that apply equally. This is bullshit.
No, if you agree with this, you have no principles.
You seek simple answers to complex problems because you’re simple or lazy or both. You don’t have to have an opinion if you don’t know what you’re talking about. Most of you have the luxury of waiting and seeing.
If you express yourself before you know anything, then you are a fan. You root for a team. You don’t care who plays on your team as long as they win. You don’t care how they play as long as they win. Your team can do whatever it wants and it’s wonderful whereas literally everything the evil other teams do is wrong.
If you’ve ever thought that anyone who disagrees with you is evil, loves Putin, or Saddam, or Qaddafi, or Assad…then you’re part of the problem.
There is no moral high ground there.
So, sure, why not? Humanity honestly kind of sucks anyway.
Lean back and soak in some CNN and feel smugly good about what an awesome person you are, while the effects of the actions you support slosh over the rest of the unwashed masses on this planet, none of whose actual welfares are as important to you as your feeling that you’re improving their welfare.
Paint your face yellow and blue and bellow for the death of Putin while Ukraine is destroyed, Afghanistan starves, Africa starves, and, hopefully, your call for a no-fly zone gives us some atomic fireworks to boost the broadcast numbers and get some real ad revenue going.
Why not just drop down to the same level as the thing that we deem so evil that we’ve decided that we can’t listen to a word that they say about themselves?
This is what we are teaching our children: hate and stupidity. Wish for the deaths of people you don’t know.
Isn’t that what the other team does?
Is no-one interested in holding themselves to a higher moral standard?
Is no-one interested in hearing different opinions? In getting information from different sources?
Are people not concerned that they might be wrong about something? That they might have believed something convenient without proof?
How will they ever know if they only ever hear that thing, over and over again? How does any of this make us better than anyone else?
There is no us and them. There aren’t only two sides. There is only impossibly stupid, childish humanity and the sad few who watch and despair and, occasionally, cry out into a deaf, unfeeling emptiness.
]]>“The current crisis in Ukraine has been used by the Irish media class and a handful of politicians to make the case that Ireland... [More]”
Published by marco on 18. Mar 2022 23:49:32 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 27. Mar 2022 08:22:29 (GMT-5)
From the Intervention Plenary 7.2.2022 by Mick Wallace (Twitter),
some backbone and real talk from Mick Wallace of Ireland, in the European Parliament. The video is 62s; transcript is below.
“The current crisis in Ukraine has been used by the Irish media class and a handful of politicians to make the case that Ireland should relinquish the neutrality enshrined in our Constitution and even commit to joining NATO.
“Naturally, these jingoistic sentiments are from those too old to enlist, their children and grand-children too well-off to endure the bad pay and conditions our defense forces have to put up with.
“Ireland’s tradition of neutrality is born out of an unwillingness to kill and be killed in imperialist wars, that have nothing to do with our people and everything to do with the interests of the elites, profiting from arms, fossil fuels and finance industries, that just happen to own much of the media calling for military escalation today.
“Ireland is one of the few EU countries that has not been directly involved in NATO’s war crimes and atrocities, and we’d do well to continue that. And we should use the credibility and goodwill that comes with neutrality, to facilitate diplomacy, de-escalation, and peace.”
]]>“There’s no doubt about it. We’re living in times of catastrophic crisis, where the lives of innocent civilians are sacrificed in the wars of their masters. Yes, in Ukraine,... [More]”
Published by marco on 13. Mar 2022 22:13:49 (GMT-5)
Some backbone and real talk from Clare Daley of Ireland, in the European Parliament. The video is 87s; transcript is below.
“There’s no doubt about it. We’re living in times of catastrophic crisis, where the lives of innocent civilians are sacrificed in the wars of their masters. Yes, in Ukraine, but not only.
“Since the last plenary, tens of thousands of Afghani citizens have been forced to flee in search of food and safety. Five million children face famine—an agonizing and painful death—a 500% increase in child marriages and children being sold, just so they can survive.
“And not a mention of it. Not here, not anywhere. No wall-to-wall TV coverage, no emergency humanitarian response, no special plenaries—not even a mention in this plenary—no Afghani delegations and no statements.
“My God, they must be wondering what makes their humanitarian crisis so unimportant? Is it the color of their skin? Is it that they’re not white? That they’re not European? That their problems come from a US gun or US invasion? Is it that the decision to rob their country’s wealth was taken by a despotic US president, rather than a Russian one?
“Because, my God, all wars are evil. And all victims deserve support. And, until we get on that page, we have no credibility whatsoever.”
Imagine we live in a small town. We’ve got a neighbor who’s a bit of an asshole. It’s complicated. This neighbor tells everyone how great he is, and he’s done some good things for the town in the... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 11. Mar 2022 23:34:47 (GMT-5)
“That’s a nice little town you have here. It’d be shame if something were to happen to it.”
Imagine we live in a small town. We’ve got a neighbor who’s a bit of an asshole. It’s complicated. This neighbor tells everyone how great he is, and he’s done some good things for the town in the past—quite a while ago—but he’s really been a pain in the ass lately. Like the last 50 years or so. He’s pretty rich and he owns a lot of the local stores—or buys from them—so it’s kind of hard to reason with him.
To be honest, he’s kind of got a stranglehold on the town. He mostly gets to do what he wants, which is mostly getting more stuff and more power. It’s kind of hard to see how the town’s ever going to get him under control or get rid of him.
We’re kind of just waiting for him to die or kill himself doing something rash or stupid. Fingers crossed. But man, God may love fools and drunks, but she also loves the hell out of bastards, too. Those guys just lead charmed lives sometimes.
But I’m getting off-track here.
So, what does this guy, our neighbor, do? Well, sometimes, he just goes into other people’s property—stores or homes—and just takes their stuff. Or sometimes, he just takes over a business—forever or for a while—and then exacts tribute from the previous owners. He just up and says “this is mine now”. It’s kind of like the mob, honestly. It’s not a good situation, but it’s what we’ve got.
Or sometimes he ruins someone else’s business and kind of accidentally ends up with a new business that replaces it. People just kind of have to put up with it. Hell, they think that maybe they can get in on the new business. Their greed overwhelms their principle every time. Rich, powerful people get away with doing shit that others don’t. Why try to fight it?
How does he get away with it? Well, he’s got a lot of money, friends, and guns. Does he need anything else? Nope. We’re just monkeys down from the trees, man.
It’s kind of understandable, though. People have a hard time crossing him or stopping him or even reprimanding him because (A) it doesn’t seem to help, because he doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks—it only matters that he still thinks he’s God’s gift to the town—and (B) he has his fingers in so many pies that, if you cross him, you’ll be cut off and probably destitute and thrown out of town soon enough.
So, it’s kind of go-along-to-get-along or starve in the wilderness. Not a lot of people are going to opt for the latter.
So, it’s a problem, but the town is kind of used to it. They pay fealty and ignore his bullshit as best they can. It’s pretty pathetic how into it a lot of them are, though. They can barely remember that they’re even in thrall to this guy—it’s just been that way for so long, that they don’t even question it.
It gets worse, though, because this guy’s behavior kind of makes it seem like there are no rules, when what’s really the case is that there are no rules for himself, but there are definitely rules for everyone else—especially anyone who isn’t a close friend of this guy.
If you’re not in good with him, then things don’t go so well for you. Especially if you have something that he wants. In that case, you might want to stay out of sight and keep to yourself, as best you can. Good luck with that, though, because he’s honestly got eyes and fellow travelers everywhere.
God help you if you think you can try to work with this guy on a level playing field. That’s really asking for trouble. Also, God help you if you were to act like him, say, by taking over a business that’s not yours. Nobody’s going to be glad-handing you and telling you that it’s just boys-being-boys and what-can-you-do and letting you just keep whatever you managed to steal.
No, no, they’re going to all gang up on you and try to impress that other goddamned sonofabitch, who’s going to be the first one to scream to high heaven about how it’s unconscionable that anyone would even think of doing something like that, when he just did the same fucking thing last year. And one of his fucking buddies is doing it right now. Hell, he himself is probably going to do it again next weekend.
But, man, when any unsanctioned upstart gets too big for his britches and starts trying to act like one of the big dogs without permission—hoo-whee!—that’s not going to end well. You’re going to get the whole sanctimonious, hypocritical bullshit. The whole town will act as if no-one had ever done anything like this before. It’s an unprecedented act of criminality! (They’ll say.)
Sure it is, but only if you have a selective memory—which you’re strongly encouraged to have, if you want to survive in this town.
It’s not that it’s OK to take someone else’s stuff (obviously), but damned if that asshole neighbor who gets away with everything wasn’t also up to his eyeballs in that same dirty business and kinda/maybe/sorta/mighta forced the upstart’s hand, just a little bit, oopsie.
Maybe if the upstart had just been able to do business unobstructed—maybe if they weren’t worried that king asshole was going to just up and steal the whole business for themselves—maybe things wouldn’t have gone down the way they did.
Now that other asshole—the upstart one, not the God’s-gift-to-our-town one—-is sitting in that business, pretending everything’s fine, but it’s not. They should say sorry and get the fuck out of there. Retreat is the best option, but it’s probably not going to happen. It probably won’t even be allowed to happen until a pound of flesh can be extracted.
Who knows? It doesn’t matter now. To be clear: we’ve got no love lost for anyone who steals someone else’s shit. Mob behavior is mob behavior, right? Fuck ‘em all.
But king asshole’s penchant for taking everything for himself makes it really hard to stay out of his way. If he wants what you’ve got, he’ll find a way. You can either roll over like everyone else—or you can fight. Either way, he’s going to end up with your shit, if he wants it. He really doesn’t care how much of the town gets ruined in the process.
It’s about the principle, man. You’ve got to show everyone who’s boss. Plus, you want all the toys for yourself. That’s how you know you’re winning.
And, man is it annoying to have that motherfucker just cheering everyone on to pile on and beat the shit out of the upstart. Again, considering how no-one had ever given a shit when the king asshole had done it himself a dozen times before. It’s almost too easy, right? It would be infuriating if we weren’t all just so used to it.
Different strokes for different folks is the way of the world, I guess.
The problem really is: we kind of want to stop the upstart asshole, but then we end up supporting the original asshole? Isn’t there any way that we can condemn ‘em both?
We kinda want a town without any mobs, but that doesn’t seem to be on the menu. Instead, most of the simpletons here just throw their support behind the big guy and help him squash any upstarts. They buy his bullshit and conveniently forget everything he’s done, leading the charge against the upstart as if it’s the first time they’ve ever seen a crime on that level.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s wrong when anyone does it, but those other assholes really aren’t helping. We should squash the upstart’s ambitions, but we could get some fucking perspective and stop pretending like it’s never happened before—and like it won’t happen again. And, when it does, it will almost certainly be perpetrated by our big old king asshole.
Like, why is it that we go after the upstart and we end up making the other asshole even more powerful? Hell, before all is said and done, that asshole’s probably going to end up with the stolen business himself and we’ll probably end up thanking him for it.
It’s a mess. But that’s our town. Always has been.
]]>“Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson: When dictators do not pay a price for their... [More]”
Published by marco on 7. Mar 2022 23:34:23 (GMT-5)
I took a look at the Full Transcript of Biden’s State of the Union Address by Joe Biden (New York Times) and took some notes. As these things go, it wasn’t the stupidest State of the Union I’ve heard, but it was pretty stupid.
“Throughout our history we’ve learned this lesson: When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos.”
This is 100% true. It was also delivered without irony or shame.
“Putin’s latest attack on Ukraine was premeditated and totally unprovoked.
“He rejected repeated, repeated efforts at diplomacy.”
This is a lie.
“We countered Russia’s lies with the truth.”
This is a lie.
“We are coming for your ill-begotten gains.”
The phrase is “ill-gotten”. Your gen-y speechwriters are showing.
“But let me be clear: Our forces are not engaged and will not engage in the conflict with Russian forces in Ukraine.”
I hope that this is not a lie.
“[…] we’ve mobilized American ground forces, air squadrons, ship deployments to protect NATO countries, including Poland, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.”
Well, you have to do that, don’t you? And if those countries provoke Russia into attack with their arms shipments? Then U.S. forces will be engaged with Russian forces, … but not in Ukraine.
You could have also said, “we are waging a proxy war against Russia and hope to do so indefinitely, selling weapons to our allies, who will die using them to kill Russians, who we wish an unhappy quagmire in Ukraine that we honestly hope stays in the current limbo with no resolution for a very long time, long enough for us to sell all of our LNG and weapons to Europe while Russia starves.”
“America will lead that effort, releasing 30 million barrels from our own Strategic Petroleum Reserve.”
A strange coincidence, that. The U.S. manages to kill off a major competitor by provoking a war and then cleans up in its former markets. Ruthless.
“When the history of this era is written, Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.
“While it shouldn’t have taken something so terrible for people around the world to see what’s at stake, now everyone sees it clearly.”
This is not a lie. This is 100% what will happen. People will “see it clearly” because it will have been made clear through indoctrination.
¼ of the speech was Ukraine and Russia. What would he have talked about without the Russian invasion?
“And as my dad used to say, it gave the people just a little breathing room.”
What? Your Dad was in the American Civil War, Joe. And “giving people breathing room” is not an expression that you have to credit to anyone.
“But that trickle-down theory led to a weaker economic growth, lower wages, bigger deficits and a widening gap between those at the top and everyone else in nearly a century.”
An interesting nugget to throw in there. Are you just mentioning the policy? What’s the point of mentioning it? Did he mean to detract from a policy that his administration clearly continues to support in almost all policy?
“The federal government spends about $600 billion a year to keep this country safe and secure.”
This was literally a non sequitur in a discussion of infrastructure. The number is far too low. This is basically a lie.
Next, he talks about buying American a lot.
Then he talks about insulin prices being too high.
Then he talks about taxing billionaires.
“The point is even they understand they should pay just the fair share. Last year, 55 of the Fortune 500 companies earned $40 billion in profit and paid zero in federal taxes. Look, it’s not fair. That’s why I proposed a 15 percent minimum tax rate for corporations.”
Sure, sure. But I think you’re just making noises with your mouth. You will almost certainly not follow this up with any policy.
“By the end of this year, the deficit will be down to less than half of what it was before I took office.
“The only president ever to cut the deficit by more than $1 trillion in a single year.”
JFC. C’mon, man. That’s like the home run of taking credit for shit that you didn’t do. The deficit was gargantuan in 2020 because of COVID policies that helped the nation get through it. Taking credit for a deficit reduction in the following year is super-dishonest.
“Capitalism without competition is exploitation — it drives up profits.”
Yeah, no shit. See you next year, when you might mention it again.
“Tonight, I’m announcing a crackdown on those companies overcharging American businesses and consumers.
“And as Wall Street firms take over more nursing homes, quality in those homes has gone down and costs have gone up.
“That ends on my watch.”
Excellent ideas. See you next year, when you might mention it again.
“Raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and extend the Child Tax Credit, so no one has to raise a family in poverty.”
Excellent ideas. See you next year, when you might mention it again.
On to COVID.
“And we’re launching the “test to treat” initiative so people can get tested at a pharmacy, and if they prove positive, receive antiviral pills on the spot at no cost.”
That actually sounds pretty good.
“Let’s use this moment to reset. So stop looking at Covid as a partisan dividing line. See it for what it is: a God-awful disease.
“Let’s stop seeing each other as enemies, and start seeing each other for who we are: fellow Americans.”
Excellent advice. I hope that this is the message people take away from this speech. OMG obviously, they won’t, because even if they wanted to, the media will belay that command. Also, Jen Psaki (the real president) will belay that command.
“We should all agree: The answer is not to defund the police. It’s to fund the police. Fund them. Fund them. Fund them with resources and training. Resources and training they need to protect their communities.”
So long, progressives! Good ol’ police-loving Joe is back.
Now he’s talking about the Supreme Court.
Now he’s talking about refugees and immigrants.
Women, abortion rights.
LBGTQ+.
Opioid epidemic.
Mental health in children.
Veterans.
“I don’t know for sure if the burn pit that he lived near, that his hooch was near, in Iraq and earlier than that in Kosovo is the cause of his brain cancer, or the diseases of so many of our troops.
“But I’m committed to find out everything we can.”
That is a helluva sentence to hear in a State of the Union. “hooch”? That sentence is a grammatical train-wreck.
End cancer.
“My fellow Americans, tonight, we have gathered in this sacred space — the citadel of democracy.”
JFC. Lay it on a little thicker.
“We built the strongest, freest and most prosperous nation the world has ever known.
“Now is the hour.
“Our moment of responsibility.
“Our test of resolve and conscience, of history itself.
“It is in this moment that our character of this generation is formed. Our purpose is found. Our future is forged.”
Oh, OK. I guess you did lay it on thicker. Again, with that classic Biden attention to grammar. These are just words you’re making with your mouth.
“God bless you all, and may God protect our troops. Thank you. Go get ’em.”
Whoops. Saying the quiet part out loud.
After publication, I read Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin), which seems to hit many of the same points I made above, while being simultaneously more eloquent and... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Feb 2022 12:11:43 (GMT-5)
The following comes from a self-indulgently expansive footnote in the preceding article Superpowers are hypocrites.
After publication, I read Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin), which seems to hit many of the same points I made above, while being simultaneously more eloquent and informative.
“We hear very little today about Britain’s role in the NATO-led war in Libya in 2011, which demolished that state, left its people in the hands of warlords, and pushed thousands to flee and drown in the Mediterranean. Nor do we hear about Britain’s complicity in the ongoing war in Yemen, conducted by our ally Saudi Arabia with our weapons, £17.6 billion of which have been provided by BAE systems to the Saudis since 2015. The United Nations estimates that 377,000 Yemenis have died in that conflict.
“These lives are not any less or any more important than the lives of Ukrainians. We should fight to end all of these wars, and all of the wars yet to come.”
The U.S. and other NATO nations similarly choose to whom they wish to sell weapons and whom they choose to condemn for using them. People very cynically choose whom to care about and whom to ignore.
I’ve seen Swiss people castigating themselves publicly for not having supported Ukrainians sooner, but I’ve never seen anyone do so for Yemenis or Libyans (or any of myriad other beleaguered peoples).
People generally support the official good guys against the official bad guys. When the discomfort from peer pressure exceeds the discomfort of having to actual care about other people, they relieve that pressure by pretending to believe in a cause for a little while.
People get there a lot faster if someone can explain to them how it might affect them directly [1]. Attacking Ukraine is an attack on Europe, which is infinitely worse than killing brown people in the sand somewhere that no-one would ever want to visit on vacation.
These stories show up individually, without context.
Mostly we don’t get context for the story itself, but we almost certainly don’t get context about the story relative to other, similar stories.
When the U.S. and NATO [1] cried... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Feb 2022 10:33:18 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 26. Feb 2022 12:11:46 (GMT-5)
Let’s think a bit about the stories that we’re told about the world.
These stories show up individually, without context.
Mostly we don’t get context for the story itself, but we almost certainly don’t get context about the story relative to other, similar stories.
When the U.S. and NATO [1] cried “that’s enough” and bombed the former Yugoslavia [2] nearly flat, for humanitarian reasons—because of a “genocide” [3]—and then created and quickly internationally recognized the country of Kosovo, that was considered a blow for democracy and humanity in general.
When Russia executed and then supported the result of a referendum to allow Crimea to return to Russia from Ukraine after a coup in Ukraine that swept in a very Russophobic government, that was called “annexation”.
When Syria asked its ally Russia for help in suppressing rebels in the east, the Russians came to his aid. Assad was bombing his own people, but it was OK because he’d first labeled them as separatists and terrorists. In that case, the U.S. and NATO jumped in on the side of the separatists/terrorists and fought a proxy war against Russia to help Assad.
In Ukraine, after the putsch, the new government was in the same situation as Assad: separatists and terrorists in the east want to be their own republic. [4] In this case, Russia rushed to the support of the separatists/terrorists, while NATO rushed to support the leader attacking his own people. [5]
So, sometimes, countries end up supporting authoritarians who bomb their own people and sometimes they end up supporting separatists/terrorists [6] who want to create a new country. [7]
This almost never happens without armed conflict, in one form or another.
We seek a good guy and a bad guy. [8]
But there are no good guys.
They’re all bad guys, if they’ve taken up arms.
That’s what it means to be anti-war.
You don’t have to support the side that your newsfeed has told you to, as you reluctantly call for military intervention just this one time.
Instead, you should put your effort into learning as much as you can about (A) what’s actually going on [9] and (B) what could be done to resolve the situation without violence. [10]
No one said that pacifism was easy.
Another recent example where the U.S. plays the role of Russia is with Taiwan. Taiwan wants to separate from China, just like Donetsk and Luhansk. In this case, the U.S. supports separatism, because it is in its best interests to do so: they get to sell weapons to Taiwan and they get to play savior for the world’s leading semiconductor-producer, while simultaneously taking away the same prize from China.
A more historical direct comparison of similar situations—missile emplacements uncomfortably close to national borders—comes from the article Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin) (which I read after publication of this article, so this is an update).
“And so, what was all this for? Why were the Ukrainians walked up a garden path only to be abandoned to their fate? Did anyone really believe that Russia would permit American missiles to be placed on its border? They didn’t, for the same reason we all know that the United States would never permit China to place its missiles in Guadalajara. In fact, we don’t need the hypothetical: when the Soviet Union tried it in Cuba, we got the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world has ever come to nuclear war.”
Because we are, for the most part, morons. We are very simple machines that want to think that we are unwaveringly on the moral high ground. So, we pick a good guy and we stick with that entity, no matter what else we learn. If it gets too uncomfortable, we just stop learning rather than put any effort into changing our minds. We would rather be ignorant and happy than informed and conflicted.
The amount of other people’s suffering engendered by our support of their oppressors doesn’t matter at all. The goal is to reduce our own suffering, even if it’s only the inconvenience of having to live with uncertainty.
That others might suffer much more can be temporarily of interest, but we’d rather not lose sleep over it.
After publication, I read Socialists Fight for a Future Without War by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin), which seems to hit many of the same points I made above, while being simultaneously more eloquent and informative.
“We hear very little today about Britain’s role in the NATO-led war in Libya in 2011, which demolished that state, left its people in the hands of warlords, and pushed thousands to flee and drown in the Mediterranean. Nor do we hear about Britain’s complicity in the ongoing war in Yemen, conducted by our ally Saudi Arabia with our weapons, £17.6 billion of which have been provided by BAE systems to the Saudis since 2015. The United Nations estimates that 377,000 Yemenis have died in that conflict.
“These lives are not any less or any more important than the lives of Ukrainians. We should fight to end all of these wars, and all of the wars yet to come.”
The U.S. and other NATO nations similarly choose to whom they wish to sell weapons and whom they choose to condemn for using them. People very cynically choose whom to care about and whom to ignore.
I’ve seen Swiss people castigating themselves publicly for not having supported Ukrainians sooner, but I’ve never seen anyone do so for Yemenis or Libyans (or any of myriad other beleaguered peoples).
People generally support the official good guys against the official bad guys. When the discomfort from peer pressure exceeds the discomfort of having to actual care about other people, they relieve that pressure by pretending to believe in a cause for a little while.
People get there a lot faster if someone can explain to them how it might affect them directly [11]. Attacking Ukraine is an attack on Europe, which is infinitely worse than killing brown people in the sand somewhere that no-one would ever want to visit on vacation.
“I guess the Guardian et al were right…..”
They were referring, of course, to the Russian escalation this morning in the Donbass.
I wrote back:
Sure they were. I’m not going to be so quick... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 25. Feb 2022 08:49:03 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 25. Feb 2022 19:01:17 (GMT-5)
I got a message from a friend yesterday morning (one with whom I occasionally discuss politics). It read,
“I guess the Guardian et al were right…..”
They were referring, of course, to the Russian escalation this morning in the Donbass.
I wrote back:
Sure they were. I’m not going to be so quick to believe everything I’m hearing right now the way they’d like me to hear it. Fool me once, shame on you, etc. Deep breath and wait to see how it shakes out.
If they do get their war, then they did everything they could to make it happen, that’s for sure. Champagne corks are a-popping in Bethesda (lotsa “defense” companies there).
But I don’t think it will lead to war. So far, they’re now discussing whether the current troop movements count as an “invasion” because the territories in question (DRB and LRB) are part of something guaranteed at-least partial autonomy under the 2014 Minsk agreements (which Ukraine signed and has since ignored).
I hope Russia doesn’t let itself be baited any further, but this latest move is either (1) indicating that U.S./European behavior has crossed some sort of red line or (2) the Russians calling EU/U.S./NATO’s bluff.
Whatever the case, we also have to remember that China is almost certainly not unsupportive. Putin and Xi just met at the Olympics, so its unlikely that China was “surprised” in the same way that our clowns always seem to be “surprised” by everything no matter how many dozens of billions in budget they manage to inhale every year.
I’m still reading and evaluating, but taking much of what I hear with a grain of salt for now (OMG shelling in Kiev!)
I can’t see this homepage of the NYT as anything but celebratory. We did it guys! We helped start another war! Income streams saved!
The picture there is not of Kiev (as many will assume), but Kharkiv, which is just across the border from Russia’s Belogorod (i.e. the city lies in the contested Donbass region covered by the Minsk agreement).
Unless you’re directly affected by a current event (e.g. in a war-torn region), you are not under any obligations to form a quick opinion on that event. Take your time and try to figure out what’s actually going on before “picking a side”. Honestly, there’s probably no “side” anyway—there’s plenty of blame all around, usually. There is—and has almost never been—a “good guy”.
So where do I think we stand? I think we are seeing a media system that is very much on message and very sure of itself that it knows the truth. I know that this system is not only keenly interested in distributing propaganda, but also uniquely set up to do exactly that. The economic incentives of the entire system are structured to promote not the truth, but instead to promote being first with hyperbolic pronunciations in order to produce hits and generate engagement.
It is not that they cannot be trusted to eventually get it right, but that we have to understand that they have strong incentives to get whatever they think they know out there, as quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter whether it’s right or wrong or dangerous or outright, unsubstantiated fabrication. They have learned that the upside is very high (increased revenues) and the downside is nonexistent (no-one even cares about retractions anymore).
They have learned this lesson again and again. They know where the rewards lie. They lie with promoting war, the only industry that remains in the U.S. This industry buys most of the ad time on the major radio and television networks. There is no reason to be surprised that they are jubilant when a war they’ve been pushing for for only half a year seems to be coming to fruition. They’ve gotten this far; it will only take a little more effort to get the ball over the goal line and reap the rewards of a rich vein of wartime news over, hopefully (for them), many years.
They’ve been promoting Russia as the enemy for a good decade, if not more. The recent Russian incursion is being called “unprovoked”. Really? Wasn’t the first attack against Russia the sanctions imposed against it? I don’t mean the retaliatory and recent ones, but the crippling ones that have been in place for almost a decade already.
[Update 25.02.2022, 13:30] The article Russophobia Leads Us to Assume the Worst of Russians – and Assuming They’re Demonic Could be Dangerous by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch) writes
“News about the Ukraine crisis has in large part degenerated into propaganda. It is a confrontation between good and evil, between the simple hobbit-folk of the Shire against the dark lord of Mordor plotting to end their freedom and rule the world. Any suggestion the other side might have real grievances is ignored.
“These grievances may be exaggerated and the Russian response to them mistaken or wrong, but they need to be taken seriously if the crisis is ever to end.”
Almost no-one acknowledges (A) that it was ongoing and that (B) sanctions are an act of war more damaging to the civilian population than even rockets. The new sanctions are even worse, but just another attack by the West on Russia. Many don’t seem to consider starving a country’s economy to death as even an attack—much less an act of war—but those people are sanctimonious hypocrites with very pliable morals.
Russia moving into the east of Ukraine can hardly be called unprovoked with a straight face, but they do it anyway, because of the overwhelming cloud of contextual ignorance that befuddles the large majority of most western populations. This ignorance has largely been sowed by the same media organizations.
We eat up our own propaganda like popcorn and barely even notice it exists. Austerity works. Crypto is good. The markets are fair and free. Everything is Russia’s fault, unless it’s China’s. Our wars are “humanitarian interventions” and based on RTP (Right To Protect) whereas Russia’s are contraventions of the Geneva Convention and the greatest incursion on European soil since WWII. Sure, sure, OK.
What I’m saying is: think for yourselves. Wait and see. Patience is a virtue. The firehose of information coming at you right now is by definition unsubstantiated. You shouldn’t be basing any opinions or making any decisions based on it. It has all too often become a gossamer of lies and half-truths in the past. It is all too likely that you are being invited to cheer for a team that doesn’t end up being the good guy. The U.S. and NATO do not have a good reputation, in that regard.
Try to learn about the history of the region and the likely motives and incentives of the parties involved. Ukraine wants the U.S. and NATO to commit to its defense. Russia wants to keep NATO rockets off of its doorstep. Russia sees the opportunity to push its agenda through the Donbass region. Most of the people there are ethnically Russian (and many are Russian citizens), but that may just be a good excuse.
The U.S. and NATO kicked this whole thing off eight years ago by investing $5B in the putsch in Ukraine, to install a more amenable government. These people play the long game. They don’t really care what happens in between. Now, they’ve been banging the war drums for over half a year (at least) and have managed to push Putin into action. None of this would have happened without the west and the western media saying it would happen for a long time. They are nearly jubilant that they made it come true. They do not care about anyone in Ukraine. They do not care about the effects on the rest of Europe. Champagne corks are popping in Bethesda.
As the article Vicious cycles by Yasha Levine writes,
“The point isn’t for Ukraine to win the war. The point is to make Russia bleed — economically and militarily. And it doesn’t matter how many people die or suffer or how much of Ukraine and its economy is laid to waste in the process.”
They’re also popping at the White House as Russia has provided a nearly perfectly timed distraction to the 2,000 COVID deaths per day and the ever-increasing inflation in the U.S. After an uncomfortable year with the focus turned on domestic issues, the Democrats have the war they think they need to get through the mid-terms. None of them care about Ukraine or Russia. They are happy to bleed them all in exchange for political advantage.
As the article It’s the Inflation, Stupid by Ted Rall writes,
“It is understandable for the president to focus on a major foreign-policy crisis. But obsessing over the fate of a country that is not a traditional ally, has little history of shared values with the United States and falls under the sphere of influence of another superpower is politically dangerous, particularly when it comes at the expense of economic issues close to home.”
The markets in the U.S. are up, of course. The markets love a good war. The markets in Russia have dropped significantly (see Putin Thought of Everything – Except a Crash of 45 Percent on the Moscow Stock Exchange and Big Russian Companies Losing Half their Market Value by Pam Martens (Wall Street on Parade)).
The media are highly unreliable for short- and even medium-term news. They have lied to you in the past for their own short-term gain and will likely do so again. If you have the luxury of not being directly affected by whatever is going on, then you should consider reserving your decision until you know more—or until what you think you know has been true for longer than 24 hours.
After I wrote the text above, I received a subscriber email pointing to the article by Glenn Greenwald (SubStack) that starts with the following text.
“The outbreak of war between two or more nations is obviously one of the worst events that can happen for humanity, if not clearly the single worst. For that reason, when it happens, emotions are extremely high; nationalism and tribalism surge; the range of permissible debate radically shrinks; the political and media class unite in lockstep messaging across the political spectrum; and anyone even slightly off-key or questioning of that script is hunted down and held up as a heretic and traitor […]”
That’s quite elegantly put. The rest of the article is suprisingly short, includes a link to an excellent Chomsky video and also a discussion on Rumble (which I haven’t listened to).
I don’t expect any significant number of people or organizations to follow this guidance.
After I wrote the above, I actually did my own research. It was a couple of hours’ worth of reading, so far. I’ve included salient and relevant citations below, with almost no additional notes.
The article Stop Pretending the Left Is on Putin’s Side by David Broder (Jacobin)
“To observe that those who destroyed Iraq, Libya, and Yugoslavia have no standing to condemn him is not an exercise in “both-sidesism.” The likes of Blair, Clinton, Trump, and Putin have often been on one same side, through material collaboration in the War on Terror and in their common undermining of the international law which they all claim to uphold. Time and again, Washington has allied with despots, come to see them as unreliable, then launched military offensives against them that succeeded only in spreading chaos. The Left has every duty to remember these disasters — and prevent them from being repeated in the present.”
“[…] we can at least rely on certain core principles: an unrelenting rejection of the use of military force; a refusal to justify one set of generals by citing the crimes of another; and, above all, a defense of our own right to speak without fear or accusation of disloyalty.”
The article Understanding Putin’s narrative about Ukraine is the master key to this crisis by Jonathan Steele (Guardian)
“It is crucially important for those who might seek to end or ameliorate this crisis to first understand his mindset. What happened this week is that Putin lost his patience, and his temper. He is furious with the Ukraine government. He feels it repeatedly rejected the Minsk agreement, which would give the Ukrainian provinces of Donetsk and Luhansk substantial autonomy. He is angry with France and Germany, the co-signatories, and the United States, for not pressing Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, to implement them. He is equally angry with the Americans for not taking on board Russia’s security concerns about Nato’s expansion and the deployment of offensive missiles close to Russia’s borders.”
“Nato’s stance over membership for Ukraine was what sparked Russia’s takeover of Crimea in 2014. Putin feared the port of Sevastopol, home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, would soon belong to the Americans. The western narrative sees Crimea as the first use of force to change territorial borders in Europe since the second world war. Putin sees this as selective amnesia, forgetting that Nato bombed Serbia in 1999 to detach Kosovo and make it an independent state.”
“Convinced that Nato will never reject Ukraine’s membership, Putin has now taken his own steps to block it. By invading Donetsk and Luhansk, he has created a “frozen conflict”, knowing the alliance cannot admit countries that don’t control all their borders.”
I’m not convinced by this argument. Ukraine doesn’t fulfill many of the conditions for NATO membership. It’s unclear why Russia would feel the need to add another one. On the other hand, Steele continues,
“Frozen conflicts already cripple Georgia and Moldova, which are also split by pro-Russian statelets. Now Ukraine joins the list. There is speculation about what will happen next but from his standpoint, it is not actually necessary to send troops further into the country. He has already taken what he needs.”
What Accounts for Putin’s Assertiveness on Ukraine? by Ray McGovern (Antiwar.com)
“That nothing will happen on either Ukraine or Taiwan without coordination between Beijing and Moscow seems to be key to understanding why Putin is feeling his oats. Yesterday, Chas further reminded me that “China agrees with Russia that the US global sphere of influence needs rollback. It does not agree that Ukraine should be invaded, occupied, or annexed. Ironically, China is this century’s citadel of Westphalianism.”
“Is this not another reason why Putin would not invade Ukraine? In my view, if Putin did decide to do such a stupid thing, it is a given that he would check with Xi first, and that Xi would respond with a loud NYET in Chinese.”
“What about Putin’s recognition yesterday of the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk, and sending in Russian troops? I’ll bet Putin gave Xi advance notice of Moscow’s decision, but I do not think the Russian president sought Xi’s approval, much less permission. How the Chinese will react is anyone’s guess.”
Citing from the same article, here are some additional remarks from Amb. Jack Matlock (US ambassador to the USSR from 1987-1991):
“I could not and cannot imagine that Putin would be so stupid as to invade Ukraine, bomb its cities, etc., though obviously Russia has the capability, even without any exercises on the border. The US also has the capability of attacking every country in the world without warning, so one must distinguish between capability and intent.
“[…]
“Zelensky’s steadfast refusal to implement Minsk II gives Putin a dandy excuse to say that this left him no alternative to recognition of the Donetsk and Luhansk entities. He is a judo master, whatever else one might say.”
The article Russia sends troops into East Ukraine, Biden announces sanctions by Clara Weiss (WSWS) writes,
“Since Thursday, civilian infrastructure across Donetsk, including kindergartens and schools, has been subject to shelling. According to the separatists in Donetsk, one civilian was killed in Monday’s shelling by the Ukrainian military.
“On Friday, separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk initiated the mass evacuation of the civilian population to Russia, excluding men aged 18 to 55. So far, at least 49,000 people have reportedly arrived in Russia, most of them in the Rostov region. Kilometer-long lines of cars waiting to cross the border have been reported since Friday.
“Up to 700,000 women, children and elderly people may be evacuated from Donetsk alone. With most of these people already completely impoverished before they were forced to flee, they are now faced with the loss of virtually all of their belongings and a catastrophic social and public health situation in Russia, where over 150,000 new COVID-cases are being reported every single day.”
The article Maps: Russia and Ukraine Edge Closer to War (NY Times) has a pretty good (i.e. factual) overview of the situation in East Ukraine.
“The separatist enclaves claim all of Ukraine’s eastern Donetsk and Luhansk regions as their territory, but they control only about one-third of the area. It was not immediately clear whether Mr. Putin would recognize the enclaves in their de facto borders or would seek to expand them by force.”
The article Beware the Sanctions Trap Over Russia by Daniel Larison (Antiwar.com) writes,
“It remains to be seen whether the Russian government will take any action beyond moving troops into the separatist-controlled areas, and any decision on further punitive measures should hinge on the extent of Russian military action. Russia’s recognition of the separatist republics is illegal, and so is its military presence on Ukrainian territory, but the US and its allies should be wary of launching a costly economic war in response.”
“It is hard to see how impoverishing the Russian people and potentially throwing our own economies into recession make anyone more secure. Just because broad sanctions are the default US response to many international problems does not make them the right response here.”
“The other danger that comes from broad sanctions is that they tend to become permanent. Whether through inertia or by design, US sanctions are almost never lifted once they are imposed, and they often become an insuperable barrier to repairing damaged relations with a targeted country.”
Obviously, this advice will have fallen on deaf ears. Obviously, the U.S. will stumble into the most ham-handed possible response that closes the most diplomatic doors.
The article EU countries impose sanctions on Russia over Ukraine crisis by Johannes Stern, Alex Lantier (WSWS)
“The power that intervened in Ukraine in 2014 was not primarily Russia, however, but Washington and Berlin. When Le Monde denounces the “2014 intervention,” it attacks Russian aid to forces in Donetsk and Luhansk, but falsely treats the Kiev regime as an entirely legal entity by simply passing over in silence the fact that it was installed through an illegitimate, far-right coup.”
The article Who in the Lord’s name gave the US the right? A question for Mr. Biden by Joseph Kishore (WSWS) writes that NATO was the organization that established the precedent that Putin claims to be following in Ukraine.
“The catastrophe stoked by the US and NATO powers was used, in 1999, to justify direct military intervention. Waving the banner of “humanitarianism,” eagerly supported by layers of the upper middle class and academia, the Clinton administration launched its war against Serbia to enforce the secession of the province of Kosovo. It was accompanied by all sorts of claims of human rights violations that were ultimately demonstrated to be grossly exaggerated.
“The war was carried out by NATO, which did not obtain a resolution from the United Nations and was therefore acting in direct violation of international law. It culminated in the installation of a government in Kosovo run by the Kosovo Liberation Army […]”
NATO created the template, and is the first to point the figure when anyone emulates it. Smooth.
“The strategists of American imperialism interpreted the dissolution of the Soviet Union three decades ago as an opportunity to use military force to restructure global relations. In the process, the US has proclaimed, and exercised, the “right” to invade, bomb and instigate regime change operations in countries throughout the world. The NATO military alliance has been systematically extended throughout Eastern Europe, to the very borders of Russia. Now, the US is instigating a conflict with Russia over the sacred “principle” that Ukraine be allowed to join NATO as well.”
The article Putin’s Advance Into Ukraine Compares with Saddam Hussein’s Invasion of Kuwait…a Disaster for Russia by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch) writes,
“[…] the Russian advance has a political impact that goes far beyond the Donbas region and affects the future of Ukraine and Europe. By recognising the independence of the two separatist republics Putin has ripped up any prospect of a diplomatic solution with Ukraine. At the heart of the Minsk-2 agreement of 2015 was an unimplemented accord for autonomy for the pro-Russian republics within Ukraine that looked like the only feasible diplomatic road forward – and this is now gone forever.”
The article Russophobia Leads Us to Assume the Worst of Russians – and Assuming They’re Demonic Could be Dangerous by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch) writes,
“[…] for all the expectations of a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine predicted as imminent by President Biden and Boris Johnson, this has not occurred. Supposedly, Russians commanders leading 190,000 Russian troops had received definitive orders to attack at the weekend, and by now their tank columns should be racing towards Kyiv and other major Ukrainian cities, but in fact they have not moved.”
“It is perfectly legitimate for Western governments to describe this as the invasion of sovereign Ukrainian territory. But it is so far in an area that was totally under Moscow’s control since the separatist leaders are Russian proxies and, whatever term one uses, it is not the all-out military assault that Biden and Johnson were talking about, which may be still to come, but has not come yet.”
“Because Russian grievances are assumed to be without merit, their actions appear irrational or demonic. They may be true, but assuming that this is the case from the beginning only deepens the crisis and makes it more insoluble.”
Level-headed assessment.
Russia, Ukraine and the Chronicle of a War Foretold by Chris Hedges (Mint Press News)
“Poland, for example, just agreed to spend $ 6 billion on M1 Abrams tanks and other U.S. military equipment. […] The consequences of pushing NATO up to the borders with Russia — there is now a NATO missile base in Poland 100 miles from the Russian border — were well known to policy makers. Yet they did it anyway. It made no geopolitical sense. But it made commercial sense. War, after all, is a business, a very lucrative one. It is why we spent two decades in Afghanistan although there was near universal consensus after a few years of fruitless fighting that we had waded into a quagmire we could never win.”
“The Obama administration, not wanting to further inflame tensions with Russia, blocked arms sales to Kiev. But this act of prudence was abandoned by the Trump and Biden administrations. Weapons from the U.S. and Great Britain are pouring into Ukraine, part of the $1.5 billion in promised military aid. The equipment includes hundreds of sophisticated Javelins and NLAW anti-tank weapons despite repeated protests by Moscow.”
The Party of Chaos Blows Its Cover by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)
“And now here is what I think is happening and will happen in Ukraine. The Russian aim is to neutralize Ukraine’s military capability — the means for harassing the eastern provinces known as the Donbas. That has been accomplished. Ukraine no longer has an air force, a navy, or a whole lot of weapons and munitions. It is surely in Russia’s interest to complete this operation in as few days as possible to minimize harm to civilian lives and property.”
C’mon New York Times. Do better.
]]>Published by marco on 24. Feb 2022 23:51:27 (GMT-5)
I can well imagine that the article following Fed Up With Google, Conspiracy Theorists Turn to DuckDuckGo by Stuart A. Thompson (NY Times) will be “DuckDuckGo is a right-wing web site”.
C’mon New York Times. Do better.
I don’t usually see the NY Times home page. It’s possible that it always looks like this. I... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Jan 2022 12:25:38 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 26. Jan 2022 18:36:28 (GMT-5)
I was at the NY Times this morning to look up a referenced editorial and landed on the home page instead. This is what greeted me, above the fold and prominently placed at the top and center of the site.
I don’t usually see the NY Times home page. It’s possible that it always looks like this. I honestly hope not, but can’t rule it out. This is war propaganda, pure and simple. Their formulation has nothing to do with reporting and everything to do with pushing an agenda.
The first headline is a doozy:
“Germany Wavers in the Ukraine Standoff, Worrying Its Allies
“Europe’s most pivotal country has struggled to overcome its post-World War II reluctance to lead on security matters and waffled on forceful measures.
“Its muddled stance has fueled doubts about its reliability as an ally and added to concerns that Berlin’s hesitance could allow Russia to sow division.”
Germans are cowards and unwilling to fight a U.S. proxy war. Germans are “wavering”, “struggling”, “reluctant”, “waffling”, and cannot be “forceful”. They are “muddled”, have “doubtful reliability”, are “adding to concerns”, are “hesitant”, and, finally, complicit in “sowing division”.
Phew. This is a master class of propaganda to launch against a populace well-prepared to accept it. If you’re not so well-prepared, then it might come across as trying way too hard to be convincing. Which it is.
Next up,
“As the West Warns of a Russian Attack, Ukraine Sends a Different Message
“Analysts are puzzled over Ukraine’s “stay calm” posture. But some say that after years of war, the country calculates risks differently.”
Ukraine doesn’t know its own ass from a hole in the ground without the U.S.‘s help. They are too benighted to see the threat that’s right in front of them. This is coming from a media that has no shame about having been wrong about every major issue they’ve pushed for at least the last 20 years. This time they’re telling you they’re right. Or they know they’re wrong and they don’t care (see the analysis of a Matt Taibbi article below).
Next up,
“U.S. to Bolster Europe’s Fuel Supply to Blunt Threat of Russian Cutoff”
The U.S. will ride to Europe’s rescue to help them surmount the emergency engendered by the U.S.‘s own wild and groundless accusations against the Russians. How magnanimous. So the U.S. pushes war with Russia, then offers to sell Russia’s primary customer its own product. Could this be a much more naked grab for market share? Invent a crisis supposedly caused by your primary energy competitor, then offer to jump in to “bolster” its former customers. Just so we’re clear: “bolster” does not mean “donate”. It means “sell”, probably at a markup.
And, finally,
“Russia has stepped up its propaganda war and pushed out a disinformation campaign amid tensions with Ukraine.”
A classic case of projection: If you suspected that the U.S. media is, once again, blowing smoke up your ass about a supposedly necessary conflict—see: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Afghanistan again, Iraq again, Afghanistan again, Iraq again, Iran pretty much always, Libya, Syria, and so on—then you should know that it’s the Russians that are the liars! They’re the ones sowing “propaganda” and “disinformation”, obviously. I mean, they probably are, but they’d have to get up very early in the morning to top the NY Times.
When I finished reeling from that onslaught, I received the article Let’s Not Have a War by Matt Taibbi (TK News), which offers more background on this kind of nakedly aggressive support of war by a supposedly independent media. Spoiler: it’s about selling weapons. With most of its industrial base otherwise exported and a massive brain drain toward a hyper-financialized economy, military hardware is the only remaining actual industry that the U.S. can really get behind.
Some citations from the article,
“Both Biden’s comments and the “Obama doctrine” were fundamental betrayals, presidents saying out loud that there existed such a thing as “our” interests separate from Washington’s war pig clique. The latter group somehow believes itself impervious to error, and takes extraordinary offense to challenges to its judgment, amazing given the spectacular failures in every arena from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.”
When Biden recently backed down on defining a “red line”, he was taken to task for weakness. Obama was similarly excoriated when he, surprisingly, did the same in 2014, after the Ukrainian coup and subsequent peaceful annexation of Crimea.
“Their wag-the-dog thinking always argues the right move is the one that allows them to empty their boxes of expensive toys, from weapons systems to Langley-generated schemes for overthrows, which a compliant press happily calls regime change.”
Somehow, the most sensible thing to do is always to get more military contracts for burgeoning domestic businesses. The media, funded by the same businesses, is happy to lend a hand in the war effort.
“Our plan with every foreign country that falls into our orbit is the same. We ride in as saviors, throwing loans in all directions to settle debts (often to us), then let it be known the country’s affairs will henceforth be run through our embassy. Since we’re ignorant of history and have long viewed diplomats too in sync with local customs as liabilities, we tend to fill our embassies with people who have limited sense of the individual character of host countries, their languages, or the attitudes of people outside the capital.”
The U.S. constantly goes for so-called regime change—it’s a euphemism for conquering and occupation by empire—and they’re always so bad at it. They follow exactly the game plan that anyone with a whit of sense would know to avoid: ignoring the conquered populace. You’re not running a zoo. I’m reading Persepolis Rising (Wikipedia) right now and the occupation and insurgency in that book follows the description in the citations above and below nearly exactly. In fact, while I’m reading the book, I can’t believe that it’s a coincidence that I’m constantly reminded of American occupations of the 21st century.
“Instead of devising individual policies, we go through identical processes of receiving groups of local politicians seeking our backing. We throw our weight behind the courtiers we like best. The winning supplicants are usually Western educated, speak great English, know how to flatter drunk diplomats, and are fluent in neoliberal wonk-speak.”
When we do go meet the locals, we end up working with the ones that are most like us, of course. It’s like when you see reporting from somewhere in the Middle East on some mainstream media and the interviewee doesn’t need a translator. That means the media ignored everyone who can’t speak English—they’re literally everywhere—in order to find some relatively affluent graduate of an American university to explain what’s going on “on the ground”. That’s selection bias of the highest order, but it goes mostly unremarked. That person you found that speaks with a Brooklyn, NY accent is almost certainly not representative of the local populace.
“The ostentatious incompetence of the foreign policy establishment, which America got to examine in technicolor during the War on Terror, was one of the first triggers for the revolt against “experts” that led to the election of Donald Trump. Once, these were drawling Republican golfers who got hot reading Francis Fukuyama, thought they could turn Baghdad into Geneva, and instead squandered trillions and hundreds of thousands of lives pushing Iraq back to the eighth century.”
What Taibbi characterizes as “incompetence” should, in light of his other comments about the financial upside of such policies, rather be deemed “malfeasance”. They are not incompetent per se: they are good at funneling money upward to themselves and their corporate masters.
What they are bad at is actually helping the people who live in conquered countries. They might also be bad at hiding their true intentions, but it doesn’t seem to affect the bottom line, so who cares? Therefore, since they’re not even trying to do any of those other things, you can hardly say that they’re “incompetent” at them.
“The more recent crew is made up of Extremely Online, Ivy-educated fantasists who rarely leave their embassies abroad and view life as an endless production of Sloane or The Good Fight, soap operas about exclusive clubs of fashionably brainy pragmatists with the guts to color outside the lines and “get things done.” Lines like “Yats is our guy” make them tingly. This is perhaps the only subset of people on earth arrogant and dumb enough to think there’s a workable plan for pulling off a shooting war with Russia.”
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. The only thing that changes is the cover story. Where one brand is perhaps more willing to be nakedly aggressive, the other talks of “right to protect”. But they’re all talking about “preemptive defense” or some such nonsense. They’re all just lying about everything in order to keep the money train rolling and to advance their own careers.
The cover story they use doesn’t make a lick of difference, morally. For example, what’s the difference to you if someone steals all of your money at gunpoint or cons you out of it with a sob story about a charity that doesn’t exist? Your money is still gone. They still have all of it. The only thing that’s different is how they took it from you. For some people, that difference may be enough, but not for me.
First off, I don’t want my picking on Jimmy Dore... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 24. Jan 2022 18:14:55 (GMT-5)
I watched a video called “Do Lockdowns Work?” in late December and wrote down a bunch of notes and thoughts as I did so. The title is ostensibly interesting, but they didn’t really talk about that topic all that much in the 80 minutes of the video.
First off, I don’t want my picking on Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal to be read as support of the policies or ideas of whomever they happen to oppose. I listened to their rather long, 80-minute video because I’ve learned from them in the past and think that they generally have useful and well-sourced things to say. Not always, but often enough. That said, I haven’t listened to Dore in a while, maybe half a year.
Still, that I’m not criticizing whomever would be considered to be in opposition to them is much more an indication of the even more clearly poor quality of those arguments, which I don’t even bother examining or reporting on anymore in anything more than a cursory manner.
So, here’s the video:
Jimmy Dore and Max Blumenthal are suffering from the plague of having been right a few times, so they’re always right (or least that they’re right in this instance). Half of what they say is OK, but they’re acting like there was another way out of COVID (at least at the beginning).
The lockdown prevented people from getting cancer checkups. OK, fair. But they would have been prevented from those checkups anyway because of the hospitals filling up. They don’t have any nuance. They don’t address the fact that the lockdowns did have a medical justification. They just dismiss it out of hand, as if the pandemic wasn’t really a pandemic, even though it’s effects were massively ameliorated by the policies that they’re chastising.
Still, people like Max and Jimmy will win in the end. They’ll get their way: the world is letting it rip, so let’s see. Maybe it won’t be so bad. Maybe they will have been right.
They talk about how lockdowns are unhealthy as if they’d discovered this fact. This is not news. This is not something that no-one knows. They paraphrase the most hyperbolic formulations and predictions and then pretend that that’s the norm. No-one sane is saying that there are no costs
They also reiterate the Great Barrington Declaration, which no-one else I listen to still supports. Most never did. The idea there was to protect the elderly but let the rest of society go (because COVID poses no danger to anyone under 65). That was the idea. This turns out to (A) not be true, at scale and (B) advocates a lockdown for the most mentally vulnerable. They don’t care what “isolating the elderly” actually implies, though. Nor do they care whether the alternative to the lockdowns would have been worse. They just fight against liberal idiots online, as if those were authorities. They don’t mention a single, actual authority.
They also equate the idea of a policy (e.g. of imposing a lockdown) with the actuality of the policy. They, like everyone else, mix and match information that we’ve learned over the last two years as if we’d all known these things from the beginning. They disparage Zero-Covid without talking about how China seems to have managed it so far. For two years now. And China is nearly fully vaccinated, so they’re sitting quite pretty.
These two fools are very interesting on other things, but their information and approach is woefully out of touch here. They don’t address anyone who actually knows anything.
They ask what the final agenda is: I don’t think there is one. Countries like Switzerland are just trying to navigate the pandemic without descending into a hospital-free chaos. When Blumenthal says, “they’ve never been forced to face the logical contradictions of their own arguments”, he doesn’t see the irony that neither has he. The subtext of Blumenthal’s argument is that he doesn’t really believe that COVID is dangerous. But then he seems to be arguing for everything to go “back to normal”, that he’s arguing for a return to 100% neoliberalism. I understand that he cares about people, and especially the poor, but I feel like he and Dore aren’t helping here as much as I usually think they do.
They say that the WHO says that it’s going to become endemic. But Blumenthal and Dore don’t know that we can’t make the leap to endemicity without a higher immunization level (either through vaccination or recovery). That’s why there are new lockdowns proposed in some countries and that’s why it’s logical/believable that we’re nearing the end. There are just too many millions of people in the wrong category to let everything rip at once. The hospitals are filling up. It’s not about you, Dore, or you, Blumenthal. The people you claim to be defending are drowning in a sea of patients.
“Dore: They told me that if I got vaccinated that I could go back to my life. And now they’re telling me that I can’t go back to my life.
Blumenthal: “Yup.””
This ceaseless whining is embarrassing—or it should be. Nature and reality have failed to line up with your simplistic notions of how things should be and now you’re going to throw a tantrum. It’s not about ending it anymore. We missed that chance. Maybe that chance was always a mirage. China doesn’t seem to think so (and their gamble is paying off).
No-one who’s sane is proposing that we have endless lockdowns. Dore and Blumenthal are right about the wealth funneling upward, of course, but that’s a separate issue. Just because people took advantage of the lockdowns to personally profit doesn’t mean that the policy was wrong or that not doing anything would have been better. In a world that sucks, there are no good options.
They kept talking about information constantly changing. I think that’s an impression you only get when you get your news from idiots on social media. Otherwise, you don’t get the impression that there is any “pinwheeling” of the message.
It’s becoming increasingly evident that a lot of very bright, otherwise useful people are being negatively affected because they spend too much time fighting idiots online. The ease with which they can refute idiots deludes them into thinking that they’ve spent enough time refining their arguments. This is only true on Twitter; in the real world, their arguments sound childish and unformed—or obvious and thus not deserving of the flourish with which they deliver them.
Towards the end (~1:04:00), Blumenthal talks about the fact that the vaccine is not a sterilizing vaccine, so it’s more like a therapy. Fair enough. The fervent hope was that would have been more of a vaccine, but it’s not. Instead, it only drastically reduces infection (especially when paired with some easy other measures, as long as it’s still circulating) but also even more drastically reduces the danger of this thing. Then Dore and Blumenthal talk about how YouTube makes them say that the vaccines do reduce infection, which they abso-fucking-lutely do, but they’re both so rabbit-holed and mentally damaged from fighting with idiots online that they can’t even see it.
Dore, “Why doesn’t he [Fauci] ever tell you about vitamin D?” Because there is literally no evidence that it works. It’s just online people with no research and no medical background who have self-nominated themselves as experts who believe in all of this stuff. And, of course, someone’s making bank on selling supplements. The whole world would rather believe in fairy tales. Dore and Blumenthal also talk about how “they” are suppressing alternative medications for treatment while promoting vaccines. The vaccine is the best medication. It’s head and shoulders above everything else.
I suppose the part that’s a bit overwhelming is that these two spent 80 minutes stroking each other without once seeming to admit that they weren’t 100% sure of everything they were saying. It was nearly unrelenting smugness, with only occasional respites where you could tell that they really cared about solving the problem—but then they kind of went back to tea-bagging their opponents.
Here’s hoping that they pull back from this kind of content. I generally admire what they do.
Published by marco on 6. Jan 2022 22:54:50 (GMT-5)
It’s January 6th, so half of the U.S. media has its panties in a bunch again about the B&E that happened a year ago at the Capitol Building in Washington D.C. It’s not just the usual suspects either—everyone is getting in on the hyperbole. For example, the article What Do You Call a Failed Insurrection? PRACTICE by Greg Palast is by a great investigative journalist. He’s done great work. He’s still rehashing and republishing details that were disavowed nearly a year ago.
“Forget the whack-jobs who invaded the Capitol one year ago today. These “insurrectionists” were schmucks with no chance of overturning the election. (I don’t dismiss the gravity of their actions — they crushed the skull of a policeman and threatened other murders in the hall of the people.)”
No-one crushed Officer Sicknick’s skull. According to Death of Brian Sicknick (Wikipedia),
“He was pepper-sprayed during the riot, and had two thromboembolic strokes the next day, after which he was placed on life support, and soon died. The District of Columbia chief medical examiner found that Sicknick had died from stroke, classifying his death as natural, whereby a death is “not hastened by an injury”, and additionally commented that “all that transpired played a role in his condition.””
So why is Palast repeating this? Because it’s a knee-jerk, unthinking iteration of bad things you heard about a thing that’s really bad because it’s really bad. Why is he even writing about it? Why is Palast placing a priority on talking about this stupid event? Ordinarily, he focuses laser-like on voting laws, which is his bailiwick, and which are far more important than regurgitating disproven Democrat talking points. You’re better than that, Greg.
I don’t think it was great that the protesters stormed the Capitol. I think it’s definitely worth finding out how it happened so easily. I don’t think that Congress should be in charge of investigating it, though. That’s not their job. Why isn’t the justice department doing it? Oh, they are? And they’re not really finding too many charges that will stick? And they’re holding people in jail for months and months? Neat. The American system works wonderfully.
Probably one of the funniest takes today was the article AOC Lays Wreath At Her Grave On January 6th (Babylon Bee), which captures the mood in 2022 perfectly. It’s about hyperbole and appearances and making sure the angle is just right.
“United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez visited Woodlawn Cemetery this morning to grieve in quiet dignity at her own grave on the 1-year anniversary of her death on January 6. […] AOC, […] was killed in the Capitol’s House Chamber by murderous Trump supporters […] Once her camera crew confirmed they had several good shots, she wiped her eyes, slowly walked to her brand-new Tesla, and drove off—leaving a crew of professional mourners in her wake.
“Visitors to the cemetery are advised to socially distance and mask up while mourning the loss of America’s greatest congresswoman. For those mourning remotely, a contribution can be made to AOC’s 2022 campaign.”
I just don’t understand how anyone looks at America and thinks that this is the number-one priority. There are so many other issues to address for people who bethink themselves of high moral fiber.
Nearly everything else is more important: corporate capture of the state, unbridled war-making, Boschian levels of inequality, no health-care to speak of for many, many people, an enormous police and carceral state, a burgeoning use of prison/slave labor, a merciless, stupid, and counterproductive immigration policy, an unchecked and perennially bungled pandemic, no real response to climate change—the list goes on and on. The moronic protesters from last January are not even on the first page…or in the first chapter.
However, if you’re looking for a more nuanced take on the matter, you could do worse than the article The Long American Meltdown Led to the January 6 Insurrection by David Sirota (Jacobin), which writes that,
“At its core, the January 6 insurrection was the weaponized manifestation of virulent anti-government sentiment in a putatively democratic country where a majority has not trusted its own government for two decades […] That anti-government sentiment on display during last year’s riot wasn’t spontaneous — […] it was cultivated by both politics and reality over the last four decades.”
This anti-government sentiment isn’t just those you think: there are a lot of people disappointed with the government’s inability to do anything but funnel money upwards toward a self-selected and self-perpetuating elite that includes not just many politicians, but most of the media as well.
“Democrats shoved aside a beleaguered labor movement in pursuit of corporate campaign cash, figuring they could help Republicans kick voters in the face, and then just try to buy reelection with corporate donors’ money.”
Not only that, but they’ve been doing this for a good three decades, starting with Bill Clinton (and continuing in the same vein with Obama after an eight-year GWB interregnum),
“Bill Clinton, the first Democratic president after the Reagan era, proudly declared that “the era of big government is over,” and then launched a crusade to slash welfare, help capital crush unions, deregulate Wall Street, privatize government services, and pass the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) — the latter of which prompted culturally conservative working-class voters to abandon the party in droves, according to new research.”
There is no alternative, as Maggie Thatcher said. She meant “to capitalism”, which in America’s case is correct: if you don’t like how things are going, there is literally no viable political alternative. Everyone who might effect any change is inexorably drawn to power, Republicans and Democrats alike.
They don’t even pretend to try to resist it anymore. Think of Pelosi’s recent, brave defense of congressional insider trading that has made so many of them (herself included) millions and millions of dollars richer in a year where the country is otherwise reeling from a pandemic and economic bitch-slap. Why should anyone trust this government to do anything but make its own situation better?
“[…] overall, the government was not addressing eminently solvable economic problems that have been enriching a handful of billionaires while making life miserable for millions of people.”
A lot of the discussion of this overarching, important topic is in the context of the upcoming election in the U.S. No, not the one in November of 2022; the one in 2024. You see, Americans are so deeply narcissistic and ignorant of the world that they believe that these things matter. It doesn’t matter to the world and it doesn’t even matter in America.
Elections don’t matter in America. The same people always win. The politicians have different faces—or somethings they don’t; Joe Biden has a lot of miles on him—but the policies tend in the same direction. There are no surprises.
Will the psychotics from the Republican party win back the houses in 2022? Who cares? How would they make the Democrats more ineffectual? Americans don’t seem to respond to any form of wake-up call. They’re always willing to waste more and more time while they masturbate away the largest collection of wealth, knowledge, power, and influence the world has ever seen. It’s pathetic.
Or maybe Trump comes back in 2024? So what? If he does, America will deserve it. Again. Because America hasn’t done anything to not deserve it. America only does stuff that earns another round of Trump as president. He has a shocking amount of charisma and seems to be able to navigate America’s politics quite well—which says something about both, no?—but he’s a terrible leader.
Would it be better to have someone more effective and willing to face some of the priorities outlined above? Of course. But that’s not going to happen. Instead, more of the same will continue to happen, until it very catastrophically stops doing so. That’s how these things end, as Hemingway wrote, “gradually, then suddenly”. It won’t be because anybody was able to stop it.
To be fair, some have tried. People like Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders and, to be honest, countless others who have fought the good fight and offered alternatives and shouted from the rooftops—all for nought. The place is worse than it’s ever been—unless you’re well off, riding the wave of profit powered by the misery of the 99%. Maybe it’s more ripe for real change—because it’s so close to collapse. But maybe it’s also still firmly in the “gradual” part and the “suddenly” part is still painfully far off. Rome took centuries to die after it was obvious that it would.
None of the efforts so far had any lasting effectiveness—other than inspiring some memes like “99%” and “Black Lives Matter” that long outlive their movements. Instead, their efforts were swallowed or rejected by the parasite that’s wrapped itself around that country. No, when it ends, it will be because the system just died of its own callous stupidity and greed. But we have to wait for it to happen. All of our attempts to point out that we should kill it fall on deaf ears.
]]>“An analyst who was a key contributor to Democratic-funded opposition research into possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia was arrested on Thursday and... [More]”
Published by marco on 6. Nov 2021 23:28:49 (GMT-5)
The article Authorities Arrest Analyst Who Contributed to Steele Dossier by Adam Goldman and Charlie Savage (New York Times) contains the following condemnation of the Steele Dossier.
“An analyst who was a key contributor to Democratic-funded opposition research into possible links between Donald J. Trump and Russia was arrested on Thursday and charged with lying to the F.B.I. about his sources.
“The analyst, Igor Danchenko, was a primary researcher for claims that went into the so-called Steele dossier, a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions suggesting that Mr. Trump and his 2016 campaign were compromised by and conspiring with Russian intelligence officials to help him defeat Hillary Clinton.”
Given its role as the main document underpinning the entire RussiaGate narrative, this is transitively a condemnation of that narrative itself. Is this how the NYT is finally going to acknowledge that RussiaGate was a deliberate lie? That it was an absolute dumpster fire of quasi-journalistic activity that is, quite possibly, the death knell for actual journalism in America? Nope, they’re just going to pretend that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia [1].
There are innumerable articles from the last 5 years on the NYT claiming exactly the opposite—and none of those will get a correction on them. The NYT will almost certainly not pay in any way for the leading role they took in misleading public opinion with a deliberate political agenda. Instead, they rode the Steele Dossier and similar anti-Trump propaganda, lies, and slander to heretofore unprecedented online subscriber numbers, simultaneously rescuing their business model.
Their agenda was to unseat an elected president by any means necessary, including, of course, just flat-out lying about how bad he was because he was so bad that he managed to cover up his badness so elegantly and completely that the only way to get rid of him—and we absolutely needed to, because he was definitionally bad, even if the evidence wasn’t sufficient—was to spread lies about bad things he hadn’t done, in order to be able to nail him for those things that we know he’d done, but couldn’t prove.
That’s justice, everyone! When you can nail people you know are bad, whether you have evidence for it or not.
How can you tell the difference between someone who’s legitimately bad, but manages to hide all evidence of their wrongdoing and someone who’s done nothing wrong, but you just want to smear with lies? You can’t!
But, also, don’t worry your pretty little head about that kind of stuff. Your moral and intellectual betters are putting their maximum efforts into making sure that this doesn’t happen. Trust them. Just keep buying stuff you don’t need and consuming content that rots your brain and keep pursuing the unattainable dream on the treadmill they’ve prepared for you.
The NYT lit a dumpster on fire and the conflagration burned the whole city down. Now they’re walking away, whistling, as if they’d had nothing to do with it at all.
]]>“This leads to our third trend, in some ways our hardest pill to swallow, which Paul Street dubs the Trumpenleft. Street sees so clearly the danger of fake... [More]”
Published by marco on 6. Nov 2021 22:58:50 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Nov 2021 23:31:30 (GMT-5)
The article Shifts Since Fahrenheit 11/9 by Nick Pemberton (CounterPunch) writes about other writers, lauding one, and slandering a few others, dubbing them the “Trumpenleft”.
“This leads to our third trend, in some ways our hardest pill to swallow, which Paul Street dubs the Trumpenleft. Street sees so clearly the danger of fake populist people like Glenn Greenwald, Saagar Engeti,, Matt Taibi, Dave Chapelle and Joe Rogan who peddle hate as a version of “rebellious” politics that are actually philistine. These people will mobilize the masses for the return of Trump. They seek to confuse the American people. What is actually going on in their minds is that Trump represents a form of freedom for being against “cancel culture” (which is code for intersectional justice and has become a not so subtle dog whistle against minorities, women, LGBTQ+ and the poor).”
That is a slanderous lie. Paul Street has gone off the deep end with his anti-fascist screeds. I would be extremely careful citing him. I’ve seen some decent interviews with him, but his writing is long and tediously preachy and repetitive, in a way that that of Chris Hedges is not. That he calls anyone who dares to disagree with any one of the myriad points on his agenda part of the “Trumpenleft” is, and I’m being generous, unfortunate.
For example, he is a huge supporter of Russiagate, to my utter disappointment. He never wavered despite all of the evidence for it disappearing in a puff of smoke. I wonder whether the most recent revelations [1] will cause him to waver—but I’m sure he’ll think of an explanation. Once you’re deep enough in the rabbit hole, you’re pretty good at justification.
So if you weren’t the on the Russiagate bandwagon, then you were for Trump. This “for us or against us” horseshit should be beneath well-educated leftists like Street and Pemberton, but even the best of us end up drawing a line in the sand somewhere and calling it a day. It’s just less work that way and being open-minded and fair—is exhausting. I mean, who has time to read everything? It’s just easier to take other people’s word for what people have written. You can save hours that way. And why would anyone want to mischaracterize what someone else said to make them look bad? That hardly ever happens. Ditto for people reading an essay and not understanding it—or misinterpreting it because they have no sense of irony. [2]
Because of what he wrote above, I’ve lost a bit of respect for Pemberton as a writer now, as well—although he has a long way to fall, in my opinion; this is one data point on a record I consider to be otherwise quite good.
I do think that Paul Street has his heart in the right place, but he tends to lump everyone who doesn’t agree with his extreme formulation into a single group of enemies. He is not unique in this tendency. This is a tendency shared by many who claim to be on the left. And look at what Pemberton does, above: he does the same thing! To accuse Engeti (whom I’ve watched on The Hill, but not much since), Greenwald, Taibbi, Chappelle, or Rogan of being Trump supporters is madness. It’s completely ignoring what they’re actually saying and writing.
Matt Taibbi wrote a book recently called “Insane Clown President”. Dave Chappelle absolutely does not support Trump. Neither does Glenn Greenwald, for God’s sake. When you find yourself writing stuff like this, you should really ask yourself whether you’re sure it’s correct. These are strong allegations. Has Street or Pemberton actually read or watched anything these people have done? Or are they just cherry-picking deliberately misleading clips and tweet-quotes?
Anyone who writes or speaks in an ironic/sarcastic style these days—as both Taibbi and Greenwald are wont to do—is liable to have their statements cherry-picked and stripped of ironic intent. Chappelle, as a comedian, doesn’t even get a pass that he might be just saying things for laughs. A comedian is being paid $26M for a single show—and that show is incredibly popular and a net win for the company that paid him that much money—and people will still somehow claim that he’s “not funny”. When you find yourself on that side of the argument, you really should come up for air and check your assumptions.
For example, I only skimmed Glenn Greenwald and Iowa’s latest WTF Moments by Paul Street (CounterPunch) because I wanted to see what his take on Greenwald’s deeply sarcastic essay was, but then I stopped reading when I noticed that he was reading Greenwald’s biting sarcasm literally. Here’s Street,
“But the first part of Greenwald’s statement is idiotic, as are the portions of his essay in which he defends AOC’s gown as a brilliant statement of “revolutionary socialism.””
This is the problem when someone dips their toe into a writer’s oeuvre and tries to summarize the sum-total of it based on that. That’s why I’m so careful to be generous to Street—because I think his voice is important overall, but I wish he’d be more careful with his, at times (and in my opinion), lunatic stridency. He applies a purity test to make enemies where he could have allies instead.
A week later, he published Glenn Greenwald is Not Your Misunderstood Left Comrade by Paul Street (CounterPunch), noting that he’d “received numerous emails defending Glenn Greenwald against a recent CounterPunch essay”.
Instead of reading those mails that most likely told him that he’d misread the essay because he can’t take a joke, he dismissed the incident by writing “[d]on’t disparage Glenn Greenwald in left media unless you are ready for an inbox eruption.”, as if any critique of his articles from “those people” are a priori invalid because, if you don’t hate Greenwald, then you have nothing of value to offer Paul Street.
He then wrote a long screed doubling down on his initial point while pretzeling around to make it look like he hadn’t completely misinterpreted Greenwald’s essay in the first place. The point he was trying to make is: Greenwald bad. Whether the evidence is manufactured or real doesn’t really matter when the conclusion is known in advance.
Published by marco on 30. Oct 2021 08:56:45 (GMT-5)
The clown-car, fake-empathy horror-show continues in Washington, as every promise made by the Democrats to the people that elected them to all of their offices are broken. This time, apparently, the Republicans don’t even have to do anything special to torpedo everything—two Democratic senators are torpedoing everything for them. And so it goes.
The article After Paid Leave Plan Gets Chopped, Biden Promises Revamped Spending Proposal by Eric Boehm (Reason) details how the Democrats are axing an expensive part of their plan to pull their social safety net somewhere up within the same time zone as most other OECD countries.
“Democrats appear likely to abandon plans to include an expensive new federal entitlement program—paid family leave—as they try to trim the overall cost of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan proposal.
“Biden’s plan called for a federal paid leave program that would replace up to 85 percent of a worker’s pay (with that percentage falling for higher-paid workers) for up to 12 weeks per year. Workers could access the paid leave program if they were having a baby, taking care of an elderly or sick relative, or recovering from a serious illness of their own.”
They won’t be able to do it, so American workers continue without protection and without any alternative to just working all the damned time, no matter what life throws at them in an increasingly unstable society. Or, Paid Leave Struck Down By People Who Do Combined 4 Hours Of Work Annually (The Onion).
The article Biden Dumps Free Community College From Spending Bill by Scott Shackford (Reason) describes how the Democrats have also given up on helping anyone pay for any school whatsoever, leaving the poor to fend for themselves in minimum-wage jobs, or take out unpayable loans, or join the military. Enjoy!
“President Joe Biden’s plans for two years of free community college appear to have been scrapped from his “Build Back Better” spending extravaganza.
“In an address to Congress back in April, Biden announced a $109 billion plan to make community college free, resurrecting a plan the Obama era that ultimately went nowhere. Biden’s plan will apparently share that fate, as it was not included in the giant-yet-nevertheless-scaled-back “framework” that the White House released this morning.”
Further, the article Biden’s incredible shrinking social “reform” bill by Patrick Martin (WSWS) notes that, even the watered-down form, is utterly inscrutable and still has only a small chance of passing.
“The legislation incorporating the “framework,” a draft budget reconciliation bill, was submitted to the House Rules Committee Thursday and runs to nearly 2,200 pages. Its provisions are complex, and the procedures for its approval are both convoluted and highly precarious. It is entirely possible that the legislative process will lead to a complete political debacle for both the Biden White House and the Democratic Party as a whole, with no significant legislation passed.”
Not only that, but the budget bill—which encompasses everything useful to the actual day-to-day American—is small, relative to other expenditures.
“By comparison, the military budget over the same period would be at least $8 trillion, and projected interest payments on the federal debt could be even higher. Every year, the Federal Reserve is pumping close to $1.5 trillion into the markets—nearly as much as the proposed legislation allocates in ten years.”
So, not only is the interest on the debt more per year, the military—even just the base figure to which they’re willing to admit—is 4x as high, the free money for Wall Street and corporate America is nearly 10x higher, but the so-called budget bill—that the media is screaming their heads off about containing socialist giveaways for the irredeemably indolent—is actually shedding its social programs while, utterly mysteriously, retaining pro-business aspects.
“In the course of these “negotiations,” measures that provide subsidies to businesses or promote the entry of more workers into the labor force have advanced, while measures that cost business money, sustain working people while they are not actively employed, or simply improve their lives, have been killed.”
See the article for a detailed listing of what’s in and what’s out. Also: no new taxes on the wealthy. No surprise there.
While it’s understandable that the Democrats are losing support for this reprehensible, spineless, and incompetent behavior, it’s just shitty human nature that somehow it’s expected that the Republicans will clean up in the 2022 elections because of it. How? Why? They’re acting like 50 other Manchins and Sinemas [1], refusing to pass anything whatsoever and letting the Democrats destroy themselves. They’re just as in bed with corporations and the military and just as against universal health care and even just making life less miserable for the 99% as the Democrats—probably more. But somehow in this calculus, they’re coming out smelling like roses. Madness.
Published by marco on 6. Jun 2021 12:12:30 (GMT-5)
This is an excellent interview with Steven Donziger, who’s a corporate/political prisoner in America. He is an American lawyer who was instrumental in helping an international team get a multi-billion-dollar judgment against Chevron in Ecuador for their poisoning of the environment and reckless endangerment of indigenous peoples.
The interview starts at 28:00.
Ecuador’s indigenous peoples won the judgment, and courts everywhere in the world but in the U.S. have recognized it. Chevron will have to pay at some point, but they are delaying the payment as long as possible. The U.S. government and court system is helping them. In this case, when the government declined the case, the judge appointed a corporate prosecutor to continue the case. The prosecutor works for a Chevron law firm. See 41:00 or so.
This reminds me of EvilCorp from Mr. Robot S01E08, where Colby lectures Angela on the reality of corporate lawsuits. I included the full quote in Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.3, but the part that is probably germane to this case is included below.
“Angela: This is a huge class-action lawsuit. They’re going to pay millions.
Colby: Roughly 75 to 100 million. I mean, that’s what their lawyers will settle for—after they exhaust most of your team’s legal funds for the next seven years. And sure, that’s…that’s a lot of money, but not to them, not really. We started a rainy-day fund when the leak happened, just for this occasion. The fund itself has already made five times that amount.”
Fact imitates fiction imitating fact.
Donziger is being prosecuted not by the government, as is usual, but by corporate lawyers, in a circuit court run by a couple of judges who are quite clearly beholden to Chevron’s interests. He is being accused of a trumped-up charge of corruption or trial manipulation or some such thing—but it would be thrown out of court immediately, were it ever to get that far.
That’s why they hold the case in limbo instead. That this is even possible is a testament to the degree to which corporations control the U.S. at all levels, including the the judiciary. See 36:00 for Donziger’s description, where he also describes “civil RICO”, which is the law under which he’s being prosecuted.
The case has dragged on for over two years, during which Donziger has remained under house arrest, with a few exceptions. He has to wear an ankle bracelet. His case has never actually gone to trial. This is pre-trial detention in his home. The maximum historical penalty for the charges leveled against him are 90 days house arrest. He has had almost 800 days—and he’s never been prosecuted nor even seen a trial. He is just being detained indefinitely.
Donziger presents his case well, always focusing on the judgment and the Ecuadorean people first, then emphasizing that he is going to be fine. He is “trapped” in his New York apartment with extremely limited mobility, but he can communicate and he can leave for very special reasons (e.g. occasionally partake in son’s activities in school).
Donziger is in all ways better off than, say, Julian Assage, who is an actual political prisoner of the government, being held in far worse conditions even though he’s also never been convicted of a crime. Assange was, in fact, exonerated in his trial, but is being held in prison while the U.S. prepares its appeal, taking months and months and months to do so. The British government calls him a flight risk and chirpily imprisons a citizen of two foreign governments (Assange is Australian and now Ecuadorean) without a care.
This is how our governments rule; this is the respect they have for rule-of-law. They are monomaniacal, power-hungry, imperialist, authoritarian, hypocritical entities that cannot be trusted in any way to do the right thing or to support any principle. Ethics mean nothing to them. They serve only that which extends and supports their personal fortunes and power.
While it is entirely possible that China is the same, the U.S. and UK are the last ones that could hope to take the moral high ground in such accusations. If China takes over the U.S. role, then, in the eyes of 99% of the world, nothing will have changed but the flag. For many not in the western world, it will be a marked improvement.
I’ve included some selected quotes below, but almost everything Donziger says is important and illuminating. The entire 35-minute interview is worth your time. I’ve heard several interviews with him, but this is the most succinct and eminently understandable one I’ve seen/heard. He is extremely careful and precise in his language in describing this case, which is both admirable and prudent, considering there are hordes of lawyers just waiting for him to slip up in some way that lets them bury him even further.
At 43:50 he discusses his “prosecution”.
“They don’t want this case to go before a jury. […] I got convicted or found guilty of felony criminal offenses by a single trial judge without a jury. And then, after that, I’m going to be potentially put in jail by a judge connected to Chevron—again, without a jury. […] This is a parade of horrors, in America, as regards to trampling of someone’s due-process rights. And the fact that I’m a lawyer—and a reputable lawyer—a human rights lawyer—I have never had a single client grievance in 28 years of practice—by the way, I’m disbarred in New York by judge Kaplan [the judge in the current case]. To be clear, I never had a hearing. […] I never had a hearing where I could challenge his findings that I’d bribed a judge.”
At 45:45 he waves away the personal impact to focus on the way Chevron is trying to establish a discouraging precedent for future action.
“Look, this is bad for me. It’s difficult. I’m strong. I’m resilient. I have a great family. Tons of support. 68 Nobel Laureates. Six Congresspersons. I’m going to be OK. We’re going to get through this. The real problem is: this goes way beyond me. […] This is a corporate playbook, invented by Chevron and its law firm Gibson-Dunn. Gibson-Dunn makes hundreds of millions of dollars in fees off me. They enrich themselves by implementing this playbook that is designed to criminalize human-rights lawyering […]”
At 48:30 he describes the parameters of the original case against Texaco/Chevron.
“This case is owned by the indigenous peoples and farmer communities in Ecuador—about 80 communities—who live and work in an area where Chevron (via Texaco) operated from 1964 to 1992 and deliberately dumped 16 billion gallons of cancer-causing oil waste into the environment, into the waters, into the groundwater, and it’s still going on. You can go down there and see the damage and can see it’s still happening. Pipes out of these waste pits going into streams that people drink out of. This, again, was a deliberate decision made by Texaco to save money, with the clearly foreseeable result that people would die.”
At 49:30 he expresses confidence that Chevron will eventually have to pay up, that they’re not giving up because they’re going to win—not only the case, but the money.
“This is a model of human-rights litigation […] We’re now in year 28 of this. […] It really is an epic battle, but make no mistake, the affected communities in Ecuador are the winners. They won the case. And the reason this is happening to me now is precisely because we won—our team won—and Chevron doesn’t want to comply with the rule of law. And they prefer to spend money to attack the lawyers. They don’t want the precedent that they have to write a check […] That judgment can be enforced in any country in the world except for the United States because of this ruling against me. So Chevron faces enormous financial risk.
“[…] When I say they won, that’s what I mean. They haven’t collected, so Chevron hasn’t been held fully accountable. But I am confident, as are other lawyers even smarter than me when it comes to international enforcement, that this judgment will be collected upon or will be settled sometime in due course, where they will be able to clean up their ancestral lands and save lives. I think this is a historic victory.”
At 52:00 he emphasizes that his being locked up means that they’re winning, that they’ve hurt Chevron.
“We won. I’m locked up because we won. It’s very important that people know that. They want people to look at me and be demoralized. I’m telling you: look at me and don’t be demoralized. We are going to get through this and there’s people in Ecuador, community leaders, who are sophisticated, powerful people. [..] I’m so damned honored to work with them.”
At 54:00 he describes the hubris and arrogance of the U.S. court system, as represented by these Chevron-bought trial judges,
“Judge Kaplan is just a trial judge—a low-level, federal trial judge—who basically issued a ruling, based on false, Chevron, paid [$2 million] witness testimony, that I bribed a judge and he tried to use that to overturn a decision of Ecuador’s highest court, as well as Canada’s supreme court. […] So you have a trial judge trying to overrule a sovereign nation’s supreme court. Can you imagine if an Ecuadorean trial judge tried to do that to the U.S. Supreme Court? That person would be laughed at. […] It’s unbelievable that people actually give it credibility.”
At 57:00 he further discusses the lack of oversight for judges with lifelong appointments.
“I don’t think there should be private prosecutions in the United States. […] There’s no accountability of lifetime-appointed judges. And I think that there needs to be some. Look, most are good judges; they try to work within the framework of the rule of law, in good faith. But if you don’t want to do that—and that’s Judge Kaplan and Judge Prescott, who, in my personal opinion, they’re not doing that, they’re abusing their power to help Chevron and attack me—there’s gotta be some mechanism to hold them accountable. And right now, there’s none. […] If there was a mechanism, I don’t think that this would be happening because they would calculate in their heads, ‘well, I’m not going to be able to do this and get away with it.‘”
At 1:01:30, he contrasts the international and alternative media response with the nearly complete lack of attention by the U.S. mainstream media—especially the New York Times, which is just up the road.
“I’ve got journalists flying thousands of miles in from Europe to interview me and I can’t get the New York Times, which is right up the street—a 30-minute walk from my apartment—to come sit with me and do a story about this. […] No matter what you think of me, no matter what you think of the choices I’ve made, you cannot deny that this is an interesting story. There’s an American lawyer locked up for almost two years on a misdemeanor without trial, who won this big judgment about Chevron. What is going on? That’s a story. Yes, I am frustrated. And none of the networks have covered it.”
I’ve seen and heard him interviewed several times on the podcasts I follow: Chapo TrapHouse, Ralph Nader, Scheer Intelligence, now Useful Idiots. If you follow better news sources, then this has been on your radar all year.
To learn more about the original case, watch the documentary Crude (watched and reviewed in 2012 in Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.9).
Donziger basically learned Spanish in order to help prosecute this case. He says in this interview, “I’ve been to Ecuador 250 times in 20 years to work on this. […] This was not the work on me or one person.” He’s humble. He gives credit where credit is due. The man is a climate hero. He’s been under house arrest without trial in America for almost two years.
]]>“My fellow American,
“[…]
“A key part of the American Rescue Plan is direct payments of $1,400 per person for most American households. With... [More]”
Published by marco on 5. Jun 2021 22:22:08 (GMT-5)
I honestly don’t remember what Donald Trump’s message was, but I happened to read the latest letter from an American president—this time it’s Joe Biden.
“My fellow American,
“[…]
“A key part of the American Rescue Plan is direct payments of $1,400 per person for most American households. With the $600 direct payment from December, this brings the total relief payment up to $2,000. This fulfills a promise I made to you, and will help get millions of Americans through this crisis.”
The U.S. government sent its citizens money to get through an economic and medical crisis, taking far, far longer to do so than any moral leadership would have, then made sure to lie about how much money it sent them, and then to pat itself on the back for that lie—all in one of the first paragraphs of the letter that was to have accompanied the check, but that showed up nearly two months after it had been sent.
That’s right: I got the check a month after it was sent—and the cover letter showed up over a month later.
And why do I write that he’s lying? Because I got $600 in December—over a month before Joe Biden became president. That’s the $600 that Biden is claiming counts toward the $2,000 he claims to have sent me. That check came from the previous administration, not his administration.
Considering how much Biden supposedly hates Donald Trump and his entire administration, he seems quite happy to claim the Trump Administration’s largess as his own, all in order to claim that he gave me $2,000 when he really gave me $1,400.
The money doesn’t really matter to me—I don’t even live in the U.S., but I do pay taxes—but it’s the principle of the thing: I don’t like having smoke blown up my ass by a geriatric con man. I didn’t like it when Trump did it and don’t like it when Biden does it.
On the reverse side was the whole thing in Spanish. “Mi compatriota […]”
As a bonus, on the front of the envelope, the U.S. government made sure to include a threat:
“Official Business
Penalty for Private Use, $300”
What the hell does that even mean? How do you privately use an envelope? Am I liable for depositing the check? This just seems like a way of making everything the U.S. government does carry an implied threat of unknown consequences.
At 15:00:
]]>“Eugene: They did not want Lumumba […] the country starts to break apart. […the Belgians] tracked down Lumumba, they captured him, and... [More]”
Published by marco on 5. May 2021 21:50:13 (GMT-5)
Abby Martin of the Empire Files interviews the incredibly well-informed Eugene Puryear on AFRICOM and U.S. interests on the continent of Africa.
At 15:00:
“Eugene: They did not want Lumumba […] the country starts to break apart. […the Belgians] tracked down Lumumba, they captured him, and then they executed him. And they then instituted a regime that was maybe one of the most brutal, kleptocratic, resource-extraction regimes in the history of the 20th century. […]
“The role of the U.S. is … late 50s, early 60s … and it’s a major role because were trying to shape the impact of the emerging colonial African states to make sure that they were not truly a counterweight to the imperialist agenda and the colonialist agenda. Which meant that, even though the colonies were gone, the basic role that these countries played in the world economy would remain the same and that’s as, essentially, resource-extraction hubs.”
At 19:00:
“Eugene: The general thrust of the Freedom Charter was, at the very least, strongly social-democratic, if not socialist, society that they were projecting out for South Africa, which is, of course, the wealthiest country inside of Africa.
“[…] the U.S. especially was very afraid of a non-negotiated solution in South Africa, because the most likely scenario would be the ANC would take over. They are, in fact, many of them, socialists and communists, and they would immediately ally with Zambia, Namibia, Angola, and Mozambique which were, themselves, also socialist and communist and they would create basically another Soviet Union in southern Africa.”
At some other point, he notes that “As Michael Parenti often says, ‘these countries aren’t underdeveloped, they’re over-exploited.‘”
Chomsky comes down very strong on characterizing... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. May 2021 23:20:51 (GMT-5)
The article “Marx’s Old Mole is Right Beneath the Surface” by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian (Boston Review) is one in a long series of interviews of Noam Chomsky by David Barsamian over the years. I found it kind of interesting as a jumping-off point for some thoughts of my own.
Chomsky comes down very strong on characterizing the attack on the Capitol on January 6th as a coup.
“First of all, it was explicitly an attempt at a coup. They were trying to overthrow the elected government: that’s a coup. As for those who participated, one striking feature—look at the photographs—is that few young people were involved. That’s quite unusual; political events and demonstrations are mostly young people. Here it was middle-aged and older people, and they were all enthusiastic Trump supporters. He was egging them on.”
My first thought was “Ok Chomsky”. I feel like Chomsky’s really rabbit-holed on Trump, ascribing tremendous power to him. It was a terribly executed coup—or, in Chomsky’s words, an “attempt at a coup”. He’s taking the declaration of it being a coup at face value—some of the participants claimed it was one and pretty much all of the mainstream media took it on the strength of that claim.
I just don’t feel he’s giving this issue the same attention to detail that he usually does. Like, the old Chomsky would have whipped out the definition of a coup and alternative characterizations and maybe compared it to real coups. He would have wondered where the follow-through was. Instead, he looks at a few hundred addled heptagenarians and just takes their word for it that they were attempting a coup.
Sure, they were armed, but did they use their weapons? What was the plan? It had no chance. It was poorly planned; there was really no plan, not for “after” they’d won, was there? They did nothing. They embarrassed the nation that something like that could happen in the heart of it, but they all shuffled right back out a few hours later. No standoff, no shots fired, very little damage done. They were not resisted and got nowhere. It was childish.
Were there any people in power involved who could have made a coup happen? If yes, how did they fail so badly? The U.S. government was back up and running in a couple of hours. It was a singultus, not a coup.
Their vaguely stated aim had no anchor in reality, as far from a coup as a child’s drawing of a car is from the real thing. The drawing is barely recognizable as a car, but the child is convinced it can get in it and go somewhere. That doesn’t make it a car.
It was about as much of a coup as that band of fools who tried to “take over Venezuela” last year by landing a half-dozen armed idiots in a zodiac on the beach and “storming” Venezuela from there. They were swept up in hours and arrested. Some people trumpeted that that was a coup attempt as well, but are we really at a point that you can put an “elephant” label on a fluffy bunny rabbit and change reality?
“There were elements there from the more violent militias, such as the Proud Boys. It was a pretty violent affair. Five people were killed; it could have been much worse.”
It could have been, but it wasn’t. Four died of heart attacks. One shot fired, by police, which killed a protestor. A police officer on the scene died of a stroke the next day.
Yes, it could have been much worse, but not a single one of the protestors fired a shot from any of their many firearms. They walked in, they walked back out. They stayed between the velvet ropes, for God’s sake. As coups go, pretty unrecognizable. There were many, many demonstrations, protests, and riots last year—heartily lauded as righteous—that were much more violent than this one.
They physically broke down some doors to breach the Capitol, but the majority of the violence was symbolic. The nation’s pride was wounded and it was embarrassed on the world stage. At that point, they had to double down and pretend that it was a lot more dangerous than it was. Just America being a drama queen again. Anything for attention.
Chomsky moves on to discuss how the Trump administration drastically increased short-term gain for fossil-fuel companies by trading medium- and long-term climate disaster.
“[Trump’s] major policy programs were to destroy the environment as quickly as possible, maximize the use of fossil fuels, and eliminate the regulatory apparatus that somewhat controls them, with the goal of increasing short-term profit for sectors of industry, fossil fuels, and others. This is the most malicious program in human history. It’s barely discussed; that’s not what Trump is criticized for. But whatever else he did pales into total insignificance compared with this. Another four years of it, and we might have been pretty near the finish line.”
I don’t really understand where the evidence for this is. I know Trump and his crew were bad guys, but I really don’t see how they were orders of magnitude worse than anyone else. Trump continued Obama’s expansion, no? Obama and Biden oversaw the fracking boom as well as the biggest expansion of offshore drilling ever. I wasn’t aware that Trump had increased it so drastically as to be another order of magnitude.
And now? Will we do anything useful with the next four years under Biden? I suppose we’ll make some noises in that direction. I’m not convinced that anything will come of it. We haven’t changed any of the underpinnings of the American oligarchy, so how could something fundamentally different happen?
Why would the oligarchs start losing now, when they have control of everything? Because a near-octogenarian who’s always been in their pockets publicly said some vague things? Biden’s done this his whole career: said one thing and done another. He is the quintessential politician, in that regard. He’s the president America deserves, in a different way than Trump, but just as much.
Despite his claims, I don’t think that Biden will slow climate collapse in anything approaching a significant manner. The pandemic did, though. It weakened Exxon to the point that it was delisted from the S&P 500. That’s a good start.
I still see far too many articles about how the coming climate catastrophe is exaggerated, that the doomsaying is based on models and projections and that these might be wrong, that we might find a silver bullet. To be clear, I don’t think that Chomsky believes this. But he’s also sounding a lot more hopeful than the vague mutterings of Biden warrant given how much he’s shown himself to know about how deep of a hole we’re in, climatologically speaking.
The climate—just like the virus—doesn’t care. It doesn’t care. The temperature will rise and all of those who urged complacency and business as usual will probably not even see that they were wrong. They certainly won’t admit it. And they certainly won’t lose power or influence. They arrogance and inability to process information only makes them stronger, more likely to influence more people even more ignorant than they are.
It won’t matter anyway. Even an “I told you so” will ring hollow as we scamper from air-conditioned shelter to air-conditioned shelter, forgetting what life was once like. Nothing will matter anymore, other than getting food and water and finding shelter from the heat. We’ll be fighting our water wars and fighting off waves of climate refugees and perhaps even fighting some new pandemics because, sure, why not? Hell, let’s run out of antibiotics worth a damn too, while we’re at it.
Who needs to be outside when you’ve got the Internet on your phone?
Barsamian asks, “What would be a fair and just immigration policy?”
“NC: The first goal of policy should be to eliminate the conditions from which people are fleeing. These people don’t want to be in the United States; they want to be at home. But home is unlivable—they’re forced to flee. We have a large share of responsibility for the fact that it’s unlivable.”
We’ve plundered their lands and supported right-wing coups whenever the profits of our corporations were threatened. Well, they’re not our corporations. Those corporations belong to themselves and they own our politicians, so they bribe the U.S. government to militarily defend their rights to plunder brown people all over the world. And these bozo politicians sell themselves for a pittance. They cause untold present and future destruction and woe for comparatively few dollars of short-term gain.
These companies get want they want dirt-cheap. It’s not even a question of whether they should do it or not. Would you pay a few million bucks to get billions of extra profits? Or would you let morality get in the way? If you tend toward morality, that explains why the world kicks you in the ass—because there isn’t anything this world likes rewarding more than being an unbearable asshole sociopath.
“The problem wasn’t the caravans. It was why it was happening. While the rest of the hemisphere condemned the coup, Obama and his secretary of state Hillary Clinton refused to formally designate it a military coup—because if they did, they would have had to stop military aid to the junta. When you impose a horror chamber, people flee.”
And why is the U.S. supporting a military junta? Because those fucking morons in Honduras elected a socialist government, that’s why. Didn’t they get the memo from the last several dozen foolish countries who tried something like that? Obama was no different than any other president: his job as American president is to fight communism and socialism. That’s what they say anyway. What they mean is that the U.S. uses its military power and political influence and wealth to rob the rest of the world, day after day after day.
Most countries are pirates. But some countries have raised plunder to an art form. Why buy something or build something yourself when you can just steal it? Hell, with enough marketing, you can even secure the moral high ground for yourself at the same time that you’re slaughtering millions in the name of a slightly higher profit margin for your friend’s companies.
It’s always the same story: embargo Cuba because they’re communist and in cahoots with the Soviet and now just because. Split up Korea to keep the Soviets from having it. Tell yourself and the world a fairy tale about how you’re doing it for democracy or defending free markets or some such bullshit when you’re really just looking to plunder their resources. People will go along with it.
They’ll look at a country like South Korea, which still hosts over 30,000 U.S. troops 70 years after their war of “emancipation” was over (never officially ended, I know) and think that this is a flourishing democracy. They are an occupied country. They are not allowed to make their own political decisions—not really.
Or how the U.S. destroyed Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia to teach the world an object lesson about creeping communism. Or their attack on the African Union countries, like Angola or Mozambique? Never heard of those proxy wars against the Soviet and Cuba? Or Iraq, or Libya, or Afghanistan. How many times can people ignore the lesson that’s right in front of their faces? Spoiler alert: at least one more time, every time. The U.S. can count on it.
It can count on the world believing its claim that it’s interested in defending Taiwanese sovereignty when it’s really just interested in stealing all of that chip-manufacturing from China. That’s all there is to it. And the rest of the world goes along with it because they also need chips for every fucking thing they make and they also have no chip-manufacturing capacity and they also don’t feel like paying for anything that they can steal instead.
Especially when it’s so fucking easy to convince entire countries full of people predisposed to believing any racist thing you say about the Chinese or the Russians or the Iranis. We make it so easy for them to be pirates. Because we need the shit they’re stealing too, don’t we?
What would the alternative be? Build up manufacturing capacity in Europe or the U.S.? Are you mad? It’s far too late for that now. No, we’ll have to cruise in with several navies—the U.S. has been there for years and now England’s on its way [1]—and try to steal it instead, probably provoking a hot war in the process.
But we also know that those dastardly Chinese and Russians have a no-first-strike policy for using nuclear weapons. Pussies. The U.S. has never made a promise like that. That’s why it’s spent the last decade building up an arsenal of suitcase nukes to replace the aging ICBMs.
The U.S. knows that the world knows that it’s the only one crazy enough to actually use nukes, so it blusters around, telling the world that it’s doing all of this for the world’s own good and for the good of democracy in the flavor-of-the-week (Taiwan), claiming the moral high ground in the fairy tales it tells itself while it brandishes its nukes at a world that wishes it would just go ahead and die already.
“The 1619 Project in the New York Times was another very interesting step forward. Of course, it’s being lambasted by professional historians: you got this detail wrong, you forgot to say that, and so on. It doesn’t matter. It was a very powerful recognition of what 400 years of vicious treatment has meant for African Americans and what legacy it leaves. That’s a real breakthrough. Couple of years before that, nothing like it. All of these are steps forward.”
I disagree strongly here. As I would have expected an earlier Chomsky to do as well. It was Chomsky who wrote that it’s exactly the little details that led to a completely different and largely fictitious “manufactured consent” arising from journalism. In his famous book of the same name, he argued the case for the wars in Southeast Asia and South America. He argued then that what things looked like on the surface differed wildly from what people ended up interpreting from the news, mostly based on framing.
I’m shocked that Chomsky is OK with the mendacious propaganda campaign of the 1619 project. He used to care about details and point out how details were essential to twisting a story. Now he kind of waves them away as distracting from the main point that the new way of looking at history is the right way.
The 1619 project claims that Benjamin Franklin is and always has been a racist and that’s OK, despite a complete lack of actual evidence, because the end justifies the means. If the evidence supports it, then wonderful. Let’s do that. But if the evidence denies it, then we’ll have to do that as well.
Maybe Chomsky’s just getting tired or maybe I misunderstood what he meant here, but it sounds dismissive of scholars whose hearts would be in the right place—they have no illusions about America’s roots in slavery—but who want to come up with a retelling of history that doesn’t distort the historical record for ideological aims.
I recently took some notes on a very lengthy examination of one of the foundational works of the 1619 project (Gerald Horne’s counter-revolution against 1776 by Fred Schleger (WSWS)) that spent time on the “details” that Chomsky is waving away (counter to earlier Chomsky) and found them to be sobering and quite convincing. I had to look and verify that it was the same Gerald Horne whom I’ve heard express himself so eloquently on several podcasts who’d written a book with such sloppy/mendacious scholarship.
And the 1619 project is not a flash in the pan. There’s a book and a children’s book based on the project. All on the up and up, with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s name emblazoned on the front as a winner of the the Pulitzer Prize from The New York Times Magazine. All is as it should be. These are highly trustworthy sources who’ve never been involved in rewriting history otherwise. Sure, let’s rebase the whole U.S. history curriculum on this.
There is surely a part of this project that is useful, but they acted as if there were two “sides” to it. When scholars in the area piped up with corrections of sometimes gross misreadings or deliberate misinterpretation, they didn’t retract or change anything. Why? Well, some of the errors were so bad that they would have gravely undermined the premise of the project itself. That premise was the reason they did the work in the first place. This is not science where you make a hypothesis and then ditch it if the evidence doesn’t support it. No, this is propaganda, where the tail wags the dog.
You can’t lie about details if you want to be the honest party. You can’t just make shit up to support what you think is the truth. How does that work? How am I to understand the difference between an actual lie and “steps toward” a proper goal, but supported by manipulation and untruth? If it takes untruth and fake facts to get there, then how can it be the truth? Do we just a priori assume that we already know the conclusion and then just cherry-pick evidence and fabricate information to support it? Is that considered OK when the cause is right? Again, I’m 100% sure that’s not what Chomsky means, but he’s expressing himself poorly, at the very least (which is atypical for him).
This is exactly the technique that was used against Trump that only ended up strengthening him, in the end. Because people saw that it was bullshit. There were a million legitimate ways to attack what he was doing, but they attacked him for bullshit reasons, undermining the entire enterprise.
Anyone and everyone thinks it’s OK to just sling mud at Trump as long as it sounds “truthy”. This undermines the effort to report on things that he’s actually done. Hell, Chomsky even complained about it earlier: that Trump’s policies against the environment were,
“[…] the most malicious program in human history. It’s barely discussed; that’s not what Trump is criticized for. ”
Yeah, it’s barely discussed because people are “discussing” untruths and non-issues that are wrong “in the details” but feel right. The jihad against Trump looked, on the surface, like it was a step in the right direction, but it was, in reality, ignoring the actual evil of his policies—because those were approved by all sides.
The 1619 project is the same: it is based on dishonesty, but because it flies the right banner, it’s supported even by the likes of Chomsky. In reality, it neatly skirts changing anything in the present day that would help anyone it purports to represent. It’s just another fairy tale that wastes a lot of energy in the wrong direction, leaving the oligarchy in place, the people powerless, and the workers in chains. It will entrench the race war amongst the poor and oppressed that has always been the weapon of the rich.
That’s why a place like the New York Times loves it. They are supporting their masters, whether they’re aware of what they’re doing or not. Hell, most of the people there are so young and dumb and indoctrinated that they not only don’t realize how well they’re being manipulated into supporting the status quo, they don’t even have the capacity for realizing something like that. They’re blinded by their own self-righteousness and narcissism and instinct for self-preservation.
There is no value to a truth that is manufactured. Maybe Chomsky is just getting tired—hell, I would be—or maybe he’s getting “woke” from living and working in—and never leaving—Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or maybe he just got one wrong. Or maybe I’m missing something.
A final, good word from Chomsky that doesn’t require a rant from me in response.
“Having a job is not something you look forward to. It’s something you may be forced into, but it’s an attack on your dignity as a human being, your rights as a free human being. Having a job means being forced to live under the orders of a master for most of your waking life. Nothing wonderful about that. Skilled workers in the late nineteenth century had a very lively working-class press. They expressed their hope that over time people wouldn’t succumb to this attack on their rights—that they wouldn’t accept as normal the idea that they have to be subject to a master.”
That’s the message we should be focused on. That’s the aim we should have. The oligarchy knows it and does everything it can to distract us from the goal of changing this stupid way of running things. They know the people would have the power and they have to keep the people at each other’s throats to keep the sheep from looking up and seeing their true enemies….and turning on them.
McAlevey discusses in... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Apr 2021 22:50:04 (GMT-5)
The podcast Behind the News, 4/15/21 by Doug Henwood (Apple Podcasts) includes two interviews. The first half is an interview with Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht about Sanders’s legacy (which was OK), but the interview with Jane McAlevey about “why the union lost to Amazon in Bessemer” was absolutely top-notch.
McAlevey discusses in no uncertain terms how obvious it was that the union was going to lose the vote against Amazon in Bessemer:
That last one was ridiculous. The union deliberately torpedoed their own dues using the arguments of their enemy.
McAlevey summed up by saying that she “knew it was going to fail since the initial vote count was too long in December”. Nothing that ensued—their missteps on focusing on digital rather than physical engagement, their focus on union staff and celebrities rather than workers and community—convinced her that the organizers were going miraculously turn it around.
From the interview, I dug up the article she’d mentioned, in which she summed up the election, Blowout in Bessemer: A Postmortem on the Amazon Campaign by Jane McAlevey (The Nation), making many of the same points she made in the podcast,
“Three factors weigh heavily in any unionization election: the outrageously vicious behavior of employers—some of it illegal, most fully legal—including harassing and intimidating workers, and telling bold lies (which, outside of countries with openly repressive governments, is unique to the United States); the strategies and tactics used in the campaign by the organizers; and the broader social-political context in which the union election is being held.”
“The organizers can then help the worker understand that paying dues is essential to build the power required to take on monstrous employers like Amazon.”
“The last thing nervous workers want is to be seen near the place they work, talking with union supporters. Successful campaigns require house calls—unannounced physical visits to workers’ homes so the conversation can be had away from the company’s watchful eye.”
“A majority public structure test is when a majority of workers who are eligible to vote in an upcoming union election, or who are voting to strike, sign a petition or take photos and produce a public poster, flyer, or website that displays their signature or faces, with a message stating their intent to vote yes. When asked why that wasn’t done in Bessemer, the union’s communications director told me it had to “protect the workforce” from being fired, so it didn’t want to do anything in public. Game over.”
“When fear is running hard inside a facility—which it certainly was in the Amazon election—the only way to overcome it is by asking each pro-union worker to step out and declare themselves pro-union publicly. What “protects the workers” is when a majority of them take this action together, all at once. You are teaching collective power in the conversations and actions.”
“When there are more outside supporters and staff being quoted and featured in a campaign than there are workers from the facility, that’s a clear sign that defeat is looming.”
“The media, especially the genre of media called the labor media, should have never overhyped this campaign—or the Volkswagen campaign, or the Nissan campaign. In all three cases, the impending defeat was evident everywhere. When media folks prioritize clicks and followers over reality, it doesn’t help workers, and probably hurts them.”
If you’re interested in more of Jane McAlevey’s writing, she’s published an excerpt from her book No Shortcuts called Smithfield Foods:
A Huge Success You’ve Hardly Heard About. This documents a hard-fought and ultimately wildly successful campaign to unionize a food-processing plant in North Carolina, a state that had 3% union participation in its labor force at the time. They got a tremendous package for their workers—and did nearly everything differently from the union in Bessemer.
]]>“The trouble is what’s not in the indelible picture: Mr. Floyd’s prodigious ingestion of the world’s hardest narcotic, fentanyl, at a level likely to cause death, plus methedrine, plus... [More]”
Published by marco on 29. Apr 2021 22:42:03 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 13. May 2021 11:14:19 (GMT-5)
The article The Movie Follows the Script by James Howard Kunstler (ClusterFuck Nation) included the following about George Floyd’s intoxication level.
“The trouble is what’s not in the indelible picture: Mr. Floyd’s prodigious ingestion of the world’s hardest narcotic, fentanyl, at a level likely to cause death, plus methedrine, plus THC, on top of a 90-percent blockage of a coronary artery, and other cardiopathies, and Covid-19, all according to the official medical examiner.”
I’d already read this claim a few times and had heard both that the medical-examiner’s report should be dismissed as not relevant as well as considered to be very relevant. So I dug it up here: HHennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office Autopsy Report for George Floyd. The case title is “Cardiopulmonary Arrest Complicating Law Enforcement Subdual, Restraint, And Neck Compression”.
The parts that leap out to me (not a doctor) are, “Arteriosclerotic heart disease, multifocal, severe” but also “No life-threatening injuries identified”, which I take to mean that they’d identifies his injuries as internal, not external.
The report does state that Floyd was “positive for 2019-nCoV RNA by PCR” and had “Fentanyl 11 ng/mL” in his system, as well as a metabolite of Fentanyl, “Norfentanyl 5.6 ng/mL” (indicating that part of whatever he’d taken had been processed). I, of course, had to quickly look up Norfentanyl to discover that it was a metabolite (“an intermediate or end product of metabolism”, according to Wikipedia).
On top of that, there were also “Methamphetamine 19 ng/mL” as well as “11-Hydroxy Delta-9 THC 1.2 ng/mL”, which is, according to 11-Hydroxytetrahydrocannabinol, a metabolite of cannabis. “Cotinine” (metabolite of nicotine) and “Caffeine” were also present. No ethanol, though.
As far as I know (not a doctor), though, these are just trace amounts. 11ng/mL doesn’t sound like very much, to be honest. Not when you’re still allowed to drive in many countries with .5% (or .005) BAC (Blood Alcohol Content). Compared to that, .000011 (or .0011%) seems vanishingly small.
On the other hand, Fentanyl is considered to be anywhere from 50-100x stronger than morphine and morphine is much stronger than ethanol. There’s a decent chance that .0011% is a pretty high dose.
To try to figure out what a big does of Fentanyl was, I looked up “Fentanyl 11 ng/mL” and found the report Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report on June 23rd, 2016 (CDC), which describes other Fentanyl overdose victims as follows,
“The Connecticut Medical Examiner’s Office performed postmortem toxicology screens on specimens obtained from two patients who died en
route to the hospital (patients E and I). Serum samples from the hospitalized patients analyzed at UCSF demonstrated fentanyl levels of 0.5–9.5 ng/mL
(Table 2) (therapeutic range for analgesia = 0.6–3.0 ng/mL) (4); postmortem levels in the first two patients who died were 11 ng/mL (patient E) and 13 ng/mL (patient I). Norfentanyl, a major metabolite of fentanyl, was detected in the serum of nine patients; norfentanyl was not detected in postmortem testing of patients E and I, presumably because death occurred before metabolism of fentanyl to norfentanyl.”
With this research, it seems that the levels of Fentanyl found in George Floyd’s bloodstream led to overdoses in other patients. At the very least, he seems to have taken 3.6x-18.6x (11 / .6 − 11 / 3.0) what is considered an analgesic dose. That’s not even considering that he also had half again as much of the metabolite, suggesting (to me, not a doctor) that his body had already processed part of whatever he’d taken.
Can you imagine what a does of Fentanyl that big feels like? I must have gotten something wrong in my analysis because…how was George Floyd even still walking? Either he’d built up a resistance (can you do that?) or he was absolutely not a danger to anyone, other than to maybe falling on top of them. I can’t believe he’d be a threat as he was probably barely in control of his limbs.
Although some are proposing that this heroic dose of Fentanyl was the reason he died, it seems more likely that this undermines Chauvin’s claim that Floyd was dangerous and that he had to subdue him for “public safety”.
As for whether Chauvin should have been charged and convicted of murder, Minnesota law defines third-degree murder (Wikipedia) as:
“[…] without intent to effect the death of any person, caus[ing] the death of another by perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life”
…which sounds pretty much like what Chauvin did.
Published by marco on 25. Apr 2021 23:10:23 (GMT-5)
Back in November, I listened to this Joe Rogan interview with Tim Dillon and Alex Jones. Tim Dillon is pretty funny. Joe’s going on about taking a UFO to Alpha Centauri and the evolution of humanity and Dillon interrupts him to say “I’m not even allowed to go to an Applebee’s, Joe. … I live in California. I’m barely allowed to leave my house.” … later he says, quite poignantly, “I think we should be humans as long as we can.”
Very near the end of this 3:10:00 show, Joe wraps things up. Rogan may be saying a lot of crazy stuff—I don’t know, I don’t listen to him very often—but in this interview, he’s fair and sane and offers a true way out of the morasse of unproductive infighting into which much of online discourse has waded. I’ve emphasized some sentences.
“Joe: [To Tim] I appreciate you being here. It was everything I hoped it would be. [To Alex] This was a great one, Alex. I think people got to see a side of you that they maybe didn’t even see in the other two podcasts. I think maybe you did a great account of yourself…
“Alex: Really? You think so?
“Joe: A lot of the shit you brought up today, I mean, you were pulling shit off the top of your head…a lot of it was accurate. A good solid percentage of it.
“Alex: I’m not trying to bullshit.
“Joe: No, you’re not trying to bullshit. I know you’re not. And this is what I’ve always told people about you. And again, I think we’re at a critical time where we’ve got to rethink all these people that are calling for people to be censored. And calling for people to be deplatformed. I think you’ve got to rethink this. I think everybody has to rethink this. Because I think you might be looking back on this ten years from now and be thinking, ‘Oh my God; what the fuck did I support?’
“Alex: Well, I agree with you, but you’re being nice to the censors. They’re tyrants.…
“Joe: I think there are a lot of people in this machine and a lot of these people: they’re not tyrants; they think they’re doing good. They really do. There’s a lot of people out there calling for people to be deplatformed, calling for people to be censored, because maybe they have children and they see their children being indoctrinated into Q-Anon and all this kind of ridiculous thinking and maybe they think that the way to fight some of this shit is to just take this stuff off-line, so the kids have no access to it.
“Alex: That only makes their children want it more.
“Joe: Not only that, but it makes the people who believe that there’s a conspiracy to silence the truth, it makes them even more fervent in their beliefs. It makes them start believing it even more rabidly and, not only that, it creates echo chambers.”
That’s what the interview was really like. There was a lot of nutty stuff thrown about, but most of it was true, although it wasn’t always clear why it was important to mention it or talk about it at that particular moment. That’s where the propaganda comes in, of course, but it was no more or less hair-brained that many other discussions online. It wasn’t dangerous.
It’s not clear why Jones needed to be banned—at least not from those 3 hours of interview and discussion. I mean, Rachel Maddow (just for example) sows a deliberately misleading if not outright mendacious storyline that makes people very comfortable with the thought of outright war with Russia. No-one’s even asking her to knock it off, to say nothing of banning her from any platform.
But people can’t read and they can’t listen and they make up their own stories to fit their own narratives. And nearly everyone does it, especially if the target is juicy enough, if the target is someone you already dislike or disagree with—and you know you can get the rest of your blue-check twitterati to brigade with you.
For example, there’s the shit-show around Glenn Greenwald leaving the Intercept. Now I have to watch Naomi Klein smear Glenn Greenwald as a Trump-lover? And then accuse him of leaving the Intercept to make more money? He had the same cushy-ass sinecure that you did, Naomi—for half-a-million per year. What the actual fuck, Naomi? Are you so in-the-tank with never-Trump that you don’t see the journalistic issues at all? I guess there are a certain class of people who feel that defending free speech only goes as far as defending free speech that is officially approved. Her fervor for the task was disappointing.
Then there’s this characterization from The Knives Come Out as Greenwald Splits From the Intercept Citing Censorship by Alan Macleod (Mint Press) (in fairness, from an article that can’t tell “access” from “axis”)
“The Atlantic’s David Frum, the man who coined the term “access of evil” for the Bush administration, professed his outrage over the emergence of an alliance of reactionary thinkers, including Greenwald and Matt Taibbi on the left and Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and the Federalist Magazine on the right.”
Joe Rogan is in no way right wing. He hunts, you nitwits. That doesn’t make him right-wing. You would, of course, have to listen to the words he actually says, which is too much work for most people, apparently. It’s far easier to pick up official talking points and go with those. Nobody ever got fired for agreeing with the Democratic Party at a purportedly left-leaning but pretty corporatist outfit.
Pretty much everyone who’s against Greenwald is still happily chirping about a Russian-influence theory that has been long since disproven to have happened in the way characterized. Luckily, they managed to train a whole country full of people to, once again, respond to anything they don’t like as Communist or Russian-influenced in order to invalidate it without consideration. This sounds like a healthy intellectual culture that’s bound to lead to a healthy, thoughtful culture.
“As journalist Matt Taibbi noted, “The Intercept uncritically took dictation from John Brennan, Jim Clapper, and Michael Hayden, and killed a piece by their Pulitzer-winning founder because it was critical of the probable next president.””
Max Blumenthal gets in a great murder-by-words on Twitter here.
“The Intercept’s Betsy Reed, who earns $427,419 a year & produces zero journalism of her own, mocks independent journalists who rely on Substack & Patreon to get by. Not everyone has a reclusive billionaire to pay them huge sums to edit stuff no one reads.”
In the following video, Chris Hedges interviewed Matt Taibbi on his show On Contact. In it, they spend half an hour discuss various topics, but there is a focus on the way the “official” press plays court stenographer for the liars and manipulators in organizations like the CIA and the NSA—or others who have retired from the military or these agencies to offer their opinions to the press.
In the following video, The Hill interviews Glenn Greenwald about why he left The Intercept. He also describes an atmosphere in journalism that is far more about political posturing than about establishing a common set of facts and information.
“Tucker was one of my biggest defenders when the Bolsonaro government was trying to have me arrested. […] When I wanted to talk about the persecution of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, I got to go on Tucker’s show to do it … and reach an audience that, even though they may not agree with everything I’m saying in the moment, by being able to communicate with them and have an open channel of discussion with them, they are, at least, if they trust me, they’re going to give me a fair hearing.
“Which is what you want if you believe the things that you’re saying need to be heard and are important. It’d be so much easier to isolate myself in echo chambers where everybody applauds me. […]
The reason I started writing was that I wanted to bring attention to the things that I thought the media was ignoring. Not what the media was already covering. I assume that my readers already know all the reasons why Trump is horrible. I’ve written negatively about Trump before.“I just don’t think it’s a valuable use of my time or platform to just go around repeating what CNN and MSNBC and the NY Times Op-ed page are already saying. What good does that do, other than win me applause? I want to bring attention to some of the kind of unseen trends that I think are really disturbing, that my readers would benefit from rather than just having their view reinforced and I think that’s why I’ve built up a loyal audience over the years.”
I write “Biden Administration” because am reluctant to characterize anything that happens as having sprung from... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 25. Apr 2021 22:34:33 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 25. Apr 2021 22:43:22 (GMT-5)
Since the Biden Administration took the reins, America’s foreign policy has stayed just as confusing as under Trump (or Obama or Bush…) but is arguably more strident and belligerent.
I write “Biden Administration” because am reluctant to characterize anything that happens as having sprung from the mind of Biden. His few appearances and utterances have not inspired any confidence that he’s deciding anything more complex than which kind of fruit he wants for breakfast. On the other hand, the muddled and self-contradictory nature of the overall policy does suggest that he’s involved.
In particular, it’s hard not to think that Biden and co. are doing anything other than trying to engineer regime change in Russia and China—if they have to go to a hot war to achieve it, then so be it. There doesn’t seem to be any reasoning other than raw imperialism and a desire to vanquish of anything that can be made to look like an enemy, no matter how shaky or transparently mendacious the evidence. The U.S. economy is nearly entirely military-based and no-one in charge there has bothered to try to move away from that base in decades, if ever.
Aaron Maté of the Grayzone interviews US Naval War College analyst Lyle Goldstein about America’s foreign policy toward Russia and China. As usual, Maté asks a few questions, but mostly lets his incredibly well-informed guest discuss at length.
“Lyle Goldstein [is a] research professor and founding director of the China Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War College. [Note: Speaking in a personal capacity. Opinions don’t reflect in any way the official assessments of the US Navy or the US government.]”
At 02:00, Goldstein gives a great overview of the situation with China. Really strong. Worth watching.
At 19:00, Goldstein answers a question about the Xinjiang region. He talks about the initial terrorism that led to repression—though he hastens to add that the terrorism doesn’t justify the subsequent crackdown.
China is guilty of collective punishment of an ethnicity for the actions of the separatist movements. Many countries do this, including the U.S. In particular. In addition, the U.S. wholeheartedly and financially supports Israel in doing exactly this to Palestinians for decades. That the U.S. exaggerates China’s behavior by characterizing it as “genocide” is nakedly hypocritical and politically motivated.
At 19:50, he discusses Adrian Zenz, the unhinged “researcher” behind much—if not all—of the information used by western media to justify their campaign against China.
“Goldstein: What do they do in the [camps]? Well, they sing patriotic songs and learn Chinese. […] The leap that has occurred from a few satellite photos and some stories from ex-pats to genocide is totally inappropriate. I think what you have here is a lot of people looking at this with ideological lenses, looking for something to beat up China on—and they found it. I’m not trying to sugar-coat this relationship. It’s bad out there. Unquestionably. I don’t think, if you looked at reservations for Native Americans in our country, I don’t know that the situation is any less bleak.
“Maté: Or the Gaza Strip, which Israel is occupying, with full U.S. support.
“Goldstein: There’s a number of places around the world where you can see this kind of terrible repression going on. I wouldn’t say that this is at all the worst of many repressions out there. I don’t think that this should be a major part of U.S.-China relations. And I really think that we’re probably making it worse for the Uighurs—and for the Tibetans and the Mongols and other people in China—by putting them at the center of the relationship. We’re putting them in the crosshairs. The Chinese respond by locking down even harder, by isolating them even more. And we should be seeking the opposite. We should […] open it up. If you worried about human rights in Xinjiang, you should support engagement.”
At 25:15, Goldstein points out how, in light of the hyperbolic accusations by the U.S. and allies, we are lucky that China and Russia remain the adults in the room and temper their response.
“There seems to be a realization in both Moscow and Beijing that, even if people in Washington want a cold war, this is not what they want. And that shows a lot of maturity and a lot of restraint and I think that’s quite admirable. Now, if we continue to push as hard as we can […turning the QUAD into a sort of NATO…] I think we could expect Russia and China to respond with a full-on alliance, maybe even including Iran. […] This would be a very foolish move on our part. We don’t want to go back to the 1950s.”
The feeling here is that the ball is in America’s court and it’s choosing to play as harshly as it possibly can. It wants regime change in China, which seems a gobsmackingly stupid and arrogant goal.
At 29:00, Goldstein says that, while Russia is tempering its response for now, it’s not going to sit by until it’s run over. They and China are hyper-aware of how dangerous the U.S. is—that it is important to call the U.S.‘s bluff early rather than let it spiral out of control.
“As I read the Russian press pretty much every night, I can tell you, Russia is on edge. They really are. I read their military press and they are convinced that there are drones—NATO and U.S. military drones—flying up and down along the borders and all around the borders along Ukraine, by Crimea. They’re watching the forces going in and out of the Baltics which, as you know, are within a hundred miles of St. Petersburg. They were concerned about what would happen in Belarus. And then the buildup up north, with the new tensions in the arctic. Now we have B1 bombers flying into Norway—this is totally unprecedented.
“Look, I lived in Russia. I speak Russian. I can tell you, Russians, I think—it’s a stereotype, but it’s quite true—is that they’re quite paranoid. But if you look across their history, of course they’re paranoid. By the way, Chinese are quite paranoid as well.”
But it’s not like the Americans aren’t paranoid. Americans see a threat literally everywhere, even where there is literally none. They manufacture threats to be afraid of. Their paranoia is rooted not in being in actual danger, but it in being in danger of losing out on potential wealth, influence, and power that would accrue to someone else, someone undeserving.
At 30:30, Goldstein talks about how we should all be working together to combat climate change instead of starting fights like it was the mid-20th century.
“Russia’s defense budget is […] well under 10% of the NATO total defense budget. […] And nobody’s talking about this, but we need Russia’s help on climate change. And not just because Russia’s a big place where we could plant trees, but because they’re selling a huge amount of fossil fuels and we need them to slowly, slowly, de-link their future from that.
“That’s going to an incredibly arduous process and that’s what we should be working on. And not building up more and more nukes and stimulating dangerous situations all over the place. We’re talking about from Syria to the Caucasus to Ukraine, Moldova, to the Baltics, to the Arctic, we are full up in a very dangerous space with Russia.
“The Ukraine situation remains very hot and you can see both sides [Ukraine and Russia] are girding for possible return to active military hostilities. […] You don’t want to drive the bear into a corner.”
At 36:25, Goldstein talks about how the U.S. would be making a huge mistake to assume that China and Russia’s tempered response thus far is a sign that they aren’t prepared for the U.S.
“They’ve gotten rid of so many arms-control treaties over the years. […] The point is, this isn’t a new thing. For 20 years, they’ve been convinced that we’re out to get them. Between NATO expansion and demolishing all these arms-control treaties.
“Now China? It’s going to be very hard to get China in, because China is substantially weaker on the nuclear front. […] Right now, China is—I hate to say it—preparing for the worst. And, believe me, they will have their nuclear deterrent. It will be very solid at that moment when the balloon goes up over Taiwan. […]
“We need to pull back from brink with China and we need to start building some good feeling that could be a good basis for starting to talk about arms control. It’s going to be very hard to get there, though, especially by pulling out of the Iran deal, by being so truculent on the North Korea front. […]
“Believe me, in Moscow and Beijing, they’re planning as if the U.S. can only be deterred … only “speaks the language of force” […] That’s increasingly how we’re viewed around the world, which is a very—from the point of view of global stability, nuclear stability, but also just preventing wars. It’s a very dark place to be in. Work is cut out for diplomats, but also for journalists […] to try to pull us back from the brink in these very difficult times.”
Since I listened to that interview, there have been regular news reports that are increasingly worrying. In the following section, I’ll just summarize using news reports.
From the article US sends two warships into the Black Sea as Russia warns of “full-scale hostilities” with NATO-backed Ukraine by Clara Weiss (WSWS), we learn that the U.S. took a nearly unbelievably provocative step. Can you imagine any other country—allied with Canada, as the U.S. is with Turkey—sending warships into Lake Superior as a “show of force” against the U.S.?
“Last Friday, Zelensky met with US president Biden, who assured him of full US support against Russia. In response to these provocations, Russia has amassed troops on the borders to Ukraine, announced military exercises and is reinforcing its navy in the Black Sea.”
“In speaking of “Russian aggression,” the imperialist powers, Kiev and their lackeys in the media are turning reality on its head. It is Ukraine, backed by NATO and the US, not Russia, that has been systematically escalating the situation and pushing the region to the brink of all-out war.”
“Vladimir Putin’s government has given the West numerous warnings over the years that attempting to make Ukraine a NATO military client crosses a bright red line in terms of Russia’s security.” Carpenter warned that the situation could escalate into a nuclear confrontation between Russia and the US.”
The article Amid war danger in Black Sea, Turkey threatens Montreux Convention by Barış Demir (WSWS) tells us that Turkey is very complicit in helping NATO get it’s warships closer to Russia.
“Washington and Berlin responded with an attempted military coup against Erdoğan in 2016, while Biden was Barack Obama’s vice president. The coup’s failure further undermined Ankara’s relations with NATO.”
“Sections of the navy are objecting to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s talk of using plans for an Istanbul Canal to scrap the Convention, which limits warship deployments to the Black Sea. This could allow NATO to deploy warships from the Mediterranean, at will, to threaten Russia’s coast.”
The article U.S. Imposes Stiff Sanctions on Russia, Blaming It for Major Hacking Operation tells of how the U.S. is not just moving militarily, but also at the financial level—tightening existing and already quite brutal sanctions on the Russian economy.
This is madness. Look at that headline: these are the words of war criminals. Naturally, the Times has to write that Trump gave Russia only “wrist slaps” because he failed to completely decimate the Russian economy. Thank goodness we’ve now got a firm hand on the rudder who will be willing to go the extra mile to really make the Russian citizenry suffer, as the U.S. is already doing in Iran.
The article US government strikes back at Kremlin for SolarWinds hack campaign by Dan Goodin (Ars Technica) chimes in with the standard formulation that, contrary to nearly all historical evidence, everything the U.S. claims about Russia’s activities is true, even when presented without a shred of evidence.
“US officials on Thursday formally blamed Russia for backing one of the worst espionage hacks in recent US history and imposed sanctions designed to mete out punishments for that and other recent actions.”
“Russian government officials have steadfastly denied any involvement in the SolarWinds campaign.”
“Besides attributing the SolarWinds campaign to the Russian government, Thursday’s release from the Treasury Department also said that the SVR was behind the August 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition leader Aleksey Navalny with a chemical weapon, the targeting of Russian journalists and others who openly criticize the Kremlin, and the theft of “red team tools,” which use exploits and other attack tools to mimic cyber attacks.”
Sure, why not? As long as you’re making baseless accusations against an official enemy, just pile it on. It costs them literally nothing.
Days later, though, as the article Joe Biden’s Demonic Phase by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) points out, the unquestionably belligerent moves against Russia started to fall apart.
“Three weeks ago, Ol’ White Joe called Vladimir Putin “a killer.” This week, Ol’ Joe called Vlad on the phone and suggested a friendly in-person meet-up in some “third country.” In the meantime, Ol’ Joe essayed to send a couple of US warships into the Black Sea to assert America’s interest in Ukraine, the failed state whose American-sponsored failure was engineered in 2014 by Barack Obama’s State Department. Turkey, which controls the narrow entrance to the Black Sea, was notified that two US destroyers would be steaming through its territory. Hours after the announcement, the US called off the ships. Then, hours after Ol’ Joe proffered that summit meeting, his State Department imposed new economic sanctions on Russia and tossed out a dozen or so Russian embassy staff. How’s that for a coherent foreign policy?”
“[…] the mentally weak Joe Biden is merely projecting the picture of a weakened and confused USA […]”
I think that sounds about right. I can’t imagine what the Russians really think about the U.S.‘s foreign policy right now. As Goldstein pointed out above, they’re understandably concerned and cannot completely ignore U.S. blustering—no matter how incoherent.
Trump embodied the belligerent, unsophisticated, ignorant, lowbrow asshole/bully that America has always been. Biden embodies what comes after: the senility of an empire that was already ineffective but, in not even realizing it, evinces that character even more with every bewildered lurch.
“[…] the blundering team of Sec’y of State Antony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who went to Alaska recently to tell the Chinese delegation that they were morally unworthy of conducting trade negotiations, thereby torpedoing the trade negotiations that they went to Alaska to conduct. Smooth move fellas.”
It’s hard to ascribe this ham-handed diplomacy to an “8-dimensional chess” strategy. Occam’s Razor suggest that these chronic war-hawks are just not good at dealing with countries as equals (diplomacy) because they don’t believe they have to and are unaware of how the world has changed since they last formed an opinion or learned a fact, about 30 years ago. Likely also playing a factor is their utter lack of morality or ethics or self-awareness—especially of their own hypocrisy. They don’t know and they don’t care. There will be consequences.
The article Bombast From Washington: Joe Biden’s Russia Sanctions by Gilbert Doctorow (Antiwar.com) takes us up to the present day.
“Were the sanctions intended to sabotage the call for a summit meeting? As a practical matter the sanctions will at a minimum postpone the setting of any date for a summit, and quite possibly end in the cancellation of any meeting. But I doubt this was the intent of the sanctions’ sponsors or of Biden himself. Rather it is a demonstration of the utterly ignorant and self-focused way that U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle propose to deal with the world.
“US policy is based on scenarios written by political scientists with the intellectual capacity and life experience of college sophomores.”
“Let us define this “position of strength” notion in very contemporary and instantly understandable words: it means the US knee on the neck of a supine Russia. “I can’t breathe” is the only response that these militants want to hear from the Russians before they sit down and talk about the way forward in mutual relations.
“This is precisely what Russia under Vladimir Putin resists tooth and nail, saying that Russia will negotiate only under conditions of mutual respect and equal treatment of national interests.”
In the Oliver Stone interviews, Putin repeatedly says that it is clear that the U.S. does not see any other country as any ally or trading partner, but only as “vassals”.
“The sanctions were bombast, which Google Search defines as “high-sounding language with little meaning, used to impress people.” The ‘free world’ and ‘democratic values’ defenders who pack the Biden administration are big talkers and cowardly actors.
“The Russians understand that very well, even if it eludes nearly all American commentators. The Russians point to the decision taken by the US on Tuesday NOT to send its two warships into the Black Sea, as had been previously announced. Instead the vessels turned back before entering the Dardanelles and were sent to Cyprus to do some unspecified repair work.
“[…advisors from the Pentagon] knew that the Russians could and would, if necessary, neutralize the two US Navy vessels in a matter of minutes by electronic warfare weaponry.”
“[…] there is absolutely no sense to convene a U.S.-Russia summit at present or in the foreseeable future. It will resolve nothing.”
In the postscript to his article, Doctorow included a list of the details of the Russian response to the sanctions:
Russia is clearly indicating that, if the U.S. does not want to have discussions on an equal and diplomatic footing, then Russia is not interested in discussions at all. Russia doesn’t need the U.S. for anything. It is, of course, very wary of the damage that the U.S. could cause, but it has long since planned and executed alternatives with allies like China and Iran, with which it is forced to collaborate.
Russia still reaches out to Europe a bit more—in particular Germany and the eastern states—which, although willing to work on large infrastructure projects like Nordstrom II, generally gives the cold shoulder in public. This two-faced attitude is at least partially in order to appease its ally the U.S., but also because of what is clearly a deep-seated prejudice against Russia.
The article Amid mounting tensions, US imposes sanctions on Russia by Clara Weiss (WSWS) has some information about the fallout from Biden’s loopy behavior. tl;dr: Russia probably won’t summit with Biden and Ukraine says its going to look for nukes on the open market if NATO doesn’t give it some. Fun times!
“The alliance, which has aggressively expanded to Russia’s borders over the past three decades, and has backed multiple coups in countries such as Ukraine and Georgia, hypocritically called on Russia “to cease immediately its destabilising behavior.””
“Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that in the light of the sanctions a summit between Biden and Putin, which Biden had proposed on Tuesday, would not happen anytime soon, but did not rule it out entirely either.”
“On Thursday, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, Andrij Melnyk, threatened that if Ukraine is not soon admitted to NATO, Ukraine would be forced to “rearm on our own.” Speaking to Deutschlandfunk, he said that the Ukrainian government was “considering” the acquisition of nuclear weapons.”
Just a week later and we’re on to the next stages. The article Vladimir Putin warns against further anti-Russian provocations by Andrea Peters (WSWS) covers Putin’s annual “state of the union” address to Russia.
“With Russia and US-allied Ukraine on the brink of war, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned in his annual address to the nation on Wednesday that “the organizers of any provocations that threaten the fundamental interests of our security will regret what they have done in a way that they have not regretted for a long time.”
“Stating that thus far Moscow has tempered its response to “unfriendly actions” by foreign nations and continues to seek healthy relations with these powers, Putin added, “We really do not want to burn bridges. But if someone interprets our good intentions as indifference or weakness and they themselves intend to burn or even blow up these bridges, they must know that Russia’s response will be asymmetric, rapid, and tough.””
These remarks are presumably aimed at not only at Zelensky in Ukraine, but also at the maniacs in Washington.
“Even as he confronts a serious geopolitical crisis to Russia’s west, the Russian president devoted more than eighty percent of his speech to domestic issues, in particular the coronavirus and the economy.”
The rest of the article is an interesting analysis of the domestic situation in Russia. It is not rosy, as the country is still largely an oligarchy and Putin makes promises about improving things that’s he’s rarely kept, even partially.
On the other side of the border, President Zelensky says Ukraine “ready” for war with Russia as tensions mount by Jason Melanovski, Clara Weiss (WSWS), the rhetoric is unhinged, with Zelensky of Ukraine sounding more and more like Mikheil Saakashvili of Georgia back in 2008.
“[m]ounting tensions in the Black Sea region, President Volodymyr Zelensky declared on Tuesday night that Ukraine is “ready” for war with Russia. He warned that the country would “stand to the last man” in the event of a war.”
Fantastic. Armed to the teeth by the Americans (“[…] over $2 billion in military aid and equipment it has received from the US since [2014]”) and full of stupid bravado.
“On Wednesday, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba revealed that he had asked US Secretary of State Antony Blinken to provide Ukraine “powerful means of electronic warfare” for its stand-off with Russia. He also said that he had called upon EU Foreign Ministers to cut Russia off the SWIFT system […]”
Published by marco on 11. Apr 2021 22:59:57 (GMT-5)
John Oliver addresses the menace of Tucker Carlson in the video. It’s a pretty cheap takedown in that the charges of white supremacism are fraught and Oliver relies nearly exclusively on older clips (some from the 90s, for God’s sake). Carlson is on TV every night of the week. Did you have to reach back to the 90s to find sufficiently incriminating material?
I’m surprised the Oliver didn’t point out that Carlson’s “concentrating” face resembles a constipated weasel.
John Oliver, once again, spends long minutes on spurious arguments. A white supremacist interviewed on CNN (CNN!) tells them how his whole family watches Tucker Carlson “to learn from him”. This is red meat for liberals, but they, just like Oliver, will completely miss the point.
Another way of looking at it is they’re learning from Tucker how to express their anguish in a way that doesn’t use the word “nigger” and doesn’t involve burning crosses. How is that … wrong? Instead of just shutting it all down, maybe use it? You have to start somewhere. You can’t just throw 75 million people into the ocean, no matter how much you want to.
He should have focused on all of the things that Carlson is saying, not just the stupid things. The few times I’ve seen Tucker, I’ve been taken aback at how much like Bernie Sanders he sometimes sounds. That’s obviously because Sanders is also a white supremacist.
Because anyone who’s not 100% woke is a white supremacist and a misogynist and gets to wear the dunce cap for the rest of their lives until they’ve atoned enough, which they never can, but they should never stop trying, and the enlightened wizards of the Elect (like Oliver, to some degree, though he’s not nearly at the pinnacle) will let you know how you’re doing, which is, invariably, poorly, because you might have failed to focus the whole of your efforts on doing exactly what they told you to do, which is, quite frankly, at least half of the point.
The other half is to make you vulnerable to being fired or leaving your position in self-imposed exile so that the rare slot you occupied can now be filled by a friend. Classic power plays at work, dressed up as being on the moral high ground, to make it unassailable. Again, classic. Usually, it was about being loyal to the company (not working long enough! Has a life!) or the nation (is a Communist!), but it all washes out to the same ploy. It’s tedious.
Hell, you can view this entire screed by Oliver as a direct attack on a competitor whose rhetoric is getting too close to Oliver’s own and whose nationwide nightly audience dwarfs his own. Through a cynical lens, it appears as if Oliver is jumping on the bandwagon to tear down Carlson in a bid to expand his own audience.
Carlson has a lot of abhorrent views, but he has some non-abhorrent ones, as well. He’s actually kind of Oliver’s competition in some respects, playing the voice for the downtrodden. It’s not like Oliver has more baseline cred there than Carlson does, right? A by-now very-wealthy British-transplant comedian turned people’s polemicist vs. a white upper middle-class turned same.
Oliver focuses on how Tucker Carlson is a rich dude who married into the Swanson fortune, who benefitted from a lot of grift. That’s fine, I guess. You could make the same story about Anderson Cooper—but Oliver would never do that.
I’m over a third through this clip and he’s still talking about stuff from the 90s.
Oliver tips his hand when he says, “that’s a pretty salient point there, but it’s hard to take seriously, given who’s making it. […] I don’t care how good your advice is, I’m not taking from you. (Emphasis in original)”. He literally says that Tucker’s identity is more important than what he’s saying. The conclusion seems to be that Tucker cannot redeem himself by saying more positive things. He can’t redeem himself at all, by this formula. He’s been reprehensible too long to be useful, according to Oliver. He’s irredeemable. Deplorable.
Did John Oliver just call Tucker Carlson a “picket fence”? Is that a soft version of “cracker”? And how does Oliver get to do that? Being even whiter than Carlson? It’s ok to make racial slurs about white people, I guess?
The clip of Ilhan Omar that Oliver showed was a good illustration of his point because what she was saying was something that today’s Carlson would seem to agree with. That quote, though, doesn’t have a year on it, so it’s hard to tell how hypocritical Carlson is proven to be.
“We must fight to preserve our heritage and culture.” (a quote from Carlson) is something that could be in literally any presidential speech. Oliver then trots out another quote from 2006.
That he commands an audience of millions and has gotten my father to watch interviews with Jimmy Dore, Glenn Greenwald, and Aaron Maté means nothing to Oliver. That my dad heard him say that Julian Assange should be freed means nothing to Oliver. That Carlson issues screed after screed excoriating Wall Street for its rapacity means nothing. He asked Britney Spears a gotcha question in the 90s, so he’s dead to society, ready for cancellation. He should just give up and let Oliver have his audience and time slot.
It’s not that I agree with Tucker Carlson on more than a handful of issues. It’s that Oliver is spectacularly tone-deaf in focusing laser-like on making literally every one of Tucker’s opinions be based on white supremacism and anti-immigration. Carlson is speaking much more for the nation that Oliver, to be honest. You should try to use him instead of tearing him down.
I love how Oliver’s description of Carlson’s show as a pointy-faced white guy on TV telling people that they are owed something and that “they are being oppressed” is literally a description of Oliver himself, but for a different audience.
Published by marco on 11. Apr 2021 22:52:44 (GMT-5)
I watched this on the Katie Halper podcast, but Taibbi and Halper’s MST2000-like chatter didn’t really add anything (this time). You can probably find the real thing on C-SPAN or something, but the time-marks I made line up with this version, so I’m using that as a reference.
Let’s go back to how the filibuster was when I first joined the Senate 120 years ago. That was actually pretty funny.
Biden is doing fine so far. He’s answering cogently and fluidly. His voice sounds old, but he’s having a very good day. He’s even actually answering the questions. He’s using dodgy language (“Federal holding facilities”), but that’s just standard for U.S. administrations. You gotta put lipstick on that pig. That’s propaganda.
Reporter: Do you want to see these unaccompanied minor deported? Or should they stay in America?
How do you not answer this with: I want to see any unaccompanied minor end up in a good home, with a good life. I don’t want any child in any country to be in poverty, without their parents. But that’s what I want, and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. That’s where my heart is. As you’ve already noted, simply accepting every immigrant provides an incentive for more immigrants to show up, flooding our system and making conditions at the border facilities inhospitable, to say the least.
I would rather figure out a way for people to be able to live lives of meaning, out of poverty, in their home countries. It’s desperation that drives people to seek out places like America where they feel they’d be less desperate, where they feel they’d have more opportunity to live with some modicum of hope.
What I want is for us to be able to improve the speed with which we help people find a good home, whether it be back where they’ve come from or whether it be here in America. That’s what I meant with contacting relatives more quickly before.
But he didn’t say any of that.
Will we still be in Afghanistan next year? …
“I can’t see that being the case.”
What? Really? That’s good news…
Just to be clear, how soon will that be?
“I don’t know. To be clear.”
That was pretty funny, too! Credit where credit is due. Grandpa’s still got some laugh lines.
“You only got another hour now, ok?”
Also not a bad joke.
Voting rights
“It’s sick. It’s not American to not allow water on the voting lines…”
Kind of a softball (aren’t Republican governors terrible?), but he at least answered correctly. I mean, it is despicable.
He’s going off the script now … “this makes Jim Crow look like Jim Eagle”
I plan to run for re-election…
Really?
That counts as a question… hahaha
He’s still capable of banter.
We were back to the filibuster.
Now he’s answering with attitude. But he’s answering correctly and well, honestly. He’s off-script, but it’s fine. They’re asking him whether he’ll run in 3.5 years (and he knows when that will be). Whether he’ll run against Trump? C’mon, man…
He’s talking very progressively. “The federal budget is saving people’s lives”. He’s telling people to stop working about the budget and debt, especially when people didn’t complain when a $2T tax cut went to the top 83% … he’s doing quite well, actually.
“This country was built by the middle class. And the union built them.”
And now he’s pro-union? OK, I guess. That sounds pretty good.
Halper and Taibbi were as ungenerous as they could be in their interpretation. Too gotcha and too trying to be funny. Halper wasn’t even drinking, so she has less of an excuse.
On to China. Banning import of products? Or access to international payment systems? Wow,…are we considering banning China from SWIFT, too? Like Iran?
Here he’s just reading pretty much 100%. It’s a pat answer that doesn’t really commit anywhere, other than talking about how the U.S. will invest up to 2% in setting up more medical research, industries of the future, etc. … I guess to compete with China better? Isn’t that what Trump said he would do?
So he’s not imposing tariffs? Because we’re just going to compete better?
Who will have succeeded? Autocracy or democracy?
He doesn’t ironically see that he is in charge of autocracy.
Good-paying jobs … this part is just a bit off-script, but it’s also kind of a stump speech. No questions … just running out the clock. Now he’s just meandering from talking about airports to miners. This part is pretty confusing, but if it’s dementia, it’s on a relatively high level.
“We can’t build back to where we used to be. Global warming has taken a significant …”
School, roads above water, clean water, asbestos, he’s just talking about how bad things are, but he’s right. Schools aren’t insulated. It’s just a long, confused speech about stuff that needs to be done for infrastructure. But that wasn’t the question. But the content was fine. If that’s really where his heart is, he kinda sounded like Bernie. Whether he’ll act on it is another thing.
Back to immigration: how to address root causes?
He answered well, actually: “people don’t wanna leave … they don’t do it for fun. … They have no choice. I can’t guarantee I can solve everything, but I’m going to make things better.”
Taibbi and Halper were unnecessarily snarky, but they ended up giving Biden a B+, which is fair.
Biden didn’t discuss the economy or COVID or militarism at all. No Russia, no Venezuela, no Iran. Nothing. They spent 90% of the time talking about immigration. No fiscal policy, nothing. No COVID!
That was just my notes for during the press conference. But the article Demented Thinking About Joe Biden by Ted Rall provides more analysis. Rall points out that we’ve set the bar way too low for a president at a press conference. It’s not just whether he wandered off—he kind of did, near the end, leaving the podium twice before just permanently fucking off without even saying goodbye or god bless—it’s whether he’s capable of discussing the matters that interest a nation for an hour. Or two. Or three. He’s not. As Rall points out,
“Biden crashing and burning on a question about senate procedure would be like me messing up questions about Photoshop or Central Asia, two things that have been central to most of my life. If I start mixing up RGB and CMYK and Ashkabat and Astana, topics I know forward and backward and about which I am obsessed, that will point not to whatever-no-biggie but to worrisome cognitive decline.”
It got even worse when he was asked about the filibuster, which he seemed to confuse with the parliamentarian. That’s OK for someone who knows nothing about the Senate, but not OK for someone who was in the Senate and the White House for over 40 years. If he can no longer remember how these things work, how is he fit to be president?
“It took five reporters a question and four follow-ups to make Biden understand that he was being asked whether he favored the elimination of the filibuster, a question at the top of political news since he came into office. Here’s what the commander-in-chief finally came up with: “If we could end it with 51 [votes], we would have no problem. You’re going to have to — the existing rule — it’s going to be hard to get a parliamentary ruling [my emphasis] that allows 50 votes to end the filibuster, the existence of a filibuster.””
That is muddled. It’s not how he was talking even four hears ago.
“Pre-dementia, after all, Biden was as intimately knowledgeable about Senate rules and procedure as any human being on earth. He served 36 years as a senator and 8 years as vice president/speaker of the senate—a total of 42 years. Pre-dementia, there was no world in which Biden would have said anything so totally, crazily, amazingly incorrect. Not drunk, not asleep, not at all.”
If he’s not running things, then who is?
]]>“Meanwhile, Zenz’s study accusing China of forced sterilizations didn’t contain any proof of coercion. The Grayzone showed how “Zenz consistently framed the expansion of public healthcare services in Xinjiang as... [More]”
Published by marco on 11. Apr 2021 22:37:48 (GMT-5)
Is China Committing Genocide? Behind the US Government’s Propaganda Campaign by Dan Cohen (MintPress News)
“Meanwhile, Zenz’s study accusing China of forced sterilizations didn’t contain any proof of coercion. The Grayzone showed how “Zenz consistently framed the expansion of public healthcare services in Xinjiang as evidence of a genocide in the making.” Characterizing expanded access to birth control as genocide is what the Christian Right does. So it makes perfect sense that Zenz – an evangelical fundamentalist himself – holds this view.”
“In reality, the decrease in birth rate is a normal, predictable outcome of economic development. When people are more financially secure, they choose to have fewer kids and do it later in life. In fact, China is pouring money into Xinjiang to develop its economy. According to a 2015 U.S. government study, “To decrease ethnic instability in Xinjiang, the Chinese government’s plan is to economically develop the region.””
“Then there’s Tursunay Ziyawundun. She’s the central character in the forced-sterilization narrative cooked up by Adrian Zenz. She’s delivered teary testimonies for the BBC, CNN and Democracy Now. A few months before those reports, however, she told Buzzfeed News, “I wasn’t beaten or abused.” Again, why did she change her story? And why did all of these media outlets fail to do a basic check into her past statements?”
“Xinjiang is the heart of China’s Belt and Road initiative, the economic plan that connects Asia to Europe and the Middle East. It’s an alternative model to the dictatorship of the U.S. dollar, where the World Bank and International Monetary Fund turn countries into neo-colonies for American corporations – a system backed up with the constant threat of military invasion. The U.S. can’t deal with legitimate competition, so it’s resorting to smears in an attempt to isolate China diplomatically and slow its economic growth.”
This is an interesting theory. We have two opposed viewpoints: one is that the Chinese is government is simultaneously trying to enslave and exterminate an ethnic population. They are doing this not through actually killing them in large numbers, but by forcing them into reeducation/labor camps and controlling their numbers with birth control. At the same time, they are injecting money into the region because they are economically interested in it. As with nearly every other government on the planet, they would, presumably, like their own elites to benefit from it rather than the locals that actually provide the value. This is classically capitalist. It is still a rather convoluted way of orchestrating a genocide. Perhaps it’s the modern, 20th-century way of doing so.
I honestly think that this campaign is very similar to the U.S.‘s desire to be in Afghanistan. It was only initially about revenge for 9-11—we’ve leave discussion of that misguided and abhorrently criminal justification to the side for now. It is now—and has been for quite some time—about keeping troops close to China. It is about disrupting trade routes and keeping an eye on things. It is about setting up non-Chinese resource routes, like oil pipelines.
This story about the Uighurs, with its relatively sparse and seemingly unreliable and self-serving sources with dubious paychecks seems very much like exactly the kind of propaganda the U.S. needs to keep its people focused. It’s like the U.S. pretending to care about women’s rights in Afghanistan—well, anywhere, really—it’s like the babies being tossed from incubators in Iraq, it’s WMDs in that country, it’s anything about Qaddafi. They’re all just pedestrian lies told to get enough support to provide political cover for projects that would otherwise look to authoritarian and war-like. Far better to pretend, at least superficially, that one was forced into war rather than that one sought it out for personal gain.
The show Redacted Tonight: Whose War Crimes? by Lee Camp on March 19th, 2021 (Portable.TV) provides a good overview of this effect through the lens of a war-crimes lie that I’d forgotten above: Assad using chemical weapons on his own people. The west has accused Assad of this 3 times (I think) and each time it’s been nearly completely evidence-free. Camp shows how 60 Minutes provided a very recent report that continues to promulgate this myth without addressing any of the multiple refutations from investigators actually involved there.
A Short History of Uighur Resistance by Louis Proyect (CounterPunch)
“Now, Grayzone’s attention is riveted on the Uighurs. In five different articles published since August 23, 2018, its reporters have warned about an unarmed and largely quiescent population, which is .0084 of the dominant Han nationality, becoming a mortal threat to China. All of these intrepid anti-imperialists at Grayzone have probably never thought much about how Muslims speaking a Turkic language ever ended up as part of China. Anybody with the slightest familiarity with American history would instinctively understand that when Texas became part of the USA, it was the result of an expansionist foreign policy, especially since the indigenous population did not speak English and showed little sympathy for the invading army. So what’s the difference between that and China’s colonization of Xinjiang?”
Fucking Louis Proyect nearly always manages to be a supercilious arrogant know-it-all troll who feels he’s 100% right and that everyone else fails his purity test. God help you if you enjoyed an Avengers movie instead of some obscure Iranian socialist documentary. He is the very definition of off-putting and ally-killing every time i read him.
Here, he’s got his panties in such a bunch over Grayzone that he thinks he can just slander them as fake anti-imperialists and accuse them of talking about the threat of the Uighurs to the Han Chinese. They do not, as anyone who actually reads their articles already knows. Proyect is engaging in fabrication because he knows no-one will actually go check his accusations. That’s also why he conveniently doesn’t link or cite anything. It’s just underhanded.
The Grayzone has never argued that China is not authoritarian or that the Uighurs are not an oppressed minorty. Quite the opposite. They simply argue for truth and evidence, especially as relates to the charge of genocide, something that Proyect conveniently ignores—like how his support of the accusation of genocide against China can be interpreted as implicit support of the U.S. imperial project.
It’s propaganda from one authoritarian state against another and the Grayzone advises not to believe it. Proyect talks about how the Uighurs are oppressed—often with very eloquent historical context—but it’s a different topic than what the Grayzone reports on, generally. They’re technically on the same side, but Proyect has to burn all potential allies because he’s a pompous ass.
“The USA annexed Mexico in 1845. Showing the same kind of alpha male drive, the Qing dynasty annexed East Turkistan in 1759, henceforth to be called Xinjiang, or new territory.”
I only know this isn’t satire because Proyect doesn’t have a sense of humor.
“Unfortunately, Sheng’s identification with Soviet leaders included a willingness to imitate Stalin’s ruthless police state controls.”
So telling that this is considered unfortunate, because Proyect is desperate to retain an ally in Sheng. Thus, he uses much softer and more forgiving language to forgive the latter’s actual descent into authoritarianism. The Grayzone, on the other hand, he considers to be a bunch of faux-intellectual faux-anti-imperialist nigh war criminals just for reporting about the suspicious origins of the Chinese genocide trope we’re seeing today.
“In October 1944, the Soviets helped the Uighurs mount a revolt across Xinjiang that led to a major step forward. Armed with Soviet weapons, they were able to secure a victory that led to the formation of the East Turkistan Republic (ETR).”
This is what he deems self-determination—assistance from one authoritarian power against another. Perhaps he supports a similar effort on the part of the U.S., which clearly shares the same moral high ground that the 1944 Soviet did. It’s amazing that the Soviets had time to help the Uighurs in 1944, right when they were fighting the Japanese on one front and the Germans on the other.
“In this sense, it was no longer a matter of 19th century colonialism but up-to-date imperialist predation, all of which Grayzone defends as “anti-imperialist” in Orwellian fashion.”
That’s a filthy lie putting that in quotes. After that coherent and informative history, why keep taking shots at Grayzone, especially by making shit up? Again, he has no link to help his readers verify that what he’s saying is true. Links and references aren’t necessary when you’re preaching to a choir.
This tack of Proyect’s is completely misguided. Grayzone is not the enemy. They may be overdoing it sometimes, but they are allies in spirit. They point out the lie of genocide. Thats important too. They do not say everything is otherwise rosy.
“[…] only they were Communists rather than the 21st century’s emerging number one imperialist power cheered on by the neo-Stalinists at Grayzone.”
This dude is such a dick. He’s smart and well-read but utter poison for a revolution. He will alienate everyone, splitting into factions.
Published by marco on 11. Apr 2021 22:36:29 (GMT-5)
This is a Useful Idiots interview with the always interesting and provactive Matt Stoller. It’s the second part of an interview with that began in New Useful Idiots: Ted Cruz, Penis Mishaps, and Matt Stoller on Big Tech Monopoly (Audio Also). I’ve highlighted and partially transcribed the bits I found interesting. The Substack page has more transcription (but it’s also only partial).
At 03:00, Stoller talks about how we need to turn our tech giants back into platforms instead of purveyors of opinion.
“Follow the money. There are really simple ways to fix this problem, but the basic dynamic is don’t make it profitable to distort the flow of information. Don’t make it a business model. That the basic deal. Take Facebook and Google and treat them like they’re communication networks. Morph them into Verizon or AT&T style networks, where they can’t discriminate.
“If you want to communicate with someone, they get you to communicate with them and then they get you off the network as quick [sic] as possible, and you pay them directly for that service. That’s the easiest way to do it.”
At 10:20, Stoller and Taibbi discuss the death of local journalism because of the rapacious and facially illegal business model of Facebook and Google.
“Stoller: It’s really local publishers that are getting screwed here. It’s like if the Wall Street Journal broke into the New York Times’s headquarters and stole their subscriber list and stole their subscription information and stole all the traffic patterns on their web sites and then went and tried to pitch the New York Times’s advertisers to advertise on the Wall Street Journal instead […] we would all be like, wow, that’s outrageous, that’s crazy, that’s stealing. That is effectively what Facebook and Google are doing—every day—to millions of publishers. That is their business model. That’s just theft. That’s why they have 40, 50, 60% margins…because the costs are being borne by someone else.
“Taibbi: Right, they don’t have to create the content, they don’t have to do anything. They don’t have to attract the audience. All they have to do is pilfer from it. This is why so many local newspapers have died since 2002. It’s something like 2½-thousand now. There are whole sections of the country that just don’t have a newspaper. And a lot of those newspapers were like the best examples of what journalism is. They covered town meetings. They were factual. They had beats. Really good work. They’re gone. Because they’re the first companies that can’t compete with this kind of system.
“Stoller: That’s exactly right. They fulfilled important functions. They could be really shitty or they could be good. Like, we have problems with COVID because the first line for epidemiologists, local newspapers saying, we have an outbreak here. That’s something, that’s actually really useful information for epidemiologists. And there are so many places that just don’t even have a newspaper anymore. They had a much harder time tracking the pandemic because there were no local newspapers.”
At 25:00, Taibbi summarizes how Facebook and Google are unlikely to release power here and will most likely capitulate in smaller ways to let themselves be used by Congress as basically another arm of the NSA.
“Taibbi: For me, the threat here is—you can kind of see this potential devil’s bargain that kind of already happened a little bit—which is, the platforms are going to want to keep that surveillance-advertising revenue-model that’s been so enormously successful for them. And they’re going to want that untouched. As a bargaining chip, they’re probably going to be willing to make all sorts of concessions on content moderation. They’re expressing a willingness to partner with Capitol Hill on all kinds of things. I worry that we’re going to leave these companies with their insane revenue model intact, but then also merge it with political considerations.”
At 40:30, Stoller makes the argument that China has its own agency, that it’s not just the good guy because the U.S. is the bad guy.
“China is an aggressive, authoritarian nation and they have specific aims on what they want to do. If nothing else, they want to grab Taiwan. And Taiwan produces 70-80% of our high-end semiconductors. And if they do that, then the U.S. economy goes poof. And how do your address that? I don’t know. But you have to start from the premise that these are important questions. […] the victimhood, like the sense that that’s not a problem because it’s all our fault, like, that’s not true. The Chinese government, they have agency, they have power, they have aims.”
It’s an interesting point, but he could have mentioned that where the so-called left seems bent on assuming that America is the bad guy—which would be a welcome addition to ameliorate the current unceasing belligerence—the current policy is one of America-first that has no notion of approaching other parties on equal footing, to say nothing of entering into negotiations as an underdog. America loves an underdog, but never sees itself as one.
The “left” he was talking about is a bit of a straw-man, I think. Sometimes it really is that the U.S. is 100% out of bounds and that’s just how it is. Stoller also kind of assumes—just like the State department—that U.S. interests are paramount. But how can that be, everywhere and in other countries, or on their borders? The U.S. nearly constantly assumes that it has the same privileges near and in other countries that it would never ever consider allowing near its own borders.
Take Taiwan, for example. The U.S. is highly dependent on its semiconductors. Instead of accepting this and treading lightly and perhaps trying to build up local industry to wean itself away, the U.S. sends military supplies to Taiwan to encourage it to go on a war footing against its neighbor China in alliance with the U.S., which is located around the world.
As far as the Chinese are concerned, they already have Taiwan. At the very least, the situation is very, very complex (Wikipedia).
“Since the ROC lost its United Nations seat as “China” in 1971 (replaced by the PRC), most sovereign states have switched their diplomatic recognition to the PRC, recognizing the PRC as the representative of all China, though the majority of countries avoid clarifying what territories are meant by “China” in order to associate with both the PRC and ROC.”
“The political solution that is accepted by many of the current groups is the perspective of the status quo: to unofficially treat Taiwan as a state and at a minimum, to officially declare no support for the government of this state making a formal declaration of independence.”
“The status quo is accepted in large part because it does not define the legal or future status of Taiwan, leaving each group to interpret the situation in a way that is politically acceptable to its members. […] The PRC seeks the end of Taiwan’s de facto independence through the process of reunification, and has not ruled out the use of force in pursuit of this goal.”
The U.S. has inserted itself into this mix to “defend its chips” instead of “paying for them” by helpfully badgering the PRC steer straight toward armed conflict with Taiwan. The U.S. simply cannot accept that it is not in charge of everything. It just sold weapons to Taiwan. Can you imagine the Chinese selling weapons to Canada?
The current situation suits everyone just fine—except the U.S.. And why do we have to give a fuck what America thinks? Because America is a moron with a gun and storms in everywhere, demanding shit. While China has “agency” and its own “aims”, it can’t hold a fucking candle to how out-of-line the U.S. is in its foreign policy.
If the U.S. forces the situation further, what is the likely outcome? A hot war with Taiwan as proxy? For what? The chip factories will be ruined anyway. Do you think the island of Taiwan has a chance against the PRC? WTF? And wanting to avoid that situation make the left naive? Unwilling to deal with foreign policy? I don’t agree with Stoller here: I think if you’re looking clear-eyed at the situation, the sanest question is to ask why the fuck are we there in the first place? Can we defend access to our chip supply without the military? Or do we just de-facto use the military for everything?
What if the PRC were to finally resolve the governmental uncertainty with the ROC in Taiwan and just agree that there is one government and it’s the PRC? That’s the most likely way it would go—I don’t think anyone’s stupid enough to think that Taiwan would somehow end up taking over the PRC, right? Unless you’re really high up in the State department of the U.S., in which case you’re expected to believe that and build policy on it. Time to bring democracy to the PRC and be greeted as liberators, once again.
It’s a mystery to me why the PRC would stop manufacturing and selling to the States if they were to unify Taiwan (eliminating the ROC once and for all). The situation is that Taiwan ostensibly has its own government, but it’s under the purview of China. What exactly is going to change if the U.S. Navy backs off? The problems come because the U.S. is trying to capture Taiwan on the doorstep of China.
I am not kidding. The U.S. lectured China at their latest summit with this gem:
]]>“A confident country is able to look hard at its own... [More]”
Published by marco on 11. Apr 2021 22:36:00 (GMT-5)
I’d never heard of Carl Zha before, but he was entertaining and informative on U.S.-China relations. This is a 1-hour interview about various China-related topics.
I am not kidding. The U.S. lectured China at their latest summit with this gem:
“A confident country is able to look hard at its own shortcomings and constantly seek to improve. And that is the secret sauce of America.”
I wouldn’t even have known how to respond to that. The Idiocracy is fully bloomed.
The Chinese diplomat responded:
“I think we thought too well of the United States. We thought that we would follow the necessary diplomatic protocols. U.S. does not have the qualification to say that it wants to speak to China from a position of strength. You are not even qualified to say such things 20 or 30 years back.”
At 15:00: Carl Zha notes that the conference ended quite poorly, with the U.S. and China making separate statements. However, while the rest of the world covered both statements, U.S. Media didn’t cover the Chinese statement.
At 18:00 Carl Zha says that the Chinese people support their government to a much larger degree than that U.S. support (where Congress is and has been abysmal for quite some time). See Statista or Ballotpedia for more information.
At 25:00, Zha discusses Biden’s frailty, saying of the Democrats that “they chose this old man.”
Here’s the video they were talking about.
In fairness, it was pretty windy. This on the day after Putin wished Biden good health. Putin cursed him! Putin wouldn’t fall over in a stiff breeze, though.
At 34:00 Zha said, that he’d read a Russian … who was amazed that America would choose to antagonize Russia and China at the same time. He responded that (quick transcription),
“[…] our leaders are not the smartest bunch. I take it back. These elites are very smart about taking grift from the military-industrial complex. They don’t care if America has a bad relationship with Russia or China. What does that impact them personally? Nothing. They benefit from increasing tensions with Russia and China. That increases their funds from Lockheed Martin, etc. That’s all they care about. They talk about American interests, but they only care about their own personal interests.”
At 57:00 Zha says that Blinken was making a statement for U.S. media rather than talking to the Chinese diplomats, which is why they got some pushback. Blinked was completely undiplomatic and was grandstanding for his own country’s media for domestic political points rather than discussing salient points with the Chinese after having browbeaten them into having a summit on non-neutral territory.
At 59:30 Dan says that China has 1/6 of the average GDP per-capita, yet has eliminated extreme poverty
This is, of course, by the very weak definition of “extreme poverty” accepted by the U.N. … but, the U.S. can’t even clear that bar, with 6x the GDP per captita—because it’s much, much more unequal. Don’t waste your breath complaining about the Chinese oligarchs who run everything if you’re an American—focus on those much closer to home who put their Chinese counterparts to shame.
]]>“According to Fischer, the Twitter announcement didn’t exactly... [More]”
Published by marco on 11. Apr 2021 21:52:05 (GMT-5)
The article Meet the Censored: Live Streamers by Matt Taibbi (SubStack) includes a description of what the Boogaloos are like when you actually bother to cover them and ask them what they stand for (instead of just triggering on CNN’s description of them).
“According to Fischer, the Twitter announcement didn’t exactly make sense, because the protesters in Ohio were more of a libertarian ilk, and, as Farina and Chariton discovered in the Virginia crowd, not so clearly aligned with Trump as Twitter and other media outlets may have imagined. Fischer has frequently covered events involving the gun-toting Boogaloos, whom he describes as anti-authoritarian and less likely to be Trumpists than to profess a pox-on-both-houses attitude to Trump and Joe Biden both (“You might hear something like, ‘Unless you put Ron Paul on the ballot, I’m not voting,’” he says).”
The article YouTube personality Jimmy Dore promotes fascist Boogaloo Boy by Eric London (WSWS) is a fantastic example of everything that’s wrong with the authoritarian, smug, purity-testing left.
London writes,
“The affluent social layer Dore represents are hostile to the social interests of the working class and impressed by the gun-toting group of real estate agents, small businessmen and independent contractors who stormed the Capitol on Trump’s orders on January 6.”
This is not true in any real way. It’s for some unknown reason shooting down a potential powerful ally. How many 45-minute videos does Dore need to make with him literally yelling about the elite betraying the working class and poor before this idiot at the WSWS will deign to consider him a fellow traveler? Never?
“As for Dore, his own movement to the right is propelled by a more personal trait: stupidity.”
So Dore is “moving to the right” and “stupid”. Gotcha. Ad hominem attacks without so much as a link or quote of proof. Ludicrous. Utterly beneath the editorial quality of much of the rest of the site. Shockingly bad.
The comments show several people fighting back but there are a ton of commenters gate-keeping socialism by claiming that no-one who isn’t poor could possibly speak for the working class. That is, if you’re not poor, you are the enemy. That’s a great tactic, honestly: make sure you attack any potential ally, especially if they might have the power to enact your agenda.
Obviously, you should continue to question their motives. As you should anyone’s really. For example, the author of this piece, Eric London, is a petty person with no journalistic character to his writing whatsoever and yet he has a job as, at least, a stringer at the WSWS, giving him the cachet of looking like a socialist.
London writes just like a common American liberal, corraling people into groups without evidence, brigading people for no reason other than he’s seen them brigaded by others. He didn’t watch or listen to the interview. He had his opinion before he started and then wrote an article, safe in the knowledge that no-one else would bother watching the interview, either.
This article is a garbage hit piece that completely ignores the content of the video. It doesn’t even link the video.
In the video, Dore interviewed a member of the Boogaloo Boys who gave a speech that you couldn’t really argue with. He’s apparently not even 100% straight (Dore: mine’s Jude Law; … Boogaloo: Orlando Bloom).
Is this supposed to be misleading? Is he lying about his sexual orientation to … what? Convince real socialists he’s an ally so he can infiltrate their ranks and then what? Get at the real power in America? Why would he lie about supporting literally every issue that seems important? Why misrepresent his entire agenda? Why, in other words, should I believe an obviously butthurt author on the WSWS like Eric London, who claims that Dore and Panvidya have a completely different agenda than they themselves actually espouse, when he does so without any evidence whatsoever? Do we just believe him because Jimmy Dore bad and Boogaloo bad—just because CNN says so? And now, apparently, the WSWS?
The Boogaloos are, essentially, libertarians. This is not great, of course, because politically, they’re not great at explaining how to help poor people without a welfare state. They espouse concern, but that’s all. They want smaller communities to come together and help out. That way, generally, lies expression of racism in policy and a whole bunch of failed attempts. But that doesn’t make them actual fascists for thinking that they can make it work this time. It makes them naive and in for a rude awakening, should they try to stick to their espoused principles without drifting into socialism.
Here’s the video that London was writing about:
“Dore: So, you reach out to BLM. You reach out to Antifa. The Boogaloo Boys reach out to Antifa. […] You’re anti-war, you’re for peace, you’re against racism, you’re against police brutality, what are some other things?
“Magnus Panvidya: Pro sex work, decriminalization, legalize all drugs, end all the wars, close the ICE detainment camps. […]
“[…] This is where we butt heads with conservative groups all the time—because we’re anti-police. […] This is top vs. bottom, not left vs. right. We can argue about healthcare when we’re not dropping bombs on foreign countries. We can talk about how much money to put into education when people aren’t having their doors kicked in and being killed in their homes because they [the police] turned up at the wrong address. There are more important things going on.
“Dore: So, we would agree on the war; we would agree on the corporate control of our government; we would agree on police brutality; we’re not going to agree on the second amendment, […] I go back and forth, but I’m back to being against guns again […]”
“Magnus Panvidya: We essentially live under a fascist state. If you define fascism as corporations and government working together [the original/classic definition], you see the secret bailouts, you see the public bailouts, you see how these big corporations can do almost anything and they never go under. You never hear about these mega-corporations making a big mistake and falling apart, like they’re supposed to do under capitalism. They last forever. And, definitely, they’re so in alignment, they work so hand in hand [with government] that I don’t even consider them private companies.
“Dore: What do you think are some of the solutions? How do we fix the war problem?
“Magnus Panvidya: I think if we’re talking in the realms of the cleanest and least-violent way to do it, I think mass non-participation, mass strikes, tax strikes, stop getting involved. […] If you’re going to use my tax dollars to blow up brown kids in the Middle East, I’m not going to pay taxes anymore.”
This is a Libertarian solution, of course, but it’s not diametrically opposed to a socialist cause. There’s a lot of common ground.
Alex Jones has accused Panvidya of being a “paid CIA informant try to destroy the second amendment.”
“Magnus Panvidya: Free Julian Assange. Free Ross Ulbricht [Silk Road]. Free Edward Snowden. Free Chelsea Manning. [again]”
“Dore: It’s going to be fun watching people twist this interview, to somehow attack us.
“Magnus Panvidya: They’ll just say that I’m lying about all this, that I’m making it up to reach out to the left and that we’re secretly infiltrating all of these groups […]”
They won’t even bother to do that. They’ll just report the video without ever having even watched it. They wouldn’t even do Panvidya the service of actually listening to what he says and then lying about it. They’ll just lie about it. It’s faster that way.
This isn’t a softball interview. Just because the guy gave the “right” answers doesn’t mean the questions were easy. He could have, at any point, gone off-trail and said horrific things, but he didn’t. Dore drills him at the end about not 100% supporting single-payer. Panvidya argues that the government sucks at it, just like it sucks at fixing roads.
Dore says that it’s only because we’re under a “failed state” (with which Panvidya agree) that government doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean it can’t work. Dore probably didn’t convince him, but neither was it a bad discussion. It’s the kind of discussion you have to have hundreds of times in order to convince people. It’s the work you need to do on the ground, instead of just yelling at people for not having the same opinions as you already have.
Magnus ends the interview with a plea to help the Boogaloos root out Neonazis from their ranks. If someone sees a Nazi who says they’re a Boogaloo, hit Magnus up on Twitter so “we can take care of him”. That sounded kind of ominous, but it seemed earnest enough.
The interview segment did not include the interview with “SEP member and World Socialist Web Site Labor Editor Jerry White” nor was I able to find the interview anywhere, so I assume that it went unpublished at White’s request. This left London free to make up whatever story he wanted about how the interview went. He certainly took a free hand with describing this interview.
“Dore:I think they do a lot of great work over at WSWS—we feature their work here all the time—but you’re going to see why they’re misguided and they’re bound to lose. Because they have no idea how to reach out to people who are aligned with themselves ideologically. He has no idea how to reach out to that guy. That guy who I brought on my show. Go watch the interview. The sweetest guy. He’s been unemployed, he’s gotten no COVID relief, he’s pro-LGBT, he’s pro-BLM, he’s anti-war, and he hates both the parties.
“That seems like a guy who would be ripe for a socialist party to have a message to help that guy help that guy come over to the other side. That’s what they’re supposed to do. In fact, it’s incumbent on them to have a recruiting message for people like that. Because, as we all know, economic disasters create people who are ripe to be taken over by right-wing demagogues. So that’s why, if you’re a true socialist or a leftist, you’ve got to get to them. You’ve got to have a message for them. Especially someone who’s as open-minded as that guy [Magnus].”
White accuses Dore of “flirting with Libertarians”, as if Dore was being lulled into Naziism without him even knowing it. You can’t even talk to anyone who’s not already a socialist. If they’re a libertarian, you cut them off as a lost cause without investing a second in trying to get them to work with you on what you must think is the right cause, the answer, socialism.
Dore asks him how White would reach out to someone like Magnus and White responded that he doesn’t reach out to him because “he’s the enemy […] we fight them.” People like White are so identitarian that, when they see a label, they literally don’t care about the content, they care about the label. They also no longer care about whether the meaning they’ve attached to that label might be wrong.
He just said that “the Boogaloo boys are an extreme right-wing organization” and that anyone who claims to hold other viewpoints and is in that organization is deluded and has been fooled into being part of a right-wing organization, without them even knowing it. White knows this better. He doesn’t care about whether they’re workers and people and citizens.
“Dore: So you don’t reach out to those people who agree with you on certain topics. You don’t reach out to other Americans who are workers? If they disagree with you politically, they’re not workers anymore?”
White went on to describe how fascist the guest was, at which point Dore just lost it and took a much stronger tone, which was 100% called-for. Discussions get heated and when you see someone utterly misrepresenting what you just both literally watched, there is no need to let him go on at length. This is not a formal debate. Dore gave the guy more than enough chances to talk straight and he was insistent on promoting a narrative that was directly contravened by evidence presented in the same discussion.
“Dore: That’s what not the fucking guy was saying, Jerry. You’re putting words in his mouth. Jerry, that’s not what he was saying. You’re just making shit up now. That guy was anti-racist. He was anti-racist. You’re arguing something that we’re not even fucking talking about, Jerry. That’s not what that guy was saying. You’re making a caricature of him. He said the exact opposite of everything you just said. That is not helpful, Jerry.”
I completely understand why Dore went off. It was a grave injustice and not serious in any way what White was trying to do. I would have steamrolled him, too, probably with the same volume and profanity as Dore.
Jimmy Dore finished with:
“Jerry White, editor of the WSWS. We wish you great success in your work, organizing workers, that’s great work. That’s amazing, that you’re doing that. Let us know if we can help out. We love the work you do, at the WSWS. It’s a real socialist web site, unlike other socialist web sites. I don’t mind having a spirited … dispute … or whatever you would call it … a discussion with you. So, I appreciate you coming on and doing that and presenting your point of view and, again, continue your great work. We’d love to have you on again, buddy.”
He was polite and earnest and he showed how you debate and discuss—and get heated—without retaining acrimony. No hard feelings.
Instead, they just sneer that Magnus failed the economic wokeness purity test without even trying to educate him for one second. Terrible.
Instead of reaching out, this idiot London just goes straight down the rabbit hole, calling Alex Jones an “outright fascist”, which is infantile.
“The Boogaloo member began by telling Dore he was a “long time fan” of Dore’s program, intimating that Dore attracts other fascist viewers.”
This writer is an infant. An absolute child who is so much a part of the problem. He will cause more damage than he will ever be able to heal. It’s a shame because the WSWS is a very nice web site, with eminently clever people like Andre Damon.
This article is far beneath the tenor of most of the rest of the material on the site. It would be stupid and misleading as a blog post, but it’s much worse for its prominence on the WSWS web site.
How am I so sure that Dore isn’t the enemy? Glenn Greenwald, Chris Hedges, and Cornel West are unabashed fans and supporters and have appeared on his show several times. Cornel West has called him a “national treasure”. But Eric London of the WSWS knows better and calls him a proto-fascist.
Published by marco on 11. Apr 2021 21:11:05 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 11. Apr 2021 21:25:39 (GMT-5)
Something happened with this video. It’s still on YouTube, but Lee Camp has redacted it from his own web site. I’d originally watched it at MOC #67 − The Truth About DSA & AOC (w/ Eric London) (LeeCamp.Com), but that link is dead now. Episode #67 is conspicuously absent from the listings on that site. I’m a bit taken aback that Camp took the video down without explanation.
Eric London is much better in this interview than in print, but he cannot help but purity-test everyone. He mentions Jacobin offhandedly in the same breath as the DSA and the Democratic Party. He had a horrifically bad-faith takedown of Jimmy Dore a few months back (which is when I first read him).
My God, how can you diss Ariella Thornhill? And Nando? Fuck, dude, find allies where you can.
The rest of the interview is spot-on. But man, just back off on excoriating potential allies. I read Jacobin. They are in no way party-line Democrats. And Jimmy Dore is not a fascist, ya dimwit.
Sanders also comes under the wheels, of course. The dude is quoting Max something-or-other, a politician from 1918, but Bernie is a criminal on the same level as Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell. AOC is more of a betrayal than Bernie, but not much. Bernie actually makes legislation, but he always votes wrong. I can’t remember the last time he did a protest vote.
AMLO and Corbyn are also traitors. I get the notion of lesser-evilism, but this is taking it so far that you will never win because you can never get started. It’s possible that it draws too much energy away to support inadequate people. I agree with that. I don’t understand why he thinks Jimmy Dore is a white supremacist. Or the Boogaloos are racists.
The Boogaloo takedown just showed that London is willing to believe whatever the mainstream media says about certain groups, accepting their declarations without question, while ignoring what the groups say about themselves.
With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and “bad faith actors” (WSWS), he slashes and burns his way through Briahna Joy Gray, who gave a very fair review of his article and its nearly deliberate misinterpretation of AOC. She does not pull any punches on AOC’s abhorrent behavior, but she balks at London’s salt-the-Earth approach, which has too little regard for facts. To back that up, he deliberately misinterprets the content of the podcast, which was nothing like what he writes about. I listened to it. It seemed fair and balanced.
London’s heart seems to be in the right place, but he paints with a very broad brush and cannot be trusted as a journalist. He has a very black/white view of the world. If you attack the Democratic party, as he does, then you’re good, no matter what you say.
If you take issue with what can only be interpreted as deliberate lies (or London’s listening faculties are so broken by his filters that he really shouldn’t be writing anything for a newspaper of any standing … at least not without an editor, which seems to be the case right now), then you’re the enemy. This is exactly the attitude that the Democrats took toward Trump and I’m sad to see him take it toward the Democrats. You can’t accuse a neighbor who smokes under your window of being a pedophile.
At 44:39, Nando does a good deep-dive/description of of worker-owned companies.
]]>“Nando: If you really boil it down to its essence, politics is about who gets what... [More]”
Published by marco on 27. Mar 2021 13:11:05 (GMT-5)
This interview with Vijay Prashad is really quite good. He provides interesting information and views on Indian and Chinese politics.
At 44:39, Nando does a good deep-dive/description of of worker-owned companies.
“Nando: If you really boil it down to its essence, politics is about who gets what in our society. As Marx said: it is a struggle between capital and labor. Capitalists—or the bourgeoisie—are the people who own things , or land. Labor are those people who do the work, in exchange for the wage that the capitalist gives them. And a good way to look at that struggle in its most basic form is to see what percentage of the overall economic pie goes to capital and what percentage goes to labor.”
There follow a couple of segments showing that what was a traditional split of 2/3 for labor and 1/3 for capital was already intolerable—because capitalists comprise far fewer than 1/3 of the population, leading to wealth (and power) funneling upward—but it’s gotten even worse over the last 4 decades.
“Nando: So what we on the left want to do is reverse that trend and increase labor’s share of the pie, at the expense of capital. Eventually, we would like it if labor gets 100% of the pie. So, how we do that? There are essentially two ways to do that: the first is to increase workers’ power. The main way to do this is through labor unions. […] The second is ownership reforms. Basically, who owns the firms? Eventually, we want the workers to own all of the firms. […] thinking about who own the companies that we work at is an important piece of the puzzle.”
Nando goes on to provide many examples and ideas to reach this goal. This is super-interesting and described well.
At 1:19:00, after discussing the worker uprising and strikes in India, protesting a very corrupt system of government, Vijay makes a good point about India and China
“Vijay: This pandemic has revealed how rotten this system is. It’s not that the pandemic has made the system rotten. The system was rotten—the bloody system has been rotten for hundreds of years. This pandemic has just shown its rottenness. Meanwhile, look at China. I mean, what are we talking about? This is a system that has, at least mostly, been able to break the chain of infection and during the pandemic, they’ve been able to declare and end to absolute poverty. 850M people raised out of poverty. You know…if you are an agricultural worker in India today, you would wish you were born in China.”
People have more ability to reach others than they ever have in the past. To that end, Twitter has... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 8. Mar 2021 23:03:56 (GMT-5)
I listened to the 2-hour interview #1595 – Ira Glasser by Joe Rogan (JRE Library) and took a bunch of notes as I listened. I’ve cleaned them up a bit, but most of them are stream-of-consciousness and may be a bit repetitive.
People have more ability to reach others than they ever have in the past. To that end, Twitter has become more like a public commons, where everyone can set up their soapbox.
First off, and obviously, private conversations should not be monitored. (Glasser expressed the same opinion.) There is no justification for anything else. Private conversations are private. I can’t even believe we’re having this discussion again, as if the viewpoint, “yeah, but I need to monitor what everyone else is saying to make sure they don’t say anything I don’t approve of” is anything that anyone worth talking to would entertain.
But what about the public speech on Twitter? Most of it is public, most of it is like shouting from a soapbox. Glasser does point out that Twitter is a private company and should be able to decide for itself—as far as the first amendment is concerned. However, when the government that is in charge of their oversight puts pressure on them to censor, then there is a first-amendment problem. It’s a back door to government censorship.
If Twitter is the public commons and the government is de-facto telling them who to ban, then it becomes a first-amendment issue. These conversations should be treated the same as yelling in the park. Anything you can say there, you can say on Twitter. You can’t ban somebody for being an asshole. That’s a constitutional right. Glasser expressed the point of view that these are private companies; they can regulate the usage as they see fit. Though, we’re nearly at or headed for a private information monopoly, which isn’t conducive to an open society.
Anytime you have censorship, you must ask who’s going to censor? Who’s going to decide what’s hate speech?
“Ira: If there had been hate-speech laws in the 60s, then the most frequent victim would have been Malcolm X, not David Duke.”
“Ira: Who gets to decide what’s hateful? And who gets to decide what’s banned? And it isn’t often going to be the ones who advocate for these codes.”
Granting powers of censorship is dangerous because power shifts. We’re currently thinking that it’s only ever going to shift toward what we are choosing to currently consider to be more justice, but it can easily go the other way, and then the censoring of dissident voices will be legal. When Glasser said that, he was talking to the scolds eager to censor whatever they’ve chosen to call white supremacists.
But anyone who disagrees with the government is a dissident, not just people who’s opinions against the government you happen to agree with. Trump is, technically, a dissident. Even the notion of sedition is kind of ridiculous to me, and not compatible with an open society and a democracy. It’s interesting how no-one—anywhere on the spectrum—really has a problem with that concept. Sedition is agitating against the government. Well…how do you change it without agitating against it? Aren’t sedition laws just ways of criminalizing protest?
Anyway, if the scolds get their way, then they will have legalized censoring dissident voices—we’re just not great at thinking of people like Tucker Carlson as dissidents. If FOX is thrown off the air, though, that is exactly what will have happened. I just want to be clear that I think it’s already bad if that happens—not just when it might happen to so-called progressive voices sometime in the future, when they inevitably slip from their fleeting power.
As soon as dissidents feel power, they want to exercise the exact same regime on their former suppressers. They are no more ethical or committed to principle than the idiots they’re replacing. They have no empathy for their newly conquered foes as the new dissidents, whose voices should be protected.
They think they’re inventing something, that we’ve come to the end of history and can now dispense with the ladder that they climbed up. They are wrong. They are pedestrian and small-minded and woefully small in their vision. They are traveling a well-worn groove in history. This is what always happens. You’re not unique. You’re tedious idiots.
“Joe: Do we just leave everything up like in a town square? And let people decide for themselves?
Ira: I think so. The only alternative is to give someone the power to decide what is hate speech. And who would that be? I don’t think you can get out of that dilemma.”
“Ira: Why would BLM activists want to trust their free-speech rights to somebody like Donald Trump?”
Now, in all fairness, the Trump administration didn’t do all that much to crack down on speech. They might have wanted to, but they generally couldn’t get their shit together to do anything really concrete. Anything they did had a lot of precedent—they didn’t invent anything new. The Biden administration seems to be much more earnest about it.
“Ira: Power is the antagonist. And whoever has it, is a danger to civil liberties if they’re not restrained. And one of the restraints is in the first amendment of the Constitution, which reads ‘Congress shall make no law…’. Now, ‘no law’ means no law. It doesn’t mean ‘some laws’ […] because you can’t trust them to decide what is good and what is bad.”
“Ira: That’s the distinction that you need to draw: not between the words that are hateful and words that are acceptable, but between words and conduct.”
“Ira: The charge of incitement has a long, sorry history of being used against speech that everybody would think was protected by the first amendment now.”
I personally think that Ira lends too much weight to Trump’s words as literal, just like everyone else does. How is it that the metaphoric phrase “you have to fight” is continually referred to as the inciting statement when 99.9% of its usage in any other context is non-violent? You have to fight for that job. You have to fight to be heard. You have to fight the power. None of these are considered to mean real, fist-in-the-face violence.
“Ira: Liberals are so anxious to get Trump […] that I’m nervous that the definition of incitement will be broadened and loosened to cover speech that, in fact, should be protected by the first amendment. It took 180 years to get to Brandenburg in 1969.”
At the end, Ira says he “should be convicted under the impeachment process”, which is pretty slippery because then he says that it’s because regular people can’t be impeached, so it wouldn’t broaden the general definition. For a general conviction, he worries (as noted above) that the Supreme Court would ride the wave of anti-Trumpism to broaden the definition of incitement.
So he’s basically saying that it wasn’t incitement, but he really hates Trump. This is better than many other people’s opinions, but still wishy-washy. He seems to want to exploit a loophole (that there’s a special rule for presidents under which due process is much weaker) to get Trump in a way that wouldn’t apply to anyone else (because in a real court, the charges wouldn’t hold up for a minute). That attitude doesn’t have much to do with a principled stance.
“Ira: You’ve got the guy in your sights and you shoot the gas. And then…the wind shifts—and the political winds always shift—and pretty soon the gas is blowing back on you.”
“Ira: Can the private sector so restrict speech so that it basically means that the only people who have access to speech are the people who have access to money and the means of utilizing the mediums? Yes. That’s always been the case, though. When I grew up, if you didn’t own a newspaper or radio or television network, you didn’t have much right to speak, except to the people right around you. The Internet changes all of that.”
We need more distributed sites instead of giant social-media centers. Every citizen should have their own site, unable to be DDOSed and unable to be taken down. The people behind Matrix (chat) and Mammoth (messages/news) that are pushing distributed, decentralized software have the right idea.
Tim Berners Lee’s Solid project aims to move the whole web back in this direction. Instead of fighting with Twitter and Facebook to democratize them, we should move away from them, to our own platforms, platforms not controlled by private entities. Of course, those could still be destroyed by Amazon or whoever hosts the servers, so we’re not out of the woods yet.
“Ira: The question I have for Trump voters is, how did they bring themselves to vote for him this time? Knowing that this election was a referendum on racism and bigotry and religious discrimination. Those are the terms that Trump set. He was the one who turned our politics into a politics of either-or.”
I think that this is just wrong from start to finish. It was only a referendum on racism and bigotry in the fevered imagination of the people who had the luxury of spending their days glued to CNN. Everyone else was watching the economy fall into the shitter, along with their lives. The point Rogan made that “people just hate and don’t trust the Democrats” is mostly correct. They should also hate the Republicans, but they hate the Democrats more.
Trump did not start “either-or”. He took advantage of it. Glass is making a big mistake in assuming what people were thinking. He says he’d “like to know”, but it doesn’t sound like he’s made a serious attempt to imagine it—or even find out what it could be.
Even his question assumes the worst: that they all looked at all of the issues, with the same priorities as he and his lefty colleagues had, and still came to the conclusion to vote for Trump, despite him being the most obviously evil thing to walk the Earth (as everyone knows, according to orthodoxy). I’m not sure which latin phrase to apply to that form of argumentation, but it’s dishonest and unlikely to lead anywhere constructive.
“Ira: A vote for Donald Trump—whether you intended it or not—was a vote for white nationalism and bigotry, for authorianism.”
Oh, Ira, now you’re making the argument that anyone who disagrees with your take on the situation is either a white nationalist or someone who’s so deluded that they can’t see that they’re supporting white nationalism. The arrogance is breathtaking. You know better what people are thinking than they themselves do.
Basically, almost no-one should have voted for Donald Trump and everyone should have voted for Biden, who is, apparently, not a white nationalist. That’s the stupid narrative that the fuckers in power set up in the first place. Ira’s take on this is so naive, ignoring the context of how the election even became a choice between a right-wing, doddering corporate stooge and a narcissistic man-child.
Instead of chafing at the constraints imposed by the business elite (the two-party “choice”) and the liberal elite (never Bernie), he falls back to Bush the younger’s “with us or against us” horseshit.
I can make the same argument: that Ira’s vote for Biden (which he admitted to) was a vote for drone-bombing Syrian children. There’s a direct line to Ira’s subconscious intent and dead children. It’s as a simple as that. That sounds stupid, though, doesn’t it, Ira?
Joe also challenged him on this. It was one of the only times he pushed back rather than just letting Glasser talk.
“Joe: Don’t you think that there are plenty of other people that don’t share that perspective? There’s a lot of people that don’t think of it that way. They thought that, for whatever reason, Donald Trump has America’s best interests in mind. That what Joe Biden represents is politics as usual, that he’s going to bring all of the swamp creatures back into DC.
“And they were hoping that Donald Trump was going to fix everything. And they would point to the fact that the economy before COVID was doing fantastic. That unemployment was very low. That the stock market was booming. They felt like he was making the right steps in the right directions to strengthen the country. To frame it all entirely as bigotry and white nationalism. I just don’t think the people who voted for him see it that way.”
Now, that’s not terrible, but, obviously, Trump had his own swamp creatures and the economy wasn’t doing well—but it never is for most of us!—and people were suffering … but the media narrative—from, let’s face it, all sides—is and has been for decades that America is awesome and nothing’s ever wrong. The Democratic message of “leave the machine in place for us” was never very appealing. They don’t want to change anything Trump was doing; they just want to be in charge of it.
It sounds very similar to how Navalny in Russia has pretty much the same platform as Putin. He’s superficially against corruption as a lever to prise Putin from power, but has many similarly nefarious connections. He just wants Putin’s job. He thinks it would be a neat job to have. He’s not Bernie. He’s not MLK. Neither are any of the Democrats, when it comes down to it. AOC collapsed. Only Bernie shows a glimmer of hope and he keeps … capitulating.
Getting back to the interview: Ira didn’t care what Joe said. Just didn’t acknowledge the point at all. Instead, he doubled down and answered that he knows for a fact that people voted incorrectly. That “you [voters] could tell yourself [themselves] that you [they] were voting for him [Trump] for those reasons, but as a matter of fact, that’s wasn’t the case.”
I guess my entire family are secret white nationalists. So secret that they don’t even know it themselves. This is exactly the fucking arrogance that 70M people voted against. Literally this argument—that you, dear voter, are so stupid that you can’t even see that the election is about what I say it is and not what your poor pea-brain thinks it is. Good luck with that, you dumb fucks. See you in 2022 when you let the deranged Republicans back at the helm.
Ira says a bit later, “One can only hope that instincts for decency and respect for other people’s opinions prevails.” How does he not hear what he’s saying? Contrast that statement with the many times he metaphorically shat on any opinion that deviated from his own. If he really believes that, how does he square that with his previous complete disrespect and denial of people’s innermost opinions of themselves as non-white-nationalists?
This show was recorded on Jan. 15th, so they were still citing a lot of long-since debunked myths about that day—it’s amazing how they both just regurgitated the most extreme talking points—like the “zip-tie guy” or the “plans to murder Congresspeople”—with no evidence having been presented whatsoever. There was a picture! No context, nothing. Just a picture. And they both just swallowed it, despite both knowing how powerful images are for conveying a message without proof.
We are pretty much doomed once the AI news-stories and deep fakes really get going. Maybe they already have. Maybe they don’t need to, since people don’t read past the headline anyway. Why bother producing a deep-fake video when you just dangle a clickbait article that convinces 90% of the dazed masses?
Ira offers the same advice everyone gives to the Democrats by telling them to “add back concern for the people who were left behind by the modern economy.” That is literally not going to happen. Democrats don’t care about those people. They are deplorable. Irredeemable.
“Ira: To be friends, while you continued to oppose each other, and fight in civil ways. We’ve gotten a long way away from that in recent years. We have to start moving on the way back. (Emphasis added.)”
Note how he uses the metaphorical “fight”. It’s obviously not incitement, right? So why interpret Trump’s call to fight as clear incitement? Ira just did the exact same thing.
“Joe: I love that expression: different flavors of the same poison—because that it what it is.”
“Joe: In podcasting, people think that if you have someone on that they disagree with, that you’re ‘platforming’ them. Or if you have a right-wing person on your show, then you’re now a right-wing person. They’ll miscategorize you.”
This is happening more and more in American media. Glenn Greenwald and Jimmy Dore and Joe Rogan and Matt Taibbi—all considered Alt-Right because they hold discussion on many forums, regardless of ideological bent. The discussion is the important thing, not the platform. If you can reach a different audience with a good message—that’s worth nearly infinitely more than preaching to the choir.
Near the end of the interview, Glass notes that it was neat that because Truman played piano, people started playing piano and Eisenhower played golf, people played golf. So he says that those are good things, that the presidents were guiding the country in a good way.
“Ira: What worries me is that, when Trump lied, and created fictional realities to live in, a lot of people joined him. And, for a lot of people, those fictions are real now. And they have to somehow be weaned away from that. Not by calling them evil, and finding some way to rid ourselves of them. But by coaxing them back into the real world.”
Which world is that, Ira? The same bullshit world we had before? Are you saying we should go back to sleep and accept the official narrative again? I’m sorry, but how fucking tone-deaf can you be? He’s literally saying he didn’t like the fictional reality of Trump, but every other president was ok?
Truman dropped the fucking nuclear bombs! How in the name of all that is holy is anything that Trump did worse than that? How is it even close?
That’s all presidents do—blow smoke up your ass! The economy’s doing great! Unemployment is low! We’ve got COVID under control! Greatest healthcare in the world! Syria’s the enemy! Russia’s the enemy! China’s the enemy! There are WMDs! America is exceptional! What the hell are you talking about, Glass?
Are you mad because Trump did such a shitty and extreme job of it that way more people finally noticed that it was all unreal all along?
Joe asks him,
“Joe: Is it because he became the king of the assholes? They realized they had a king now! And there’s so many of them.
“Ira: Yes, that’s exactly right. The capacity of the president to legitimize certain kinds of behavior, to normalize, is very powerful and can be a force for good, and can be a very dangerous force, for evil.”
Like Obama? He wasn’t an overt asshole, but he broke a lot of shit. He gave all of our money to Wall Street while smiling his lovely smile at Main Street. Bush broke even more shit. What is the difference? Do we only care about appearances? Or do we really wish for a president who isn’t an actual asshole? A lot of us did but the other assholes dogpiled poor Bernie.
There is no room for a non-asshole at the table. Biden’s an asshole. He pretty much always has been. The only redeeming thing about him is that a lot of his close family died tragically. Look at his 50-year career—full of assholery. All of the presidents are assholes. Most of Congress is. It’s not even an open question. It’s answered. Go back to sleep.
Conversation’s almost over: Glass just invoked Godwin’s law. Now they’re talking about Hitler. I’m not even gonna take notes.
To be fair, he does end by saying that, on the whole, things are much better now than they were when he was born, that we all have to do our part to improve things and that “we tend to measure progress by the brevity of our own lives”, but that “it’s a relay marathon race.”
Since that’s his area, I suppose he means individual rights and freedoms, but the sphere within which most people can exercise those freedoms is quite limited. He seems to be missing the big picture: that while people superficially have more rights now, the economy has been bent at a higher level to prevent justice.
That is, inequality is phenomenally worse than it ever was in his lifetime, but he still expresses satisfaction that things are better because black people can legally vote. That now we have some black assholes in charge too. That’s the most progress we can hope for.
Still, it’s too narrow a scope—Glass has done a tremendous amount. He’s definitely done his part. Much more than I’ve done (or will likely ever do). But it’s this focus on the narrow by those who can really get things done that allows those who don’t focus on the narrow to continue to suborn their efforts, to nullify them. While Glass fought for voting rights and was satisfied with his wins, the assholes took literally everything else from the board.
Glass citing Vince Lombardi:
“Ira: You know, I never lost a football game. Once in a while, time ran out. […] In our fight for civil liberties, that’s a game where time never runs out. You just keep playing. You absorb the losses. You call better plays. You tough it out. And you realize that the game is long and there have been more victories than defeats.”
“Joe: Thank you for that and thank you for your dedication to free speech. I worry that the young people today don’t have that.”
Joe let Ira talk. He was a great interviewer. He could have pushed him a bit harder on the inconsistencies in what he was saying (often just a few sentences apart), but it was good to let him run, to give him enough line to be able to express his view, inconsistencies and all.
One comment accused Dore of being a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Feb 2021 23:32:01 (GMT-5)
I jumped in on the thread Jimmy Dore says something objectively correct about how Democrats are making people fight for a one time payment, when other countries support their citizens, and Sam Seder has a fit about it whining about Senate process. (Reddit) the other day.
One comment accused Dore of being a grifter, which is an exceedingly odd charge. It’s most likely that that person has never seen or heard Dore and was just regurgitating what they’d heard from someone else who’d never seen or heard Dore. The Internet is full of foolish children who want to pretend that they’re “participating” in “discussions”.
I remember when I was a kid, and was not allowed to watch nearly as much TV—or stay up nearly as late—as my friends, I’d sometimes try to pretend I’d seen a TV show I hadn’t and just kind of coattail my opinion on what the majority seemed to think. Most of social media is like that. Very few people read the article or watch the videos before commenting. How could they? They’re commenting on a long read or have an opinion on a 30-minute video within seconds.
So, to the grifter accusation, another commentator replied that,
“[f]or a grifter, he sure has pretty cool regular guests. Or maybe Richard Wolff, Cornel West, and others are in on the grift?”
That’s how I see it, too. Chris Hedges and Glenn Greenwald are on quite often as well. That’s a lot of clout. I’ve seen Krystal Ball. He hasn’t had Lee Camp or Eleanor Goldfield on yet (that I know of), but Dore wrote the foreword for Lee’s book. To my mind, that’s all pretty good company. No, that’s fantastic company.
Then I landed on this comment by vacuum_state, which inspired the following response. The quoted bits are from the comment to which I responded.
“There’s one thing criticizing AOC or the “squad” for having no conviction or whatever, but he tries to destroy them while not doing the same for Tucker.”
The way I see that is that Tucker started off way to the right and seems to be willing to listen to argument, sometimes changing his mind on air and sticking to it (e.g. on Julian Assange). He’s actually using his huge platform (biggest show on cable, last I heard) to get left-wing ideas and segments in front of a captive audience. Dore’s working-class ideas seem to resonate with him and he shows them to his audience. It doesn’t even matter in the end that he’s pretending.
I honestly don’t know what inspired this, but I presume some number-crunchers at FOX are just following the audience. Sometimes even they have to do that, although they do a lot of leading. If Dore were on Carlson and had to “clean up” his message, it would be one thing. But the message is the same as on his show, minus cursing. That seems…fine to me?
OTOH, Dore holds the Squad’s feet to the fire because they started off way to the left and have veered to the center, seemingly capitulating for no apparent political gain. They are _elected representatives_. They’re there to be yelled at and exhorted to do things. Even more so if they once showed the promise of doing good things and are _coasting_ now, morphing into just some more Democrats that are useless to the suffering working class, but with way better Twitter game. AOC should spend less time responding to Ted Cruz with sassy hot takes and more time watching interviews with herself from 2 years ago.
“[…] he likes to feast upon what should be his nearest allies with any clout.”
His hatred is pure. It’s equal-opportunity. It’s often uncompromising. I’m not sure which “allies without any clout” you’re referring to because he seems to spend a lot of time excoriating elected members of The Congress, who form an elite group of 535 people in a country of 330M.
Look, I don’t think Dore’s presentation is for everyone, but his politics are dead-on what America needs and his passion is pure. I’m not a fan of Tucker Carlson, but I’ve seen him espouse some acceptable views. We should be careful not to capitulate on message, but be happy for honest exposure wherever possible.
I don’t think we have the luxury of liking the message, but hating the messenger right now. We’re in a tight spot.
I received a reply by vacuum_state, which made a strong point, starting with
“Good points broadly. There are just things that rub me the wrong way. […] Dore goes out to assassinate character.”
I again responded at length, reproduced below.
“Anyone who wasn’t for his MFA [Medicate For All] push was a fraud in his eyes.”
Well, not anyone, just the people who actually campaigned on MFA a couple of years ago and still haven’t pushed it to a single vote yet. That’s why he spends less time lambasting Republicans. It’s not because he supports them, but because he sees them as hopeless. If he’s hammering on someone, it’s because he actually believes in them.
The Congress has voted against the ACA 67 times (Wikipedia) (they finally stopped after 5 years). But there have been no votes for anything like MFA or a public option, despite a lot of politicians getting votes and mileage out of supporting those things.
As Dore says, an overwhelming majority of the country would be for it, but there’s no political support, other than lip service when it’s personally beneficial. Of course, he doesn’t say it that nicely, but he’s still right when he yells that, in the middle of a pandemic, with Congress and the White House, when are the Democrats going to do one of the things that they claim differentiates them from the Republicans? If they don’t step up now, of course they’re frauds. There is no way of sugar-coating that message without getting into bed with them.
“No one on the left should be promoting Tucker Carlson as an ally. His intentions are absolutely to not advance left wing agenda, his intentions are to build a right wing populist movement.”
I can’t presume to know Tucker’s intentions. I know that he’s swung around on some issues and is playing the role of a supporter of some issues I support (e.g. Assange, working class). For example, the ten-minute video segment Tucker Investigates: What is destroying rural America? (YouTube) was interesting. That makes him useful. Obviously, we keep an eye on him for betrayal, but reaching 15M people who are otherwise unreachable is no small thing.
First of all, the parties have flipped in allegiances before (the Democrats used to have the nickname The Dixiecrats and the Republicans won’t shut up about being “the party of Lincoln”). Second of all, though, allegiances are messy. People and institutions (like FOX) have a mix of opinions they promote and “believe” in. FOX can control its audience to a large degree, but if the audience starts to shift, FOX has to shift with it, to follow the money. If they think they have to give more voice to a suffering working class—why wouldn’t they? It’s a huge majority—then it’s possible that they pivot to keep their audience. Again, stay cautious, but use them where we can.
If Dore changed his message from his YouTube channel to FOX, that would be one thing. But he doesn’t. He just stops swearing, which is a fair concession, I think.
“I get unsure what his true objectives are and whether he comes in good faith.”
That’s fair. If his delivery style is off-putting or too mixed with jokes, then a more sober summary (perhaps like the one I made above) is more convincing. But I bet he appeals to a lot of people because he’s not that hard to understand. And he happens to be right, for the most part, happens to be on the side of the working class. We should be happy to have him, broadening the appeal of a working-class message.
I just read something the other day about Rush Limbaugh that goes to that point, in Don’t Hate Rush Limbaugh. Copy Him. by Ted Rall:
“As much as Buchanan, Reagan and Trump, [Limbaugh] defined the ideological and attitudinal contours of today’s emboldened Republican Party. Had Al Franken managed to guide the benighted Air America — take a sec to Google it — to similar heights, Democrats would have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and Bernie Sanders would be beginning his second term. Who knows how many economic sectors would be nationalized by now? (Emphasis added.)”
If you find yourself nodding in agreement with the entire message of a video or interview (like the Tucker Calrson one I linked above), but don’t like the people, that’s fine. Stay alert. But maybe don’t look a gift horse in the mouth and try to burn potential powerful allies. We need all the help we can get (as long as we don’t compromise principles).
At 37:00, they discussed how both parties sought to avoid “encouraging... [More]”
]]>Published by marco on 23. Feb 2021 23:02:11 (GMT-5)
This episode of Chapo was a discussion with Liz and Matt Bruenig about population-control policies on both sides of the aisle in America. Liz, in particular, was quite eloquent and biting in her criticism of elite hatred of the poor.
At 37:00, they discussed how both parties sought to avoid “encouraging fertility among the bottom quintile”, ending with a proper critique of what’s wrong with Bill Gates running the world for us.
“Liz Bruenig: All of this talk about what would happen in terms of women’s progress in the workplace. And what would happen in terms of economic productivity. It’s not that I think that people don’t believe them. I just think that there’s a sort of grander, and more historical, motive that you can easily identify, especially in the welfare-reform conversations, and it’s that the American right and the American left do not want poor people having children. They think that those people are messed up in some kind of way. And they don’t want more of them in society. That’s all there is to it.
“Matt Bruenig: The guy who wrote their policy—his name was Robert Stein—and he gave an interview to Ryan Cooper […] and Ryan asked him ‘why don’t you include the poorest in here?’ and Stein answered, ‘well, we don’t want to encourage fertility among the bottom quintile any more than we already do.‘
“Liz Bruenig: That is what they believe. […] Among super-rich people, there are tons of charitable foundations—I believe there is an arm of Warren Buffet’s foundation, in fact—that are aimed at population control. Expressly. Especially in the global south.
“Matt: That was a huge Gates foundation thing, too. They were like, ‘Oh, the biggest problem in sub-Saharan Africa is overpopulation.’
“Felix: Every single one of those people has a carbon footprint 10,000 times smaller than Bill Gates’s pinky toe.
“Matt: Bill Gates is one of the worst fucking people alive. Just expressly evil. Just openly like ‘we have to keep Sub-Saharan Africans from breeding.’”
At 1:01:00, Liz offered a way of talking to people with differing opinions—one way is to come at it sidewise, agreeing on incontrovertible points without revealing that you may be in agreement for different reasons (e.g. one person thinks it’s because Trump is infallible and the other thinks that even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while).
“Liz Bruenig: My Dad will be like, ‘Did you see that bullshit welfare that Biden’s trying to do?’ And I’m like ‘it is bullshit. Absolutely.’
“Felix: So you have to veil your politics in such a way that you end up agreeing with them in ways that they’re not fully aware of.”
This is definitely a thing that I do, as well. It that fails, though, you can just go all-out ironic agreement and generally trust that the sense of irony has atrophied to such a tragic degree in most of the population that you’ll just get away with it.
“Liz Bruenig: I would also, in all seriousness, recommend talking to the sister-in-law and being like, ‘Look, I’m not a Communist. Trust me. I’m a Biden voter. I’m nothing close to even a soft socialist. I think people should only get what they can get through the labor market. I believe in private markets and I have no problem with capital ownership. I like submitting to my boss. And I think you should too. The fact that people get sick and they can’t pay for their medicine? I think that’d good. I like it. I wish we had more of it. And, I don’t want to kill babies—I’m just indifferent to their fate.”
They did a good job of citing a Grayzone article by Ben Norton that got to the... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 22. Feb 2021 18:01:45 (GMT-5)
This is an interesting discussion by Eleanor Goldfield and Lee Camp on their Common Censored podcast. It ranges across different topics, but the part I found the most interesting was about vetting information sources.
They did a good job of citing a Grayzone article by Ben Norton that got to the bottom of a concerted misinformation campaign about the purported Chinese genocide, for which evidence is vanishingly scarce, despite the opposite appearance in the mainstream press. But then Goldfield and Camp cited a very dubious statistic of their own, that I analyze in more depth below.
At 47:20:
“Lee Camp: You couldn’t make up more garbage to put forward. Its [Network of Human Rights Defenders (NHRD)] annual report notes that ‘this report has been produced with the financial support of generous donors’, but the donors are never named. […] So you can’t find out who funds this U.S.-backed, regime-change organization to funnel garbage information to […] organizations like the U.N., which then funnels that garbage report to outlets like Reuters.
“And, by the way, that Reuters report—and I used to be like this. I used to read Reuters and think: Ok. It’s not FOX News, it’s not CNN. Reuters is much more legit. And I used to just pick up Reuters—and if Reuters had a headline and it said ‘million Uighurs in camp in China’, I would go ‘that’s pretty unimpeachable’. There’s no doubt there. That must be true. They wouldn’t run with a headline that adamant if they didn’t know. And, I now see that it can come from utter garbage and then … John Oliver is like an 18-year-old me. He sees the Reuters and […] he’ll almost exclusively quote from NYT, Reuters, AP—those are his big gotos—and if something is said in Reuters, he will plaster it all over.”
At 50:45, Lee likens this process to money-laundering, but for information.
“This is an almost completely US-funded, regime-change outlet that pumps out false reports and then gets them into some idiot at the UN whose willing to do the American Empire’s bidding and then they say it and then Reuters…It’s basically like a game of Telephone, but it’s more like money-laundering, where you put it through several areas, like several new shops that take the money in, and it goes out the back door—and then it looks clean. […] Well, where did this information come from? Oh, it came from the UN. Then it must be legit. And the UN goes, where did this information come from? And they go, oh, the Chinese Human Rights Defenders! Well, that sounds nice.”
This analysis is related to the Section 230C1/C2: A debate on continuing utility are I recently wrote because, in that discussion, both Eugene and Eric kind of assumed that they were only talking about whether tech companies have too much power to control the narrative, when all media companies actually have too much power to control the narrative.
A little later, Camp and Goldfield cited a statistic that they’re very fond of: “that there are more black people in prison today than there were under slavery.”
In so doing, they demonstrated another way of laundering information: manipulation of statistics. At first, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, that this figure is correct for a given set of parameters. But I did a bit of research—and it’s wildly off.
But there’s a lot of context missing: do they mean number of slaves ever? Or that were enslaved at any one time? Let’s assume that latter because the former would be a much bigger number and would be much more difficult to pin down.
According to Population of the United States from the final census conducted before the Civil War in 1860, by race and gender (Statista), the U.S. population in 1860 was about 31.5M. Of those, 4.5M were black. This is less than 10% of the population of the U.S. in 2020, about 330M. I’ve taken the accepted estimate I’ve seen cited elsewhere because the article Demographics of the United States (Wikipedia) only has figures from 2010 because the 2020 census isn’t finished yet. It was about 310M then.
The article Black and slave population of the United States from 1790 to 1880 (Statista) indicates that, of those 4.5M, “89.01%” were slaves. So, just about 4M black people were enslaved. That’s the absolute number we’ll work with: the number of black people enslaved at the peak population and just before the civil war.
The numbers for incarceration are more complicated. If you just go by prison population, those numbers have been declining since 2010. There were about 1.5M total prisoners in 2019, according to U.S. Department of Justice − Office of Justice Programs − Bureau of Justice Statistics. But those numbers don’t count the people in pre-trial detention and post-detention programs (e.g. parole, which is extremely restrictive as well and technically counts as still being “in the system).
There is a lot more information on the BJS home page. For example, another report notes that there were 738,400 jail inmates in 2018, the most recent year for which they’ve published numbers. That would take the prison+jail population to about 2.4M.
For further corroboration, the article Incarceration in the United States (Wikipedia) points out that “4,751,400 adults in 2013 (1 in 51) were on probation or on parole.” That makes a total of nearly 7M people “under correctional supervision”. Of those actually in prison, 40% are black. If we assume that same percentage roughly applies to those under correctional supervision, then, in 2013, there were 2.8M black people under correctional supervision.
This is a much higher incarceration/supervision rate than for whites (2300 per 100,000 vs. 450)—and horrible—but that’s an entirely separate issue from the investigation we’ve undertaken. It is a far cry from “more black people in prison today than there were under slavery.”, as Lee and Eleanor are fond of citing. That’s even being generous and assuming they meant “under correctional supervision” rather than “in prison”. The number of black people in prison in 2013 (the last year for which I’m able to find numbers) was 40% of 2.2M, which is 880,000, which is only just over 20% of the number of black slaves in 1860.
Their statistic is not just massaged, but completely wrong and, therefore, just as misleading as the statistics they spent 10 minutes (rightfully) demolishing. They’re not the only ones citing it and either everyone should stop citing it or I’d be happy if someone could point out to me how it could make sense.
Published by marco on 21. Feb 2021 09:22:24 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Mar 2021 22:19:35 (GMT-5)
This is an informative and interesting debate between Eric Goldman and Eugene Volokh [1] about whether section 230C has outlived its usefulness. That is: is the protection for corporations and platforms sacrosanct no matter their size, power, and reach? Or do we have a problem when a small handful of companies control the channels of broad communication made available to people today?
I’ve included a transcript of the closing arguments, starting at 53:45.
Eugene made a sort of pre-closing argument first.
“Eugene Volokh: In fact, the very first employment anti-discrimination laws in U.S. history were in the 1830s. And they banned discrimination based on voting. This was before the secret ballots. In a few states, they said you can’t, because we don’t want you to leverage your economic power into political powers. So, one question, is that a good idea? Or is that an acceptable burden on the private-property rights of employers?
“And I think that’s an interesting and difficult question, which, by the way, different states have resolved differently. California has one way; other states have less-protective approaches; others may have some more-protective approaches; others don’t interfere with employer discretion at all.
“So I think we have a similar question here: to what extent should we be troubled that large business corporations are using their economic power to influence political discourse. Maybe in ways that we think are quite public-minded today, but, of course, there’s no reason to think they’ll be that way tomorrow.
“And thoroughgoing libertarians would say: ‘Not at all. Free markets. Free property.’ and many others might say the same thing. But, some others, whether on the left, or in the middle, might say this is something that—we didn’t elect Mark Zuckerberg to do this—but we’re perfectly fine with him making a vast amount of money making a very useful service. But we don’t really want him picking which candidates and which office-holders are allowed to speak in this tremendously important way. So that’s the question. I’m not sure what the right answer is. You ask what I would suggest? I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I do think we think that we ought to be thinking about this, as part of this big picture.”
Eric responded immediately and eloquently with:
“Eric Goldman: The idea that we could tell Internet services how to operate their business should strike many of us as immediately as something—well, we better have a good reason for that. (Emphasis in original as well) And the consequences for the Internet, I think, could be potentially devastating if we do let the trolls and the spammers win. So, I really think that section 230 has been a boon because we’ve sidestepped so many of these constitutional questions by allowing them to be decided by statute. And I honestly think that if we look at the amount of freedom that we have to reach audiences today that we never had in a pre-section-230 world. We’ve been given an enormous gift and one that I’m willing to fight for.”
The sentiment is basically a good one, but the main line of argument is chronologically unsound. Section 230 was passed in 1995. We’ve never known an Internet without it, at least in the United States. The Internet has never been held to the same legal, journalistic standards as other media, from the very beginning. It took a while before the Internet was capable of disseminating information at the same level as newspapers and cable TV, but it has long since eclipsed them. And it still rides much freer, despite its much, much larger power.
At 57:25, Volokh concurred with Eric’s points, but essentially disagreed with Eric on whether “we […] have a good reason”. Eric indicates that it is not the time, whereas Eugene is understandably worried that it’s long past time. Our Democracy is now a sideshow to the real power captured by 2 or 3 vast corporate monopolies.
“Eugene Volokh: Well, I think Eric and I agree on many things. One is that, indeed, regulation of private businesses is something that should not be undertaken lightly and reserved for very unusual situations, where there’s a real need. Not everybody in the audience will likely agree with that, but at least Eric and I agree. I also agree that section 230 has been tremendously valuable, especially section 230C1, which has provided the immunity that makes it possible for companies like Facebook and Twitter and Youtube […] So I think it’s an interesting question as to whether there ought to be some revisions to 230C1, but I’m very skeptical […]
“This having been said, we’re in a different time than we were 25 years ago. Back then, it was, well, there was Compuserve and Prodigy and America Online and, well, what kind of environment are they going to have. I don’t think anybody envisioned there would be one such entity because there were, especially with the Internet, linking email accounts and web pages all over, where you could access from your Prodigy account a page set up by someone at Compuserve and send email to them…people sort of thought that there would be a lot of competition—and for a long time there was a lot of competition.
“But, in large part, because of the immunity provided by section 230C1, coupled with the nature of network effects where, if you set up a large enough walled-garden social network, that will give you an edge over smaller ones, because more people will want to be one your site because it’s so large, those two things put together—section 230C1 and network effects—have yielded this environment where these entities [have] unparalleled wealth and power and monopoly status within their own particular niches.
“And we see, whether or not its a concerted plan—and I’m perfectly willing to assume it’s not—competitors like Parler are being blacklisted in a certain way that makes it very hard for competition to arise. So, the question is, is the rule that we set up for a much more competitive environment, for companies that were much less influential at the time, still a sensible rule today, when we have a much less competitive environment, where the companies are vastly more influential over politics.
“The answer may be ‘yes’, but I’m at least open to the possibility that it’s time for a change, at least on the C2 side and the platform’s power to block people, as opposed to the C1 side, which is the immunity that platforms and others have for the speech that they allow.”
During one of his segments, he basically recited the following etymology of the word laconic (taken from Online Etymology Dictionary):
“[…] 1580s, literally “of or pertaining to the region around ancient Sparta in Greece, probably via Latin Laconicus “of Laconia,” from Greek Lakonikos “Laconian, of Laconia,” adjective from Lakon “person from Lakonia,” the district around Sparta in southern Greece in ancient times, whose inhabitants famously cultivated the skill of saying much in few words. When Philip of Macedon threatened them with, “If I enter Laconia, I will raze Sparta to the ground,” the Spartans’ reply was, “If.”. An earlier form was laconical (1570s).”
Published by marco on 19. Feb 2021 23:50:31 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. Feb 2021 00:03:55 (GMT-5)
This episode is ostensibly about what social media is like in the yawning absence of Donald Trump on Twitter. It’s not just that, but those parts are pretty funny. I include a partial transcript after the video—mostly of Matt Christman (whose voice I recognize and whose comments are the pithiest). He has an excellent and moving rant at just over 45 minutes in that is amazingly eloquent considering he did it extemporaneously.
The episode’s cold open has them rewriting the famous Tears in rain monologue from Blade Runner (Wikipedia) to instead of mourning the memory of “C-beams glitter[ing] in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate”, they mourn the loss of the trove of knowledge that was Donald Trump’s Twitter account. “End of an era … one of the all-time greats.”
At about 21:00, They move on to discuss the punishment-happy attitude of many liberals to anyone even remotely involved with the storming of the Capitol. Supposed progressives are wholeheartedly supporting the no-fly list.
“Matt: The problem with the no-fly list wasn’t that it was disproportionately Muslim. That wasn’t the problem. Adding white people to balance it will not make it better.
“[…] People need to ask themselves: what do you really believe? Do you believe that government is just the gloved fist of capital? Or not?”
At 44:45, Felix points out that idiocy is independent of education.
“Felix?: Money and education in America today is no inoculation whatsoever against being an absolute rube, a slack-jawed rube. Like, mouth agape, flies-buzzing-around-you rube.”
I consider this description appropriate to anyone espousing an argument without consideration, without logic, with giant holes. The most glaring examples are, of course, Q-Anon, Stop-the-Steal, and Russiagate and WMDs and Iran’s nukes and China’s genocide.
At 47:20, Matt asks how people can support Trump so religiously. It’s not just that they’ve chosen him as a lesser evil, but they really seem to look up to him as intelligent and proficient and competent and righteous.
“Matt: All of these people decided they were going to go to Washington and try to overthrow the government for … Donald Trump. I cannot respect that. You know the man, right? You’ve seen him on television? If you’ve seen him, and you think that there’s anything positive, that there’s anything worth suffering for, then you have put a knitting needle up your nose and scooped out your frontal lobe.
“[…] The guy sold out everyone he’s ever dealt with. He was never faithful to a wife, was never faithful to a business partner, he’s never succeeded in anything other than scamming people. The fact that he’s on TV and he looked like he knew what he was doing when he was firing Meatloaf […] you have to put more thought into it than that.”
At 54:00, as is typical for Matt, he backs off a bit and gets more reflective, making an eloquent argument for the sad fact that drastically under-equipped people are wading into an ideological battle and just trying to figure out what’s going on, to make sense of the world, when literally everything is stacked against them. They’re poor, they’re misinformed, they’re overworked, they’re stressed, they’re in debt up to their eyeballs, and they can’t remember the last time they really enjoyed something that wasn’t shoved down their throats in a flood of propaganda. Much of their lives are spent moving through a miasma of misery—even when it’s not insistent in the foreground, the background buzz of it is there, diluting every experience. They wonder where their so-called American Dream went—why did it suddenly disappear in their lifetimes? Why now? Why them?
“Matt: Why am I standing when the music stops? This is bullshit. We were promised it wouldn’t be us. What the fuck, we thought until very recently that it wouldn’t be us.
“And, I have to say, although I made fun of them and I said don’t respect any of them because they were conned by Donald Trump, […] if we’re all being buffeted by the horrible precarity of incipient globalized commodification of everything while all the material basis for an ongoing economy collapses, we’re all trying to figure out what’s going on.
“All of us on the left can pat ourselves on the back that we’ve solved it, we know the right answer. We’re not idiots like these guys, with their stupid prescriptions and their dumb hoodoo. We have a material understanding. That’s luck, man. Because where we end up, with our cultural understanding, our heuristic for evaluating the world and making sense of it? It’s determined demographically. It’s not determined by your decisions and your virtue as a person. [1]
“[…] It boils down to where you grew up, who you grew up around, and what you grew up watching. And, that, when you find yourself in distress and you wanting to understand why the world is the way it is, you seek the cultural explanation of the people around you what they’re all putting out into the ether and then sucking back in.
“Cause we’re all in these segmented cultural ghettos and it’s only going to create idiocy. It can only create incoherent idiocy. Because it’s not grounded in anything. It doesn’t come from class experience. It comes from experience as media consumers.”
At 56:00, they return to the topic at hand, goofing on what a legend Trump was as a Twitter user.
“Felix?: I would like to take the phrase “Bad food restaurant”, embroider it on a banner, and raise it to the rafters. [2] Trump’s style of tweeting, his way of talking, his Twitter account in particular, I truly believe, is the Pontypool mind-virus that will spread to all of us. It has changed the structure of my brain. I think and talk like Trump now because … it’s fun.”
Matt points out that Donald Trump had a much closer relationship with the people of America than Obama did.
“Matt: Donald Trump, I think it’s safe to say, has a greater cultural legacy than Barack Obama. […] Barack Obama only set the stage for Donald Trump to enter. He was a void on purpose. That was what he was getting off on, the little sicko, was being not there.
“[…] [Trump] is the greatest poster of all time and it is not even close. No-one has done more with the medium of Twitter than he will, and we will never see his likes again.
“[…] The King. The King.”
At 1:04:50:
“Someone: Somebody has to step up and be the next Trump and emulate the same kind of derangement and total narcissism and just dickishness.
“Matt: It can’t be copied. He sui generis [3].”
At 1:06:30, they lament the coming loss of connection with the insane clown posse of the presidential mind.
“Joe Biden will never post for himself.”
Then they riff at 1:24:00 about Trump’s National Garden of American Heroes
(Wikipedia) and places in New Jersey that are slobbering about the contract to provide bronze for it. Or that Christopher Columbus is on the list because “all Trump projects are done by the Mafia”. The list of 244 people is pretty hilarious, containing almost exclusively completely uncontroversial people. Sure, Whitney Houston, Steve Jobs, and Alex Trebek are on there—but those are honestly arguable and would be supported as American heroes by a large part of the public.
Published by marco on 19. Feb 2021 22:27:59 (GMT-5)
I found this 90-minute analysis of J.K. Rowling’s participation in the trans-gender discussion to be fair and enlightening. I hadn’t paid the years-long online battle much attention and figured there was a lot of deliberately elided context as well as exaggeration and straw-manning involved. While there is that aspect, there isn’t just that aspect.
One nice example is from about 27:00 into the video. She addresses the disingenuousness of just “stating facts”. She asks the important question of why are you stating certain facts? What story are you trying to tell?
“It’s not hateful to say a fact. […] A fact can’t be bigoted. And I agree that a fact cannot be bigoted. But a fact on its own…doesn’t mean very much. Usually when we discuss facts, we’re using those facts to tell a story. And facts can be used to tell bigoted stories. Suppose someone tweets the fact that the homicide rate is higher for black Americans than for white Americans. I’m going to ask: what story are you trying to tell with this fact? What political goal are you trying to support? One way indirect bigotry works is by camouflaging political struggles as intellectual debates.”
While Rowling isn’t nearly the raving madwoman she’s made out to be, she is definitely overconfident on the degree to which her original proposition covers applies to her ensuing line of argumentation. That is, she starts off from a reasonably rational, though largely irrelevant position (there are two biological genders) and ends up dug in to a much more extreme position, one that she defended in a pretty slimy way in an excruciating long and generally incriminating essay she published a few years back.
Apparently, she also published an 800-page book whose main character has suspiciously related issues,—there’s a cross-dressing [1] serial killer, an ancient trope—she took on a traditionally male pen-name to write it, and she’s quite open about fighting personal demons that are sorta/kinda related to her own sexuality, but have nothing whatsoever to do with trans people.
Rowling has also been the target of truly scathing opprobrium from some of the Internet’s most unhinged people, which goes a long way to explaining why she’s unlikely to back down on any position. As a billionaire authoress, you’re most likely imbued with no small amount of ego and are therefore unlikely to give an inch in a battle where she knows she’s right. She may have some poisonous ideas and misguided ways of presenting them, but she’s far from alone. There are a lot of examples of violent language aimed at her, which is unlikely to change anything. [2]
It seems like she’s still thinking that she’s representing herself in terms of her original argument (the moot biological one that absolutely no-one sane is even arguing) and doesn’t realize how far away the accrued weight of ensuing years of argumentation and online skirmishes have pushed her stance.
He starts with old footage of Noam Chomsky teaching his students that standing up... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 17. Feb 2021 22:09:45 (GMT-5)
This is excellent coverage of CNN literally saying that Congress should force tech companies to shut down their competition because “there are YouTubers with a larger audience than daytime CNN” and that cannot stand.
He starts with old footage of Noam Chomsky teaching his students that standing up for freedom of speech means nothing if you’re only willing to defend speech with which you agree. If you’re for censorship of opposing views, then you’re not for freedom of speech—in any way.
They completely miss that they are the biggest propaganda of all.
“Dore: And they’re pushing radical, radical views. Oh, you mean like, the Syrian War propaganda is propaganda, you mean that? You mean Medicare for All is actually cheaper than the current system. You mean that? Those kind of radical views? What kind of radical views? You mean like Russiagate is a complete hoax set up by the intelligence community, Democratic Party and the corporate media? You mean that kind of radical views?
“That’s the kind of radical views you won’t ever say. Why is it that you won’t bring anyone on who’ll tell the truth about war? Whenever there’s a panel about war, it’s three people who are pro-war. Why is that? What kind of radicalization are you guys doing? I know exactly what kind of radicalization: you’re radicalizing your audience to be pro-war because you get most of your funding from the military-industrial complex. That’s what that is.
“And these guys are trying to make money off of it. They’re trying to make money off of scaring you about alternative news sources. Freedom of speech is super-dangerous to these guys. […] You can’t let people have freedom. You can’t let people have freedom of speech because there are bad people out there.”
Of course, CNN claims to be targeting right-wing channels, but they know what they’re doing. They’re taking advantage of the wave of “liberal” support for extreme China-level censorship to have the government eliminate the competition. They don’t care how it happens. They don’t care about left or right—they just want everyone else to shut up and get away from the money pie.
The left is absolutely justified in being worried. This is a bad idea.
They basically argue for de-platforming by making alternative sources something that people can seek out if they want them—they will never find them and everyone knows it—but not “pushing it into their faces”. That’s reserved for official state propaganda like CNN, which is on “in every airport, every bar, everywhere—and pushing war, always pushing war.”
Now the whole cabal is ramping back up, once again, against Russia, and have selected China as an enemy, to boot. They’ll grab Iran on the way and make sure that Afghanistan stays viable as a cash cow for news.
“Dore: We shouldn’t push stuff into people’s faces, except we only want people to consume the drivel that we pass off as news.”
They want to make it impossible for people to get certain news, certain sources on their phones—or at all. News should be suppressed or, in the words of the CNN shill: “we have to turn down the ability of these right-wing influencers to reach these huge audiences.” Obviously, this does not affect CNN, one of the biggest right-wing influencers of them all. Also, don’t worry about hyper-consumerist influencers. No-one ever complained about them, either.
I honestly welcome the world after Trump, with media tools like CNN and MSNBC and NYT still trying to fight that fucking Balrog so hard that they don’t even understand that they’re plummeting into the pit with it. Fuck them all. None of their arguments are worth considering any farther. They’re garbage.
I welcome it because these idiots seem poised to finish the job that Trump started: the decline and fall of the American Empire.
Dore goes on to cite Greenwald (who was citing Taibbi, who was citing a survey from last fall) that CNN (79%), NPR (87%), NYT (91%), and MSNBC (95%) are more siloed than all but Fox News. All of these “mainstream” and self-professedly legitimate sources have 79-95% self-identified Democrats as listeners/viewers. Madness.
“This idea that just right-wingers are siloed off is complete garbage. CNN is a silo. MSNBC is a silo. NPR is a silo.
“And, by the way, why wouldn’t [CNN] bring on someone who has a counter-narrative to that? Why wouldn’t they have a healthy debate about censorship? Why not bring on Noam Chomsky or Glenn Greenwald or Chris Hedges or Matt Taibbi or Aaron Maté? Why not bring on someone like that? Some award-winning journalists who disagree with the establishment-approved narrative. That’s why you’ve gotta have free speech because they’ll never give you a [spot]”
They never do this because (A) they’re not interested in alternate opinions and (B) they would try to force the guests to only espouse the views that CNN already approves of.
As this tweet by Benjamin Norton (Twitter) puts it:
“Note how this CNN imperial stenographer fearmongers about foreign bogeymen with his “foe” rhetoric. The real foe of average working-class Americans isn’t any foreign nation; it’s the parasitic capitalist oligarchs who control everything and their lackeys in politics and the media”
Dore references Greenwald above, who was interviewed recently in ’Journalists Are Authoritarians’ by Nick Gillespie (Reason).
“Glenn Greenwald: Trump gets in, and The Washington Post changes its motto to “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” essentially saying press freedom is under assault. [White House reporter] Jim Acosta writes a bestseller with some pompous, self-glorifying title, like Danger: Reporting in the Era of Trump. What the fuck ever happened to Jim Acosta that constitutes an assault on press freedom? The worst thing Trump ever did to any of them was to say mean things about them in tweets. Those aren’t assaults on press freedom. I was threatened by the Obama administration with prison when I was doing the Snowden reporting. I was criminally indicted by the [Jair] Bolsonaro government at the beginning of [2020] for the reporting I did in Brazil. Those are attacks on press freedom. Saying Jim Acosta is an idiot, and tweeting something insulting about Wolf Blitzer, isn’t.”
“So you go through those metrics. George Bush and Dick Cheney started new wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama started new wars in Libya and Yemen. What new wars did Donald Trump start? He escalated bombing campaigns, which he inherited, in a pretty grotesque way. But he didn’t start any new wars.
“When you look at things like the destruction of Iraq or the implementation of a torture regime—what has Donald Trump done that even remotely compares in terms of moral evil to any of that? Nothing. And yet we’re supposed to treat George Bush and Barack Obama like morally upstanding statesmen and Donald Trump like the literal reincarnation of Hitler.”
Gillespie claims above that Trump “escalated bombing campaigns” but, according to Chris Woods of Airwars, he did not, overall, escalate bombings. According to this graphic found on Roaming Charges: New Days, Old Ways by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch):
Greenwald continues:
“Glenn Greenwald: This younger millennial set—who are now not that young anymore; they’re in their mid-30s or older and starting to assume managerial authority within these institutions—grew up believing that free speech is not an absolute value, and that it needs to give way in all kinds of instances where more important political agenda items and more important political values are in conflict with it, as they understand it. By which they mean: Ideas and arguments that may endanger marginalized people by making them uncomfortable, or that might lead to the implementation of harmful policies by convincing people to support them, are not ideas that should be heard. They’re ideas that should be suppressed in the name of these greater political values.”
“[Journalists] don’t believe in the right of citizens to confront power centers. They think that reporting means somebody in power, like in the CIA or the FBI, gives you information and tells you to go repeat it to the public. And then you go and do that. And they think that’s reporting. But if somebody’s outside of the scope of power—like some low-level Army private, like Chelsea Manning, who doesn’t occupy an important position in Washington, or Edward Snowden—does the same thing, not with the intention of propagandizing but with the intention of illuminating, they view that as criminal.”
Published by marco on 25. Jan 2021 10:03:17 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 25. Jan 2021 20:09:08 (GMT-5)
This is an interesting discussion featuring Jen Pan and Ariella Thornhill of Jacobin and Felix Biederman of Chapo Trap House. I enjoyed the free-ranging nature and insight, but found the end, starting at 1h30 or so to be the most insightful—where they discuss concrete lines leading from Bush’s policies to Trump’s—with a partial transcription below.
This is a partial transcript starting at about 1h30.
“Jen Pan: There is no Trump without Bush. […] For example, people always talk about Trump as having emboldened a new wave of white-supremacy or white nationalists. And, while I think that that’s true to a certain extent, but, when you go back to Bush, even though he didn’t verbally or rhetorically court white supremacists, when he launched the war in Afghanistan, one of the things he did was lower the requirements for entering the military […] so that included neo-Nazis (people with Nazi tattoos), [and so on] he basically created a cohort of white nationalists who had military training.
“Ariella: Do you remember all of the “see something; say something” posters in New York after 9-11? [1] That is not not responsible for empowering regular Americans to think that it’s their job to arm themselves and protect the streets.
“Felix: When you tell people that it’s a good thing to drop everything and join the Marines because you want to kill Muslims, that that’s fundamentally a good thing, what is that but emboldening white supremacy. And you know what? I’m sorry, but what is emboldening white supremacy or a cohort of white supremacists or violent extremist elements than the greatest one-time growth of the national security state (which [Bush] is responsible for)?
“Ariella: We’re not outside of that legacy now. Trump didn’t invent those things. And it’s interesting that so many Trump supporters actually became disillusioned with Bush and then participated in the riots at the Capitol. […] And you can see a direct line between our interventions in Iraq, the rhetoric around them, the media on both sides showing up bombing Baghdad, the constant paranoia: trust no-one, report everything, call in on your neighbors, foreigners are bad.
“Felix: What do people think imparted a greater hatred of Muslims and a greater lack of accounting for their lives being worth anything: is it the awful things that Trump says or does a lot of the time? Or is it killing a million Iraqis? And then it’s just fine. Nothing happens. They’re not even mad at him.
“Ariella: And Trump, he was capitalizing on the anti-Muslim sentiment that Bush fomented. He wasn’t just saying: here’s another cool group of people to hate, out of nowhere. He was looking at the base that he courted and looking at the beliefs that they already held—and they held those beliefs because of the rhetoric coming out of the Bush administration.”
Fun fact: the NYC police have licensed their trademark to the FBI for their national campaign against domestic terrorism now.
And, yes, I, too, remember those posters everywhere and feeling very creeped out by a state exhorting everyone to snitch on each other.
The following is an especially powerful, off-the-cuff explanation for the core problem in America: a nearly unacknowledged problem of inequality that actively disparages the poor and the disadvantaged. 50... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 18. Jan 2021 22:36:57 (GMT-5)
Chris Hedges delivers powerful analysis in this 45-minute interview on the Jimmy Dore Show. [1]
The following is an especially powerful, off-the-cuff explanation for the core problem in America: a nearly unacknowledged problem of inequality that actively disparages the poor and the disadvantaged. 50 years ago, it was open season on anyone non-white. It still is, though less (or expressed less directly, if not less effectively). [2]
But they’re now joined by poor whites, who the elites happily send to the gallows, disparaging them for their backward ways, telling them that they’re wholly to blame for their own suffering and that of their families, and, now, being thrown off of global media systems and hunted as domestic terrorists.
Hedges fears that backing this particular rat into a corner will lead to the wrong kind of revolution. But the elites are adamantly and illegally and immorally triggering it.
“Chris Hedges: You can never tell what ignites…I think the tinder is there. I think the problem is, that the Left is so decimated, that the backlash may be a proto-Fascist, right-wing backlash.
“That’s my fear.
“But those people are victims, too. They may speak in racist tropes and all sorts of language that I have spent my life fighting against, but their pain is real. Their suffering is real. Their betrayal is real. The meaninglessness that has gripped their lives is real. Their loss of hope is real. They’ve suffered. They’ve watched their families suffer. They’ve watched their children…all of that is real.
“Now, it may be expressed in very negative pathologies—and it is—but, unless we address that suffering, unless we reintegrate these people into society, unless we re-knit the social bonds, to give them a place, give them a sense of dignity, give them meaning, give them a sense of purpose, we’re finished.
“And that’s what frightens me. Because both the press, the media, which is … I turn on CNN … they can’t stop insulting these people fast enough. And the Democratic Party is the same. That essentially precludes any possibility of ever rebuilding a healthy society.
“Jimmy Dore: It’s like they think if they can just cancel them off enough social-media apps, somehow they’ll all go away. They’re Americans.
“Chris Hedges: That’s it. That’s what’s so scary. And, also, the inability on their [Democrats and the MSM] part to accept their own complicity for that suffering. There’s no contrition, there’s no self-reflection, there’s no self-criticism, and, of course, there’s no remorse.”
The article Roaming Charges: White Riot, I Wanna Riot... [More] by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
]]>Published by marco on 17. Jan 2021 17:40:30 (GMT-5)
The imposed panic and climate emergencies and COVID seems to be trapping more and more victims in a death spiral of increasingly frenetic, ill-considered, spiteful, and ill-informed—if not actively misleading—commentary.
The article Roaming Charges: White Riot, I Wanna Riot of My Own by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) contains a lot of increasingly unfair “hot takes” and seemingly unwarranted swipes at other journalists and commentators. This is an unfortunate trend over the last few months. I used to enjoy the weekly Roaming Charges more, but have found my self skimming more in recent weeks.
St. Clair throws everyone under the bus: in this article, he attacks Thomas Chatterton Williams, Bari Weiss, and Glenn Greenwald. I don’t really know Bari Weiss, but I’ve seen a couple of thoughtful interviews with Williams and Greenwald’s journalism is solid and his writing excellent. The attacks are usually ad hominem and never with a single mention of why we should not listen to these people. He’s preaching to his own choir. I think St. Clair is spending too much time on Twitter and forgets to switch back to a more journalistic mode. Or maybe I’ve giving him too much credit.
I just finished reading Greenwald’s nuanced response to the capitol riot and it should have pride of place on CounterPunch. It is a nuanced take on the situation and its likely ramifications rather than an unhinged rending of clothes by the Editor-in-Chief, who should honestly comport himself a bit better than the unwashed masses on Twitter who squirt their every last thought into the public aether.
He doesn’t have to write an essay like Greenwald, but he could keep the sniping of other commentators—who are all just reacting like him, for better or worse—to a minimum, if not out of a sense of respect, then out of a sense of modesty and recognition that he himself is probably no better. At the very least, he could provide an example so that we can follow along. Otherwise, it feels like we’re just supposed to say “amen” to any of his slanders, as if the reason is obvious.
Too much of St. Clair’s reaction is knee-jerk and unhelpful. He just piles on without knowing more about what he’s writing about—just like pretty much everyone else. But he’s not everyone else: he’s the editor-in-chief of CounterPunch and should comport himself a bit better than his most lunatic writers.
For example, he writes about the killing of Jacob Blake by police, as below.
“The people charged with enforcing laws in the US are the same people who enjoy impunity from transgressing them…In the latest case, the officers who shot Jacob Blake in the back seven times will not be prosecuted.”
He makes it sound like Blake’s death is another unpunished murder by police, as if to countenance the alternative—that Blake did absolutely everything wrong in his interaction with police—is unthinkable, if not outright treason to the cause. It’s stupid.
The article Short Take: Begging for a Riot by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) covers the case in more detail—actually looking at the video—and comes to the conclusion that,
“There was a tragic shooting. There was no crime.
“The media, however, did not fairly recite the facts of what happened, that he resisted arrest, refused to drop his knife as ordered, refused to comply with lawful commands and then opened and entered his car as police officers, with guns pointed, unaware of whether this person who they had reason to believe had engaged in violence before could have a weapon.
”
Another person whose web site is a bit too knee-jerk and has some weird ideas is that of Mark Crispin Miller. I recently saw an interview with him, where he seemed to be quite reasonable and well-spoken in person, but his web site is a collection of one-liner articles, each with a link—often with no context provided at all. A small handful of links turn out to be interesting, but others are, frankly, batshit and lead to extremely sketchy-looking web-sites that I tend to open in private tabs, out of respect for my own privacy.
For a professor who, in in-person interviews, makes an impassioned case for being careful about what one reads, he doesn’t seem to take his own medicine. Or, at the very least, he doesn’t offer any insight into why he’s posting a link. Does he agree with the content? Is he posting the content to show an example of harmful propaganda? Or of propaganda that shows an alternative viewpoint?
Instead, it’s just a firehose of unwashed opinions, with no input from the ostensibly intelligent and discerning maven. Left to my own devices, I can only conclude that he’s an unhinged believer in conspiracy theories that leverage an incorrect interpretation of statistics and improperly inflate an anecdotal case into prevalence.
Just a few examples:
He posted What happened to one caregiver after his COVID shot, in which he actually writes something:
“That, according to the CDC, 3% of those injected have had such reactions is alarming in itself; and what this post indicates is that the risk is not just that you’ll have some brief, mild side effects, but that you could get gravely ill.”
The article he links to describes a man whose vaccination triggered a full-blown flu with 104ºF fever and, of course, an uncaring public hospital who told the husband and wife that they would be fine—which is probably correct—and that he wasn’t in danger. The article, of course, posits it as an uncaring public-health machinery full of incompetents who don’t care if people live or die. You could just as easily interpret it as a hospital rightly determining that their resources don’t need to be invested in a case that would heal on its own, in their professional opinion.
Instead, the article goes on to note that “I ultimately brought him to a privately held highly regarded emergency room in Hartford CT for further care”, and then goes on to list all of the tests that this brave hospital is doing (for fees, of course). “At the end of the day, I am beyond thankful for this privately held highly regarded Hartford based hospital […]”
Miller uncritically posts this article as if it’s telling the reality of vaccine reactions for 3% of those receiving it, which is utter hogwash. The gist of the article is both to amplify a single case into the general one and to hype private medical care over public care. It’s probably a completely made-up example, created by the private hospital itself.
Another link is to someone named Anonymous Coward, whose web site immediately requires that you agree to an EULA before you can even read an article. Miller offered no citation to indicate that he thought the author was positing “reasonable questions”. It’s just bizarre how little care he seems to put into the information he posts, almost as if he’s overwhelmed by the flood of information, but unwilling to concede that he just shouldn’t post something he hasn’t vetted (which is odd for a professor of media/propaganda studies).
Melzer is not optimistic because the judgment was, essentially: the British court system agrees with all of the charges brought by the U.S.... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 17. Jan 2021 17:24:47 (GMT-5)
This is an excellent interview with Nils Melzer, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
Melzer is not optimistic because the judgment was, essentially: the British court system agrees with all of the charges brought by the U.S. and agrees that, under their own laws, they would also prosecute Julian Assange for journalism.
The British prison system has deteriorated Assange’s mental condition to the level that he has strongly considered suicide and is mentally very weak. The British judge deemed the U.S. prison system—and Assange’s likely form of imprisonment on extradition—to be even more unfit and harmful and dangerous to the man’s life, amounting to capital punishment, which is, apparently, where Britain draws the line.
However, if Assange were to recover enough, then Britain would, of course, ship him to the U.S. because they agree that he’s guilty, guilty, guilty.
He was in jail for jumping bail when he sought political asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. The British authorities were seeking him on Swedish charges that the Swedes had never really put into writing and would eventually retract for lack of evidence and witnesses. When he takes political asylum, he’s accused of jumping bail, which is, quite frankly, ludicrous, as it invalidates the notion of political asylum.
Even though it’s not legitimate to equate seeking asylum with jumping bail, Britain did exactly that. Why? Because they wanted to keep Assange in jail long enough for the U.S. to file extradition charges, which they did.
Britain sentenced Assange to the maximum prison time for jumping bail, which expired in April of 2020. Since then, he’s been in prison pending the results of the U.S. extradition trial.
The British courts found him guilty, but won’t extradite. The U.S. will appeal, though it’s hard to see what the argument will be. The two countries already agree on everything except whether the U.S. is allowed to torture Assange to death once they get him.
But, since the U.S. has appealed its frivolous case, the British government is happy to keep Assange in jail until all appeals are exhausted because he’s a flight risk. This could take years. So Britain and the U.S. have found a way to imprison and, more importantly, silence, Assange, while still pretending that what they’re doing is legal and above-board. This is standard fare for autocracies bent on convincing their populations that they’re actually civil republics.
It makes you wish for the honesty of true authoritarianism, which would just say “we put him in prison because we don’t like what he says and we want to use him as a warning to others who would speak out against us.”
Assange’s fate is similar to that of so many prisoners in the U.S., who don’t have a chance of getting out because they can’t post bail, so they languish in jail for years until they get a trial.
Here, they discuss the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 17. Jan 2021 09:18:08 (GMT-5)
This is a splendid and inspiring 30-minute discussion between Cornell West and Chris Hedges. As the interviewee, West does most of the talking. I’ve included a partial transcript of the points I found particularly insightful below.
Here, they discuss the 2021 storming of the United States Capitol:
“Chris Hedges: I found so much of the coverage—I don’t know what you thought—where they were demonized as thugs—which is not in any way of course to condone their activity—missing the point. There was complicity within the ruling elite and within the Democratic Party establishment for what’s happened and the core being the rupturing of these social bonds.
“Cornell West: I think you’re absolutely right, brother. I think about 17 years ago, when I published Democracy Matters and I talked about how there’s hardly a democracy left because of nihilism. The very forms of nihilism, the notion not just of might-makes-right and greed-is-good, but the massive shattering of families, communities, bonds, networks, so you end up with not just isolated, narcissistic persons, but you also end up with persons unable to provide, unable to generate any kind of story to live by, unable to situate themselves in a national narrative that has any connection with reality.
“I think it is a profoundly nihilistic moment—and nihilism is a lived experience of tremendous wound and hurt.
“When I was there in Charlottesville, when I looked in the eyes of the Neo-nazis, I saw deep wounds and hurts and joylessness and lovelessness and a search for meaning. They just hated me, they wanted to kill me, but I could still understand the ways in which they were very much a product of a predatory capitalist culture, that is just ‘money, money, money’ and they actually were being subjugated in their own distinctive ways. They just happened to be vicious, white-supremacists as well.
“And I think that’s in part what we’re dealing with. Yes, Trump, certainly, is a symbol and a sign and a symptom, but neoliberal rule has helped create the condition for the kind of neofascist, authoritarian, populist—whatever language you want to use—and the ways in which the unbelievable contempt that people have across the board for neoliberal elites, for the professional classes, for the chattering classes, for the educated classes, for the Tyranny of Merit that Michael Sandel talks about in his book, for the Cult of Smart that brother Frederick DeBoer talks about in his book.
“All of those have to do with the arrogance, the self-righteousness, the self-indulgence, sense of entitlement, that is so indifferent to the plight and predicament of poor and working-class people. But it’s always tied on the right wing with the white-supremacist public base. There’s no doubt about that. And it is white-supremacist, but it’s not just that.
“And what you usually have, of course, in corporate media, is the recycling of a certain neoliberal identity that is Manichean—we’re on the good side; they’re on the bad side—yes, they are on the immoral side, it’s deep, but it’s so much deeper than that.”
West also talks about how the repellent hypocrisy of the both the Republican and Democratic Parties leads directly to this sense of hopelessness. Even if you weren’t already a racist, you’re faced with a choice between a party that pretends to adore you and blames your shortcomings on non-whites ® and a party that has only contempt for your stupidity and poverty (D). They form the classic rock and a hard place: loathe yourself for capitulating to racism or loathe yourself for being a failure.
“Cornell West: Biden gets up and talks about a narrative that was true for the 1950s: ‘we are the city on the hill’. Oh, yes, uhhuh, you just supported a military coup in Honduras and you think the Honduran people are just going to view you as some kind of democratic example? We know the history of Iran, we know Guatemala, Brazil, Dominican Republic, we can go on and on and on, … what? 267 interventions in 67 cities since 1945? That’s American foreign policy.
“Then, on the other hand, you get your Mitch McConnell: ‘you can’t have self-government without a commitment to truth. Politics can’t just be a commitment to power.‘ He’s an example of the most raw commitment to power that we have.
“Here comes Schumer: ‘the most important thing is democracy.’ Since when has the corporate wing of the Democratic Party with neoliberal policies not been tied to big money, and Wall Street, and Pentagon militarism?
“The nihilism is overwhelming because people are saying: my God, this hypocrisy is out of control, this greed is out of control, what are the countervailing forces that allow us to fight against it? Fewer and fewer. And that’s part of our challenge. Fewer and fewer.
“How do you hold onto the honesty, the decency, kindness, commitments to justice, and being unflinchingly candid about the grimness, and yet still being willing to muster the courage to hold onto a love of truth, and goodness, and beauty […]?”
After talking about Biden being a creature of the past, then discussing Biden’s cabinet, with Janet Yellen, who West kind-of likes, but she’s problematic because of $7M of speaking fees to Wall Street over the last 3½ years.
“Cornell West: Is she going to be fair to poor and working people? I wanna give her a chance, but I’m not holding my breath.
“So, we wonder whether the American democratic experiment is just running out of gas. It’s headed toward a self-destruction because its willful blindness by greed and its willful ignorance by contempt for poor and working people thinks it can somehow muddle through. No. These chickens have come home to roost in a very powerful way. In an ugly way.”
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist − I’m a conspiracy analyst.”
On this episode of Useless Idiots with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, they interviewed Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at NYU who’s teaches media literacy, where he teaches students to examine what the facts are before calling something a... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Jan 2021 21:42:38 (GMT-5)
“I’m not a conspiracy theorist − I’m a conspiracy analyst.”
On this episode of Useless Idiots with Matt Taibbi and Katie Halper, they interviewed Mark Crispin Miller, a professor at NYU who’s teaches media literacy, where he teaches students to examine what the facts are before calling something a “conspiracy” or accepting “unimpeachable truth”.
Before the interview, at about 9:00 in, Matt and Katie discuss Bernie’s filibuster of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act).
“Matt Taibbi: When it finally comes time to vote … as Durbin puts it … magically, they never seem to have problems getting that $740B defense bill passed.
“Katie Halper: It’s also so out of touch. I guess in a way it’s like a useful – or logical – strategic thing to do because there is so much rah-rah imperialism in this country or “patriotism”? But there is also fatigue. I think people more and more are getting sick of the idea of spending more money fighting wars than doing things here.
“Matt Taibbi: Oh, absolutely–on both sides of the aisle. That was a big talking point for Trump in 2016, which is that we gotta spend more money building bridges at home – he didn’t do it.
“Katie Halper: But they’re really showing that there’s bipartisan consensus around funding the military-industrial complex and not bipartisan consensus for helping people survive.
“Matt Taibbi: Specifically, people. There is a bipartisan consensus for a massive, open-ended, Fed-fueled bond-buying program. You know, because who could possibly dispute the wisdom of making sure that all of our national treasure is committed to propping up the financial markets and not even all the essential ones, you know, like, junk bonds included.
“But the significant number of people who are looking at eviction and who are going to food banks right now. It’s an emergency. I’m not an expert; I don’t know what the best course of action is, but it’s just so glaring that some people seem more concerned about that than others.”
Since this episode, Congress has overridden Trump’s veto of the military spending bill—I think the first time a president’s actually done that—and so has the Senate, so it’s been approved without changes for the 60th time in a row.
The interview is also very interesting: Mark Crispin Miller is a tenured professor at NYU. He teaches a course about interpreting media and detecting propaganda. Students are taking his class about interpreting media critically, uncritically interpreting it, ascribing every viewpoint espoused in every piece of media they examine to the professor and then complaining on Twitter that the professor should be fired for those views.
This would be par for the course in 2020 (now 2021), but the administration—and his peers and colleagues—are also now uncritically trying to get him to cancel his course and trying to find a loophole in his tenure in order to fire him for his racist/extreme/triggering views. As a film plot, it would be too ludicrous and unbelievable, overwrought and obvious. It’s this man’s real life.
The students are there to learn. That some of them are terrible at it and don’t think they have anything to learn or that they learn the wrong things is nothing new.
What is new is a university staffed by people so stupid that they don’t even understand what the courses are about on a basic level. They no longer believe in academic freedom or in the pursuit of knowledge. They don’t understand that they are blind, unquestioning idolators of an official truth that is nearly completely propaganda—and agree with the students that anyone who points this out (even in a course designed expressly to help people overcome their blindness) should be fired and, above all, silenced.
It’s gobsmacking. One barely even knows where to begin. It’s deliberate ignorance.
Here’s Miller:
“They say in their letter that I promote non-evidence-based claims, which, in a letter filled with non-evidence-based claims, is pretty rich. So that’s an example of what I take to be their sincere discomfiture with my engaging precisely the sort of subject that most academics and journalists and others are trained to avoid—because you get in trouble if you talk about them.
“The course, as your question implies Matt, is sort of about that. We can always, easily spot the propaganda that we don’t agree with. Ask any liberal: what’s propaganda? They’ll say, ‘Oh, FOX … FOX News’. Ask any conservative, they’ll say ‘MSNBC’. Ok, they’re both right, both are propagandistic. But what they can’t see is the propaganda that they agree with, because they think it’s just information, they think it’s the truth.”
The real reason for this concerted campaign comes at about 50:00 into the video, where Miller says that “[he’s] been a thorn in the corporate side of NYU for years”. It is not at all unlikely that this is a hit job using credulous and deluded and easily manipulated “hitpersons”.
“That didn’t endear me to board of trustees certainly. And I’m a named plaintiff in a class-action suit over NYU’s mismanagement of faculty retirement funds. So you could say I’m a whistleblower…a troublemaker.”
They accuse him, of course, of reading the wrong things and writing about the wrong things. And, even worse, encouraging his students to read articles that question official cant—if only to figure out if maybe there’s a kernel of truth, or its complete hogwash, whether it omits information, whether it seems to be promoting an agenda, whether it mixes opinion and fact, or whether it’s truthy because of the context in which it presents provable facts. He teaches a media literacy course. This is bog standard.
He’s ended up being more critical of COVID simply because he’s read so much hogwash on both sides. He encouraged his students to read some articles—that he told them he didn’t necessarily agree with—to hone their own opinions, to see what other points of view they were and determine whether there was useful information that they didn’t already know.
Being students, they quickly decided that there was not—and very quickly—because they didn’t read any of the articles. Why bother? They already knew they were wrong? Being modern students, social-justice–aware and social-media–savvy, they instead took to the “airwaves” to get him fires for promoting ideas about COVID antithetical to those promulgated by the university.
You would think was just a giant misunderstanding, but it’s deliberate—and the stupid party acknowledges no ability on their part for misunderstanding because they already know everything.
“I have done what I encourage my students to do: cast a wide net. […] And NYU is very heavily invested in the vaccine industry—in the medical-industrial complex—and they’r e very deeply invested in the whole COVID narrative. I think the idea that someone like me is odious to them, so that if there is a university connection—if this is not just cancel culture run amuck at the academic grass-roots level—I think it would have more to do with that, with my heresy on this subject, than on those earlier sins of mine against the corporation.”
He is referring here as someone who doesn’t just knee-jerk believe everything that the university and its sponsors have to say.
“To call it a ‘school of thought’ is being overly generous. It’s not thought at all. It’s thoughtlessness, the ‘school of thoughtlessness’. And that’s not a school because you’re not teaching anybody anything except groupthink. And that’s what’s happening. It’s very oppressive. It sounds hyperbolic, but it’s like going to school during the cultural revolution.
“It’s like Gleichschaltung. It’s a Nazi term for streamlining. They made all the cultural institutions—they Nazified them all. So of course there was stuff you couldn’t read. It would be a crime to read it…over even bring it up. it’s kind of like that now.”
And this is a tenured professor accustomed to dealing with exactly these kinds of issues, with the confidence and experience to navigate these issues and fight back. He’s actually suing his colleagues at NYU for libel now. But what about adjuncts? Non-tenured teachers? Students?
Anyone without a firm grasp of propaganda—and without a means to support themselves that cannot be stolen from them—will be easily cowed into not rocking the boat. They will keep their heads down in order to keep paying rent.
As is often the case with those who speak out, this issue isn’t about the specific person (Mark Crispin Miller) because he’s going to be just fine. It’s about what this culture does to people in general, how it trains them not to question holy cant. It’s about a culture that traps people into lives of desperation, then makes sure that they don’t talk about the trap—or it will be sprung on them for good.
“The left today is not … your grandfather’s left. It’s not the left that I remember, the left I’ve long considered myself to be part of, which is anti-war, which is about rectifying grotesque income inequality, strengthening the working class, certainly civil rights, there’s a whole range … I see them as ‘left’ issues; many of them are also libertarian issues.
“What the left has now become is a pro-censorship army. It wants censorship. The left has changed immensely.”
There is a portion of ideology led by corporations and other power centers that has adopted the label “left” and is perverting traditionally left issues by pretending to support them, but only in ways that benefit themselves rather than the ostensible targets of the policies.
“Why would corporate universities like NYU be so adamant and militant in enforcing social-justice ideology institutionally? Why do they hire still more bureaucrats to oversee this kind of policing? Why is there a sort of bureaucratic apparatus? And not just in universities, but in corporations and in the government…that’s very interesting, that’s very telling.”
Miller makes an interesting point about the recent push to vaccinate black people first in America, in order to be “fair”, as a form of “justice”. However, the vaccination was developed very quickly—it seems to be fine, but it was still very quick—and black people in the U.S. have been used as guinea pigs for many other medical experiments, just in the 20th century alone. It’s an interesting point that the loudest voices for social justice are calling for exactly the same thing as the loudest voices for a racist distribution are: give it to the blacks first.
“It isn’t just my students. We are all obliged to make some effort to withstand the emotional pull of propaganda that pushes our buttons. Not our enemies’ buttons, our buttons … and resist that pull and try to keep your head and think clearly about what’s being offered to you, and who’s offering it, and what kind of appeals they’re using, and understand that there’s a tremendous amount of contrary information and data that we are simply not getting in a country like this one, at the moment, with a press such as we have now. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Miller goes on to discuss how he used to write op-eds for the New York Times and was a guest on NPR until he wrote his book about how the 2004 election had been stolen [1]. At that point, he was re-branded as a conspiracy theorist and has been erased. This important book is not available in the New York Public Library, which no longer surprises me at all.
“Matt Taibbi: I hear that constantly from newsrooms. That’s a thing that I hear all the time from journalists, which is that ‘man, I’m not even thinking about pitching this story any more, because I don’t want to deal with what’s going to come back if I talk about this’. Which is just as bad as being told that you can’t write about it.
“Mark Crispin Miller: That’s been in play for decades, of course. In order to rise within the world of journalism, as in academia, you have to develop an instinct for what not to touch.
“Matt Taibbi: I think that universe is just expanding a lot, though…
“Mark Crispin Miller: It’s expanding and the pressure has become more explicit. The sort of brutality of the suppression is more clearly manifest. It’s in our face more now. People feel much more vulnerable now. If the purpose is to make me an example, they’ve already managed to do that pretty well.”
A bit later in the show:
“Katie Halper: Making certain things taboo and naming them conspiracy theories, that does have real life impact on the lives and deaths of people. Especially when you look at something like Syria and Bolivia and Venezuela, which you mentioned, right? The sanctions of those countries are killing people […] when people are deemed crackpot conspiracy theorists for talking about Syria, […] that is a way of letting the U.S. government off the hook for impoverishing—and, really, killing—people through sanctions.”
Miller again, on propaganda:
“It has never really changed. It is that playbook: making people fear that they are under attack, so that anyone who demurs or dissents is posing a mortal threat to them. That’s what it was throughout the Red Scare—the Communists, they’re attacking us, they’re undermining us—the War on Terror, after 9-11 […]
“Just discussing this cannot be grounds for termination. Because if it is, we’re not living in a free society—we’re living in a kind of cult.”
“Katie Halper: The problem with […] the “toxifying” of alleged conspiracy theorists is that it really sanctions other theories. So, like, [say someone is] a 9-11 truther and I don’t agree with that, I don’t think that they make a convincing case—but the fact that that makes [that person] a crackpot while believing that there were WMDs in Iraq doesn’t make you … problematic. It makes you MSNBC material. There’s a real inherent value-judgment that is not at all principled or consistent.”
Conspiracies do exist; it’s silly to call things “conspiracy theories”. Many of them actually pan out (e.g. Watergate, Iran-Contra, the NSA, etc.). We should instead call them for what they are: unsubstantiated or insufficiently substantiated claims or theories.
“Katie Halper: The right-wing-ification of things. Yes, I think it’s an outrage that Tucker Carlson entertains the serious stuff and MSNBC and CNN don’t. But, instead, what people say is: that is clearly a fringe, right-wing conspiracy theory because Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingram are the only people who talk about it. No. The outrage is that no-one else does.
“Matt Taibbi: Right. Tucker Carlson does a series on the impact of private equity and hedge funds on small-town America and all of a sudden it’s like … that’s a right-wing trope … no! It should be on 60 Minutes, but it’s not.”
The... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 29. Dec 2020 16:53:28 (GMT-5)
I had only heard of Chapo Trap House (and listened to part of a podcast once), but had never heard of Matt Christman (one of the founders), until I got an extensive introduction in the video interview below. He seems like a pretty intelligent guy with lots of interesting ideas and analysis.
The following is a partial transcript that includes the bits I found the most insightful.
“Matt Christman: What it does is it makes the Democratic elites feel less bad about being elites. And that’s all it was meant to do, is launder their guilt. To make them feel that they deserve their granite countertops in their town house—because they know, deep down, they don’t deserve it.
“Unlike the heathen in the McMansion, the Republican voter, who thinks he has his wealth by God’s grace.
“[As the Democrat] I know that it’s privilege. I’m not giving it up. But I deserve it. And he does it. That’s what politics is meant to do.
“And vice-versa, the [Repulican] voter, he can feel superior to the coastal-elite liberal because he “believes in God”, which he absolutely does not. His God is an inground pool and an ATV…like, that’s God. But that fake spirituality is enough to make him worthy of his wealth and other unworthy.
“Matt Taibbi: It’s kind of like the political version of the difference between Catholicism and Protestantism. Catholics feel guilty; Protestants don’t.
“Matt Christman: Yeah! American evangelical conservatism is like the end-state of American Protestantism. We cannot find God’s will in our social lives, we cannot find [it] amongst our fellow man because … we don’t know them. We only know each other as consumers and as employers and employees, as strangers. So, God’s will can only be discerned by the distribution of fortune among people. Who’s got the stuff.
“And Liberalism is just that guilty Catholic conscience that gnaws at your acceptance and that’s why there’s so much energy, you know, if Trumpism is redefining the Republican Party and its cultural language and values in a way that’s irreversible, that’s appealing. Because who doesn’t just want to have fun? If the ship’s going down, why not grab everything you can and have as much fun in the moment as you can? What good is feeling guilty?
“Unless you’ve instilled in yourself through acculturation in the college experience and living in the social milieu that comes after that, there is a real virtue and there’s something to really enjoy — essentially, Democrats get off on not getting off.
“You have to have a special experience where that is in any way satisfying. And it’s very difficult to do if you don’t have money.
“It’s that superego denial and, in denying yourself, you express your virtue, and therefore you can enjoy the things that you do enjoy. It launders your sensual enjoyments and allows those to be accessible.
“But if you don’t have a lot of money, if you don’t have a lot of comfort, then you don’t have … you have very little need to do that. What you have a need for, is to feel anything other than misery.
“And all the Democrats are telling you and will tell you in the future is: No, no, no, you have to feel bad about any pleasure you have in life. Whether it’s going to Thanksgiving or having a cigarette or having a full-sugared soda or going hunting. You have to feel bad about it. Or not do it and then feel bad about not doing it. And if you don’t have material comfort and ease and you’re haunted by precarity, a real felt precarity, then the appeal of that denial is nonexistent.”
Katie then asked if Christman could, in one minute, convert Taibbi to be a Marxist or Socialist.
“Matt Christman: We know where everything’s headed. We know. It doesn’t matter if the Republicans win the election or the Democrats win the election or we beat the Chinese or the Chinese beat us or we have a a leveraged buyout by the Chinese. Whatever. The future holds … it’s a neo-techno-feudalism until all the resources are gone. The only alternative to that is the boring shit that Marx talked about 150 years ago: working people organizing their place of exploitation and alienation, sharing their common experience of alienation and exploitation, applying it to the problem of making their lives lives of dignity and plenty and then getting numbers sufficient to confront power. (Emphasis added.)
“Katie: There you go. Boom. Cut to the Internationale.”
Christman goes on to note that there is little likelihood of this happening as long as media figures and journalists are an elite that lives in a “discursive bubble” that has nothing to do with “the price of butter”.
He acknowledges that nothing he does (or that people like him do) has a chance of getting anything useful to happen and that he and others each have to fill this existential void in their own way. There is a giant disconnect between those who know how to fix things — or see parallels to past problems — and their ability to get anywhere close to helping people to help themselves. E.g. No-one knows who this relatively brilliant and well-informed person is (including me, before this interview).
I published the first of these notes in Be honest about what the Democrats are. The following notes aren’t all directly related, but... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 5. Nov 2020 23:08:25 (GMT-5)
I’ve collected a few notes from the last few months that I haven’t published in other articles. Clearing things out before the civil war makes it all irrelevant.
I published the first of these notes in Be honest about what the Democrats are. The following notes aren’t all directly related, but there’s a thread if you’re willing to look for it.
I’ve only recently been introduced to this pairing and I quite like them. They were more recently interviewed on Useful Idiots (YouTube), which is also a good introduction to their politics and dynamic.
The video above had a few interesting bits in it, from Krystal, asking an obvious question of the hypocrites that have elected themselves arbiters of public opinion (i.e. the blue-check Twitterati),
“Saagar has the views that he holds on the show, which are unfortunately the views of the mainstream of America. How does Saagar end up on the wrong side of that line and Joe Biden end up on the right side of that line? […] I don’t understand where we’re drawing the line…”
On Donald Trump, she strikes the right tone and gets to the heart of his failing as a president.
“I view Donald Trump differently … I view him as abhorrent. But I also see him as incompetent and lazy and not particularly ideological.”
“Trump is constantly called the ultimate evil, but he’s also incapable of properly acting on his madness. America needs competence right now, so you could argue that incompetence is particularly dangerous. Ideological or no, his staff is pursuing very dangerous and destabilizing policies … though those efforts largely go nowhere as well.”
Ball’s views are echoed by Matt Taibbi in an absolutely scorching pre-election diatribe, The Worst Choice Ever by Matt Taibbi (SubStack), in which he pulls no punches on anyone—neither candidate, the media, and the whole debacle.
Taibbi hones Ball’s view above that Trump doesn’t do anything with his power by noting that it’s because he doesn’t seem to know what it means to be president. He never seems to exercise the tremendous power he has, which is pretty lucky for everyone, but is also the exact opposite of what the Chicken Littles have been shrieking about for years. It also completely belies his supporters’ purporting that Trump has actually been really effective. He hasn’t—not at more than a handful of minor things, that he often partially rolled back soon after.
“Trump played populist in public, but his presidency was spent parked limp and hostage-like in a robe before a TV somewhere in the White House, watching in horror as the anchors of shows like Fox and Friends informed him about the Beltway power machine’s latest successful effort to shit all over him. His response, every time, was to sob into Twitter by his lonesome, often deep into the night.
“He seemed not to have a clue he was president, which again was mostly a good thing. Just this weekend, in his latest race-baiting campaign to accuse “Squad” members Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of being illegal people, he asked out loud, “Where is our Justice Department?” No one in the audience had the heart to cry out, “In your Executive Branch?” (Emphasis added.)”
Taibbi’s description of Jeff Sessions is inspired and is an absolute murder by words.
“Jeff Sessions, who spent most of his career as the dumbest member of the United States Senate, but entered the Trump White House as the administration’s most accomplished expert on almost everything”
Taibbi makes the same point as above with a nice metaphor about “stepping on a rake” to describe how the Trump administration can’t get out of its own way.
“This pattern, of stepping on a rake before even getting to do the bad thing at scale, was a chief characteristic of the Trump presidency.”
To sum up, Trump was much more concerned with—and thus distracted by—short-term narcissistic goals rooted in his origins as a much smaller-scale grifter. That is, his sociopathy was not commensurate to the task. People think that Trump is the worst possible person, but he didn’t have the important component of long-term thinking unassociated with his own personal gain (which is, by definition, a short-term goal as compared to bending the will of the nation).
He’s not Hitler, folks. Hitler had follow-through, which made him deadly. Trump doesn’t have anything he believes in strongly enough—other than self-aggrandizement.
“In sum, this man who secured the presidency because voters thought his blunt, unvarnished persona might prove a corrective to unchecked elite corruption proved incapable in office of doing anything except complain into his phone, and abuse himself like a zoo gorilla every time a camera was pointed in his direction. Used to getting his way as a petty corporate boss, he was uniquely toolless as a Beltway operator, a man who in a thousand years couldn’t figure out how to use the office to achieve something positive. (Emphasis added.)”
Taibbi also has plenty to say about the Democratic Party and its current, vile incarnation—rudderless and nearly completely loosed from the even the empty platitudes that they used to mouth. Unlike many others, Taibbi is careful to point out that much of what transpired against the sitting president was illegal.
This fact reflects poorly not only on the perpetrators—who remain not only not prosecuted but uncharged—but also on the Trump administration, which didn’t even try to arrest or hinder those attacking illegally (even though that’s literally part of the job of the executive branch, i.e. The Justice Department).
“The last four years have been a ceaseless tantrum of security state hacks, media lackeys, and Beltway nomenklatura who from day one openly sought to jail our Clown-in-Chief for the unforgivable crime of getting elected without their permission. Their behavior is the only reason the Tuesday could turn out to be close.”
This “worst choice ever” is not just a problem on election day—the transformation that began a few years ago is much, much closer to completion. The country is politically split into two opposing camps that make GI Joe vs. Cobra look nuanced. There is no middle ground; Bush’s pronouncement is now the only law of the land: “you’re either with us or you’re against us.” It’s pretty much the only thing the two camps agree on. Those in a “neither” camp aren’t very vocal.
“Certainly the idea that there’s more than one legitimate political choice has already been excised from most upper-class discourse, with not only Trump and the Republicans but also every actor from the Green Party to Tulsi Gabbard and Bernie Sanders denounced across the corporate press as favorites of foreign enemies.”
In the end, Taibbi argued himself out of voting for either party with another excellent broadside of the Democratic Party.
“Trump’s incompetence and influence on the darkest part of the national character make it morally impossible to vote for him. But his opponents are lying, witch-hunting scum in their own right, a club of censorious bureaucrats whose instincts for democracy and free speech hover somewhere between the mid-seventies GDR and the Church of Scientology. (Emphasis added.)”
The post Trump on Bernie. When he’s right, he’s right. (Reddit.com) includes a video of Donald Trump doing his thing of being a blind pig finding a truffle. He says that Bernie got “S-C-*****” by the Democrats and that “Bernie is the greatest loser in history” because he always throws his support behind whatever the Democrats find in the couch cushions to run against Trump. Trump would have been much more concerned running against Bernie, but is fine with Biden.
In the comments, there was the expected back-and-forth between the anyone-but-Trumpers and the why-can’t-my-vote-ever-mean-anything-ers, culminating in the following:
“The only way is to join progressive organizations and become larger within the party. That’s it and that’s what we are doing. In the meantime the democrats are the on;y place we can get a foothold so support them as a lesser evil because it’s the only group we can have a voice and eventually take over.”
“The left hopes that replacing Trump with Biden will buy the left time. But Biden will pack his administration full of a whole new generation of vulgar careerists. It will be these people–not the left–who inherit the Democratic Party when he leaves. They will have the institutional knowledge and connections and access to money that are needed for success in American politics. They will continue servicing the oligarchs. And the Republican Party will respond by growing ever more bellicose, ever more grandiose, ever more willing to tear the whole thing down. Biden will accelerate the rise of new nationalist figures who might be able to do all the things Trump can’t even dream of doing.”
To which I answered:
I understand the argument, but how much time is this going to take? It’s been like this my entire life (which is not so short anymore): the progressives have had little to no influence on the Democratic Party platform and candidates. They move more to the right every 2-4 years. This year, when there are progressives _everywhere_, all we can do is point to down-ballot wins _waaaay_ down the ballot. No-one with any clout is allowed to sully the platform.
Biden’s web site is nearly diametrically opposed to the Democratic platform. Which one do you think is the real platform? They’re already walking back any progressive statement they ever made. People keep writing that we just have to push the Dems and they’ll go left, but there isn’t any evidence that this is true. They go where the money is. They seem to be socially progressive, but only when compared to Republicans, who are on a jihad against abortion.
At every opportunity, they remove the most attractive progressive baubles from their platform. When they’re caught, they might put it back in, but what kind of a relationship is that? The only hope progressives have is to work with people whose interests are diametrically opposed to theirs, but who can be occasionally shamed into paying lip service to those interests?
How can you trust them? They have no obligation to do anything they say now once they’re elected. They almost never do. It’s like having a roommate who’ll do the dishes if you tell them to and watch them while they’re doing it, but if you look away, they’ll sell the dishwasher for drugs.
I understand that change takes time, but we have to get real. Progressives invest an enormous amount of energy and time in the Democratic Party and get nearly nothing out of the effort. Perhaps that effort could be better invested elsewhere.
I’ve also read from certain sources (e.g. Chomsky) that former Sanders supporters are getting concessions from the Democrats and having success here, but you have to watch what their hands are doing not what they’re saying. The Democrats lie about everything. They will assure everyone on one day that of course Medicare for All is an option and the Green New Deal is on the table and we’ll all be standing here in four years and will seen nothing of that. Instead, you’ll get increased investment in fracking and natural gas (for example) and a few more options in the ACA (perhaps it will cost $11,000 instead of $13,000 for a family of four). Hooray.
I know we need patience and can’t expect everything to change at once, but this is ridiculous. Progressives are being gaslighted and deluded into throwing their votes away. They will get nothing that they want for them—other than perhaps voting out Trump.
Not only that, but people like Chomsky have officially said that there is nothing the Democrats can do to lose their votes—and the Democrats have taken them at their word and pushed the performance right up to the line—or over it, for some of us—of the reprehensibility and underhandedness of Trump. That is, Trump set the bar at a certain low level and the Democrats are limboing right up to it, confident that Chomsky of Hamelin and his acolytes can’t not vote for them anyway. They get to have their cake and eat it, too. Or so they think.
The Dems strategy is so fraught that they may blow the whole thing again because too many people see through the lies and can’t in good conscience vote for them either. They’re using pretty much the same formula with a candidate who’s somehow even less popular than Hillary was. They’re putting in a minimal effort and will get a minimal return. Perhaps it will be enough.
This doesn’t mean “don’t vote for Biden”. It just means you should be honest about what you’re getting.
Another commentator responded with,
“Biden is an emergency transition candidate. I truly believe that. Trump is such a threat to this country we just can’t risk running a true progressive at this moment. It’s not fully tested and is only argued in coffee shops whether a progressive can win. But we do know moderates can win.
“And right now, Trump is easily the biggest threat to the well being of this country we’ve had in 100 years.
“So I completely understand wanting to run Biden right now as the top priority isn’t some progressive agenda that’s unproven. We absolutely can not sustain four more years of Trump. Which again why Biden is perfect. Biden is only going to be president for four years […]
“[…] But soon they’ll have no choice as they are forced out by mortality. And when that happens there will be a flood of young progressives hungry to take over from the cold dead boomer hands.”
This is a typical response for online discourse; it literally does not address any of my points and just parrots the original premise. This is a completely hopeless person who has almost entirely forgotten what they’ve started fighting for (assuming they were ever fighting for anything). It’s hard even to understand what kind of a damaged mind could contort itself into writing something like “Biden is perfect.” At that point, the Democrats really don’t have to do anything to get that person’s vote, really.
The Democrats positively revel in how bad Trump is; they also have a whole media army reminding people again and again and again about how bad he is, that ousting him is such a top priority that it doesn’t matter who’s running against him. And then they pick the absolute lowest bar possible while bro-shaming and strong-arming and cheating Bernie out of the nomination once again. And so many people are just fine with that. They don’t even consider for a moment what the Democrats would have to actually do in order to lose their vote. They don’t care. This makes them no better than Trump voters who are also in a cult, unable to even conceive of changing their mind.
This time, it’s Democrats who have lost their minds about Trump, depicting him in Boschian terms, as the devil incarnate. The Republicans did the same thing with Obama during his reelection campaign. They are both right for the wrong reasons. Both Obama and Trump are bad for most Americans. Both of them will not change anything fundamental to benefit anyone but the already-wealthy. Substitute Biden for Obama.
Why is this person hopeless? Because after 40 years of waiting for even a shred of progressivism in national politics in America, their answer is … wait some more. Now is not the time. That is literally what we’ve been told for my entire life. It’s never the time. It will never be the time because people like this don’t make it be the time.
Incrementalism can work, it’s true—except in America today. In America today, incrementalism is subsumed and redirected and pushed into highly unproductive channels until it peters out. There are great victories in the past, ones that even came about as a result of incremental changes, but the system has learned from its mistakes. It seems completely able to prevent such incremental victories from happening anymore.
Both parties are wasting precious time—we can’t waste four more years. I don’t believe a Democratic administration will do anything realistic to build infrastructure or combat climate change. They will dither and employ their own form of incrementalism, making sure that their paymasters and all of the usual suspects are taken care of first and then sifting through the crumbs left over to see if there’s anything left from which to make some useful policy. It won’t be enough.
The Democrats and their enablers are basically saying: wait for the bad people to die so we can take over. That will not happen. They will not rise to power this way. You can’t just ooze into power—you have to seize it.
Frederick Douglass was right about 150 years ago and he’s right today:
“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
This is exactly the formula that the Democrats use decade after decade. Waiting for the opportune moment, waiting until the Democrats give progressives a chance, is delusional.
There is also, as Jimmy Dore and Chris Hedges point out, again and again, no point in promising your vote long before an election. Withhold it. Play coy. How in God’s name are you forcing the Democrats to do anything when you concede the only bargaining chip you have before you’ve even started negotiating? That makes no sense. I will decide who I vote for when we get closer to the election. Who knows what Biden does in the meantime? Is there literally nothing that the Democrats could do to lose your vote if you’re a Dump Trumper? Have you already decided that Trump is the absolute worst possible timeline?
The argument that we should just vote for Biden is an interesting one: your vote doesn’t matter anyway, so why not just vote to keep out Trump? That is, you’re never going to be allowed to vote for the person you want, so just give your vote to a Dump Trumper instead. But if votes don’t matter, why do they want our votes so badly?
The only argument is really that with Biden they think that there’s a chance to get something useful done whereas with Trump there is no chance. This is a fallacy. There is no chance that anything useful will be done by the either administration.
Biden will pay more lip service and drain more energy by pretending to bend in a more progressive direction…and in the end fail to do so, having expended everyone’s energy and time. Is that better than just knowing that Trump won’t listen in the first place? Both choices are awful. The chances are slightly better with Biden/Harris (because we have to consider the very real possibility that Biden won’t even make it through the first year).
So the Democrats are, once again, rewarded for having done everything they can to slow down progressivism in America while pretending to be better than the Republicans.
The U.S. is at a complete impasse. There isn’t always a solution to every problem.
Perhaps a vote of no confidence would be better than either of the two choices. We already had that in 2016 where over half of eligible voters didn’t vote. What if those voters voted, but for no-one? Or for Howie Hawkins? What if we finally get the Green Party up to that fabled 5%?
I think the part that really annoys the most about Dump Trumpers is that they are arguing that there is no such thing as principles and that those of us who choose to adhere to them are fools—and should give our votes to our betters to use. I’m not sure they understand leverage at all. I’m not sure how they reconcile the duplicity of the Democrats with the promises they keep citing Team Biden as having made.
As Jimmy Dore put it in Congress Goes On Vacation During An Economic Crisis! (YouTube), “you know who tells you to shut your mouth and vote? Dictators.” and “Congress doesn’t work for you, you idiot. Now go vote for them.”
Published by marco on 4. Nov 2020 22:36:12 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 16. Nov 2020 22:44:39 (GMT-5)
A friend sent me a link to a web site called “Dave Hodges: The Common Sense Show (Freeing America, One Enslaved Mind at a Time ®)”, which I honestly hesitate to link because I actually opened it in a private tab in a browser I never use—the equivalent of putting on two pairs of rubber gloves before picking it up.
I’ll include the title of the article, “Mounting Reports of a Simultaneous Coming Civil War and World War III Will Be Unleashed With An Unfavorable Election Result for Harris/Biden”, which is even longer than the name of the web site in what seems to be a sort of anti-marketing, anti-usability, and nearly deliberately SEO-unfriendly pattern followed by many of these sites.
The article is a word salad of run-on sentences, bad grammar and spelling, and missing punctuation. It boasts a pretty big font, which bespeaks the audience’s diminishing—or already diminished—ability to read smaller text. I.e. the target audience is most likely 50 and older.
The comments are even more poorly written, but some are actually hostile to the writer in a way that is refreshing. For example, the first comment was,
“nothing is past the fallen pedophile government loan wolf left us with? its clear when a society removes God and his moral will destruction is soon to follow. i think it would be the acme of foolishness not ask you to percent any kind of evidence other then the term, “ sources”? i cell phone camera a video maybe a US military report? something that tell us there is concern or this is another chicken little scream looking for attention due to what amounts to a failed life!”
That’s verbatim. Unaltered. If you can get through it—and extract sense from it—it’s actually heaping opprobrium on the author for having written a completely unsubstantiated propaganda piece. He apparently has a few readers like, as you’ll see below.
I wonder idly whether the entire site has been constructed by warring AIs machine-learning their way to parity with real-life human commentators. Parity isn’t honestly that hard to achieve, as pretty much anything goes, no-one sticks to any writing rules, and no-one really reads things before responding to them. The sins of AIs standing on unsteady legs like a newborn colt will not only be ignored, but will likely never be noticed at all.
That might be our saving grace: without correction, the AI’s machine-learning algorithm will consider its mission achieved too soon, finding a local maximum that satisfies people with poor—or no—reading comprehension, while still being detectable to some of us. On the other hand, if they can camouflage as the content above, then I already can’t tell the difference between a poorly trained AI and a person who’s banged their head on porcelain one too many times.
I wonder how much of the Internet is just that already: fake news is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can no longer tell the reliable (e.g. Wikileaks) from the purportedly reliable, but increasingly biased (e.g. NY Times) from the deliberately fake (e.g. The Onion) from the deliberately misleading (e.g. FOX, CNN, MSNBC) from the unhinged (e.g. Dave Hodges) to deep fakes and Twitter bots and so on.
The tricky pair behind South Park recently put together a 15-minute episode of Sassy Justice, a TV show filled with deep fakes that discuss the scourge of deep fakes. It’s a typically meta- and filth-filled performance from them that is funny and hammers the point home that you’re probably already watching deep fakes or reading “articles” written by AIs.
After having read/skimmed the article, I wrote the following back to my friend (with a little bit of light editing for clarity and de-personalization). In it, I reference various points from the article (e.g. China invading Taiwan).
I read the article and will include my thoughts below.
Of all of the horrible things that might happen to America—or are already happening to America—being invaded by Chinese troops through Canada is not one of them. Nor is there any reason for China to invade Taiwan since it already has de-facto control over it. It’s as if Hodges was saying the U.S. might invade Puerto Rico — what’s the point?
And from which FOBs would China be “rolling over the northern and southern borders”? What are the logistics here? For a country that has garrisoned the whole planet itself, it sure is good at making up stories about other countries. That’s called “projection”.
The more I read, the crazier that invasion plan gets. The U.S. is going to nuke itself to get rid of the Chinese?
Wait, … they’re coming from Canada and Mexico?!?
I thought the e-mail that Hodges cited that called him a “lying sack of s___” was a bit harsh and over-the-top, but it was probably the only accurate thing in the whole article.
I have heard from no other sources that China is invading anywhere. It is, instead, the U.S. that has—and has had for over 6 years now, since Obama declared the “Asian pivot”—a large part of its Navy parked in the South China Sea, right on China’s maritime border. Don’t take my word for it: perhaps you’d be more interested in hearing it from Pat Buchanan [1], who writes about these topics regularly (see his author page (Antiwar.com)).
He’s joined there by another guy you might know, Andrew Napolitano [2]—see his author page (Antiwar.com)—who writes more about freedom on domestic issues, discussing actual attacks on freedom like the constantly renewed Patriot Act.
If you want news from someone a little closer to home—and from someone who has recently taken a decidedly anti-Democrat turn after having been one for his entire life—there’s James Howard Kunstler, from out near Saratoga Springs. I read his book The Long Emergency this year (and I even read the follow-up Living in the Long Emergency). He blogs regularly at Clusterfuck Nation and, with his newfound decision to support Trump just to keep the Democrats out of power, you’ll like what he’s saying (he’s gotten a bit too erratic for my tastes lately, but your mileage may vary).
As a sample, he ends his latest post Last Round-up at the Wokester Corral with,
“I’m under no illusions that Donald Trump will Make America Great Again in the way that many of his supporters understand that slogan. The USA is headed into a terrible ordeal of economic disorder that I call the long emergency. Mr. Trump won’t stop it, and it may yet make a fool out of him. But the Democratic Party’s agenda would add an extra layer of tyrannical and sadistic insanity to the process that will only bring more suffering to more people, and I don’t want that to happen. I believe that Mr. Trump will probably win the election, but we’ll have to see what kind of nefarious dodges his opponents will employ to prevent any resolution of that outcome.”
Again, I don’t agree with everything he writes—less lately—but he offers an interesting viewpoint and it’s good to keep a finger on the pulse of other opinions.
Getting back to Chinese invasion: I think instead of looking for enemies outside of America, you’d be better served at looking for the enemies within. There are more than enough of those to deal with. Nearly everyone in power in the U.S. over the last 40 years has been more than happy to continue squeezing blood from the stone of the poorest 90% in America just to keep the roulette wheel spinning.
Even besides COVID-19, there is plenty of dire news about America’s situation today without making stuff up about invasions. The real-life stuff is more depressing, though, I have to admit.
China is not coming for us. Neither is Russia. Why bother? We’re doing a great job of tearing ourselves apart all on our own. The Federal government shoveling trillions into Wall Street can’t last forever — and those spinning plates are going to come crashing down at some point, as the “fake” economy of Wall Street re-aligns in a “short, sharp shock” with the “real” economy where unemployment is insanely high and small businesses are dying out like the dinosaurs.
Trump’s just trying to keep those plates in the air long enough to get re-elected, but he has absolutely no plan for what to do after that. It’s hard to see what the plan is now, to be honest. The plan so far seems to be “protect the rich”, then we’ll see. Biden thinks he has a plan, but that team can’t plan its way out of a paper bag, either. It reminds me of that wise old man Mike Tyson’s words: “Everyone has a plan, until they get punched in the mouth.”
Check out some of the links. I tried to choose stuff that I read that’s a bit closer to what you’re used to—no radical leftist propaganda, I promise.
Since I sent the response to my friend, I have since learned that his opinions and those of Dave Hodges are actually mainstream in America. No less
auspicious and mainstream a source than Newsweek published the following cover very recently:
They probably don’t go so far as to hypothesize about a Chinese ground invasion, but give it time. We saw the heights of fancy to which the press could lift itself using only prevarication and bile when building the immense pipe dream [3] of RussiaGate, so don’t bet against their sinophobia. Blaming the other always prevails—especially when you have America-sized problems to solve.
Update: I recently say the following snippet in the NY Times as well:
The NY Times continues its plummet into the sewer of conspiracy theory and clickbait headlines.
A while back, I had a conversation with a friend who asked me why the Democrats chose Joe Biden over Bernie... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 3. Nov 2020 22:54:52 (GMT-5)
I’ve collected a few notes from the last few months that I haven’t published in other articles. Clearing things out before the civil war makes it all irrelevant.
A while back, I had a conversation with a friend who asked me why the Democrats chose Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders. How could they want to maintain a status quo that hurts so many people?
”Dr. King’s policy was, if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent […] will be moved to change his heart. […] He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”
Given the overwhelming evidence, the only reasonable conclusion is that the Democrats don’t see a problem to fix. With Biden, they chose status quo because they actually don’t want anything to change. Everything is working just fine for them. They’re all multi-millionaires. Pelosi—just to pick a name at random—is worth about $120 million.
Bernie kept going on about change—jobs, health care, education—but the donors like things the way they are. Having lots of desperately poor, undereducated and underinsured potential employees for their donor’s businesses is very much a buyer’s market. If those employees are overeducated but burdened with massive debt or if they are dependent on employer-provided health-care, then that’s also an ideal lever.
Obama talked about change too—and hope—but he simultaneously assured the important people that he didn’t really mean it. They were reassured.
Bernie asked about as nicely as one can for the Democrats to hear the people. Twice. Both times they rudely declined. Instead, they went with Hillary—a tone-deaf choice that ended badly—and now Biden, whose fate is still up in the air.
”Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.“
It won’t matter much if he gets elected. At least we’ll have a new band of idiots to disappoint us in different ways—perhaps more eloquently. Perhaps it will all be soothing enough that we go back to sleep and forget about all of the things we were so enraged about when Trump could be blamed.
We might not even notice as four more years fly by with no effective action on climate change or healthcare or education or economy. The bar is so low now that Biden will be heralded if he just manages to handle COVID-19 in an even halfway non-criminal fashion. The revolution will almost certainly be postponed, if not canceled (no pun intended).
In the end, it was more important to Bernie to be in with the Democrats than to start a revolution. He might have been convinced otherwise if it wasn’t for COVID. I think that definitely put a stick in his spokes. On the other hand, he conceded incredibly quickly and effusively supported his pal Joe as if it was six of one/half dozen of the other whether we get Bernie or Joe, which is a nearly shockingly disingenuous if not outright mendacious betrayal.
The article Did Americans Want a Political Revolution? by David Sirota (Jacobin) cites Bernie,
““This struggle is not just about defeating Donald Trump — this struggle is about taking on the incredibly powerful institutions that control the economic and political life of this country,” he said in the speech launching his campaign.
“I’m talking about Wall Street, the insurance companies, the drug companies, the military-industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, the fossil fuel industry, and a corrupt campaign finance system that enables billionaires to buy elections. Brothers and sisters: we have an enormous amount of work in front of us.”
I can’t imagine any of that coming from Joe Biden. It’s more likely to come from Trump, to be honest. Even just before the election, Bernie’s throwing shade, but not explicitly at Trump, which is refreshing—he attacks the system.
A pity the Democrats aren’t on board at all. The Greens are, though. Bernie should have run as their candidate—even though Howie Hawkins is a helluva guy, Bernie has more star power.
But Bernie’s not running. He might get a cabinet post, but don’t count on it. Instead, it’s Trump v. Biden. The video below provides an overview/prediction.
]]>“He supported the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968, the People’s Party in 1972 and 1976, and the... [More]”
Published by marco on 2. Nov 2020 22:42:52 (GMT-5)
Howie Hawkins is the Green Party candidate for President in 2020. He’s a former teamster who, until 2018, was loading trucks for UPS. He’s been involved in socialist and green politics since…forever:
“He supported the Peace and Freedom Party in 1968, the People’s Party in 1972 and 1976, and the Citizens Party in 1980. Since its first national meeting in 1984, Howie has been a Green Party organizer.”
He lives in Syracuse, New York. He ran for governor of New York State 3 times. He has never been elected to public office.
The Green Party platform is that “[we] will be damned if we wait on the Republicans and Democrats to save the planet, confront racism, address spiraling inequality, and avert nuclear apocalypse.”
Their main issues are (the links lead to a lot of detail):
The article Third-Party Candidates Had An Impact In 2016. In 2020, They’ve Struggled To Gain Traction. by Rosie Gray (Buzzfeed) is one of the few interviews with Hawkins in anything approaching a mainstream source. In it, he addresses the Chomsky complaint that the Green Party should be working on down-ballot candidates and forget the presidency.
“If it were up to Hawkins, he told me before the event, he’d rather not be running for president at all; but decades of activism has taught him that the Greens must contend in the presidential race to gain any traction. He’d started out, with the birth of the Green Party in 1984, thinking presidential politics were irrelevant and that the party’s strategy should focus on bottom-up organizing. But this vision conflicted with the reality of the US system. “My attitude was that until we have a caucus in Congress, it’s not worth running for president. But what I didn’t understand that I understand now is that you need to be in those races to get your ballot line.””
The Democrats and Republicans have made it so that you can’t just run down-ballot—or you lose your spot on the ballot entirely. Hawkins acknowledges that he’s basically a token candidate—he’s very well-spoken and very down-to-earth.
“Hawkins had arrived early for the interview, wearing jeans, running shoes, and a Teamsters jacket. The thing that struck me most upon meeting him was his absolute normalcy. Hawkins is a retired longtime UPS worker and union member who got his start in political activism as a youth in the Bay Area. I asked him if it had been especially challenging to get his message out. “Very,” he said. “I have yet to speak to a network or cable news reporter or get a segment.” He’s done local NPR and local television interviews, but nothing national. “We just haven’t got the coverage that Jill Stein got,” Hawkins said. “Even Ralph Nader.””
He’s a smart dude with a good grasp of policy and what needs to be done. His background is working-class as hell and he’s been involved in politics since the 80s. What’s not to like? The Green Platform outlined above looks pretty good—it’s basically a good start. It’s highly unlikely that Hawkins will even get the 1% that Jill Stein got in the last election.
The following 45-minute video is a refreshing talk with a no-nonsense presidential candidate who isn’t trying to sell anything.
About 20 minutes in, Rall asked Hawkins about Edward Snowden and whistleblowers, to which Hawkins replied,
“I would ask Ed Snowden to be in my administration.”
When Rall asked him what the difference is between the candidates, Hawkins replied that,
“Biden would be better on public health, but not much else.”
Rall followed up with,
“Ted Rall: What would you do about the pandemic, on day one?”
“Howie Hawkins: Scale up. Use the Defense Production Act. Scale up testing, contact-tracing and isolating those exposed or infected in order to suppress community spread of the virus, so we can go back to work and to school safely. That’s what every organized society in the world has done, except this one. To me, that’s why the two governing parties are presiding over a failed state.
“I mean, Trump, he’s a loser: COVID won; he wants to move on. But Biden’s had the platform and he’s not clearly mobilized the public behind what we need. And if you’re in a position to act and you don’t, then that makes you complicit and that’s where we’re at. And I’ve been probably just as outraged about that from Biden as knowing his long history as a neoliberal hawk.
“He lives within commuting distance of the White House press corps. You know, he could have convened them in socially distanced news conferences, like Cuomo did early in the pandemic […] and pounded away and mobilized public opinion to get that kind of response.”
“I think our left intelligentsia has been co-opted into liberalism. They call themselves socialists but, in the end, when it comes to real politics, they always say support the lesser evil. I think what that means is that the Green Party, the left, has to develop its own spokespeople because these people give a good abstract reason on why we need to move beyond capitalism. When they get the option, they support the Democrats, which is the world’s second-most enthusiastic capitalist party.
“And it’s always an existential threat.
“But like I explained earlier: it’s not so much Trump. He’s really not that different from what the establishment wants. It’s the climate emergency, the new nuclear arms race, it’s declining life expectancy due to growing inequality. Those are the emergencies and that’s what the left should be talking about instead of saying ‘Trump is bad and Biden’s not good, but you need to get Trump out of there and then we’ll fight Biden’ You know, why don’t we fight the system now?”
A little later, they discussed the huge group of non-voters—100 million in 2016—and how there’s opportunity there for a truly grass-roots third party. Because neither the Republicans nor the Democrats seem to be interested in gaining new voters or actually offering half of the voting anything that will motivate them or inspire them.
“The largest bloc of voters are those that don’t vote. And they don’t buy that argument. They’re disgusted with both parties. People say they’re apathetic, but I’ve done a lot of door-knocking. I think people are alienated. And they feel powerless. And they stop paying close attention to policies because it’s painful, when you feel you can’t do anything about it, so you turn to private life. That’s the future of the Green Party.”
On militarism, he thinks Trump’s not really been effective at all, either positively or negatively (at least not on purpose).
“I don’t think it’s Trump, I don’t think he’s paying attention. I think it’s the national security state”
He calls for more local politics and briefly discusses the “community policing” plank in the Green Platform.
“We call for community control of the police, so that they don’t police themselves. […] Rid the force of the racists and the sadists. So that police work for the people and not for themselves.”
People used to argue that there’s “no way” someone like Ralph Nader or Jill Stein or Howie Hawkins could be president, that they’re not statesmanlike enough or well-versed enough in the nuance of leadership. Trump’s greatest gift to third parties has been to give the lie to that notion: it’s clear that their is no lower bar of competence or experience or statesmanship that precludes becoming president.
Even the Democrats have helped with the nomination of Biden: they took the ball that Trump hiked and ran with it. The Democrats looked at the Republicans and thought to themselves “that + 5% should do it”.
The Green Party Platform is actually quite good; their candidates are quite good; it’s a scandal that an interview with a presidential candidate has 57 views and 5 upvotes. A microcosm of politics in America.
His message is simple: the elites are stealing votes in... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 1. Nov 2020 22:19:51 (GMT-5)
Greg Palast has been fighting for years to stop voter purging, all on a shoestring budget and with hardly any major media coverage. He’s gotten more prominence recently, but it’s unconscionable how little influence his message still has. [1]
His message is simple: the elites are stealing votes in America with corrupt and illegal practices. Many others abet by staying mute and idle.
“I never use the term vote suppression, because when someone steals your car, you don’t say, my car has been suppressed. Your vote has been stolen, not suppressed.”
Too many in America seem to think that voting is a privilege, not a right, that somehow it’s OK to purge people from voter rolls “just to be sure they’re legal”. No. That’s not how it works. It’s innocent until proven guilty, not guilty, then let’s have a look. Oops, sorry, I guess you missed this election while you were waiting us to decide whether you’re a real citizen.
People are showing up to polls after waiting a whole day only to realize that they’ve been illegally purged, told that they’ve moved (when they haven’t) and told that they should clear up this irregularity and “better luck next time…we’re sure you understand”.
Watch the video below and see how many more votes are being suppressed than would be needed to tip the vote in one of more states (some of them quite crucial, AKA “battleground”). This is a real issue. It may be the real issue that determines the outcome of the election.
And yet, there’s not much reaction or awareness from the mainstream media (which doesn’t care about poor people) or even the recent surge of protests, which have focused more on lives rather than votes. It’s hard to argue with them because they’re already fighting for something that’s right, but they’ve climbed too small a hill. Fighting for people to be able to vote is simultaneously more likely to yield short-term results and more likely to lead to better results on other issues (like fixing policing in America—and saving lives).
Imagine if the combined firepower of progressive ire and activism that we’ve seen this year were focused on the voting issue instead of on police killings—just for now, understand—imagine how much voter suppression could be reversed. With the election right around the corner, though, that ship has, once again, sailed for another four years, leaving Palast to publish short lists of advice for people to do their best to ensure that their vote will actually be counted.
The United States of America is not a democracy, not by a long shot. How can it be, when the basic right of participation is contingent for so many? It’s a sham and scam, plastering over its gaping holes with marketing and unearned goodwill. The American people are being conned every day into thinking that they have anything to do with how their country is run for them.
Even if you do get a shot at voting, your opinion on matters generally doesn’t matter. I wrote about this recently in Corruption in the US:
“Regardless of whether Americans were completely against or completely for a policy, there was a 30% chance of it being enacted. […] The influence of the top 10% is much, much closer to the ideal—where issues with 0% support never pass and those with 100% support always do—they effectively kill ideas they don’t support and tend to get what they do support (60% chance instead of 30%).”
But, hell, if you can’t even vote, then how can you even make your voice heard—and then ignored?
And, even once you have voted, there are people who care so little about democracy that they’ll try to invalidate those votes on any technicality they can find, as well. The article Republicans Are Trying To Cancel More Than 100,000 Votes in a Deep Blue Part of Texas by Eric Boehm (Reason) documents how Harris County expanded its curbside voting to anyone—because of COVID-19—rather than for just people with disabilities (as it was to-date).
“State election officials had previously signaled that Harris County’s drive-through voting plans were legally permissible. A Republican effort to block the drive-through voting stations was rejected by the Texas Supreme Court earlier this month, and the state Supreme Court on Sunday rejected an attempt to get those votes thrown out.”
It’s almost enough to make you give up, but then you let the bastards win. The bastards have been winning for a while—and a bastard will definitely win this time, again. But that doesn’t mean you have to like it. Part of their power is that people let them assuage their consciences by telling themselves and us a fairy tale about how they’re the good guys. If the least we can do is rob them of our belief, then that’s a start.
This show is separate from her Useless Idiots weekly show with Matt Taibbi,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Oct 2020 22:26:52 (GMT-5)
Katie Halper had a show just about a month ago that had three separate interview sections. The first was with Chris Hedges and Gerald Horne; the second with David Sirota (writer for Jacobin); the third was with Arun Gupta.
This show is separate from her Useless Idiots weekly show with Matt Taibbi, of which I am a regular listener. I only learned of her from that show and am impressed with the nuance and balance and insight she brings to all of her shows.
The first interview is highly recommended, although Hedges and Horne didn’t say anything I hadn’t already heard from them before. Perhaps the most salient was that, historically, Biden has been much deadlier and more damaging than Trump has been, to date. That is, the effects of all of his policies sum up to a much higher body count and amount of suffering. Even if Biden isn’t solely responsible, he regularly brags about being the architect of the Patriot Act, every crime bill in the last 40 years, and was essential to herding the Democrats into voting for the Iraq War.
Even Trump isn’t solely responsible for the ills attributed to him. It’s hard to reconcile his obvious incompetence with the immense and sweeping societal changes with which he’s attributed. Just like Biden, though, he likes to take credit, and either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that he trumpets about having done deeply immoral things. When you brag about having done evil things, the more competent you are, the more liable.
And even if you haven’t actually done what you claim you have, it still says a lot about you that you’re willing to brag about it—or that you think it will elevate your standing. It’s like the buffoon in school who brags about having lain with a particular lady. We’re encouraged to think that he’s pathetic if he hasn’t actually done so, but he’s actually boorish and stupid for thinking that having done so would imbue him with worth.
So, even if Biden and Trump are lying about their so-called triumphs, they’re terrible for thinking that they are triumphs instead of feeling any shame.
I thought David Sirota had some good things to say and found him to be a better interview than a writer, actually (something I’d already noticed in his interview on Useful Idiots). In his writing at Jacobin, he often seems a bit hurried and a bit enamored with reporting the latest trend. His interviews, though, draw on a long career participating in and observing the political process in America.
For example, his discussion of primaries vs. general elections was insightful. He and Katie agreed that Bernie Sanders winning the Democratic primary would have been a much larger accomplishment than winning the general election. That is, the general election would have been easier because Bernie had a much harder battle convincing the democratic establishment than the people of America.
Americans were on Bernie’s side—he just couldn’t get invited to the dance because he and his ideas were too dangerous to the establishment. He was not controllable in the classic sense that Joe Biden, of course, very much is. Joe is perfect because he doesn’t really seem to have strong convictions, so it’s not hard for him to adjust when something he believes conflicts with the requirements of the paymasters. Bernie would clearly have been more difficult.
Later in the conversation, Sirota explains how amorality is a requirement in U.S. politics with a story about the end of the 2020 Democratic primaries, where most of the Democratic candidates still in the running were basically ordered by the party to drop out and back Biden. He explains why they didn’t have a problem with doing that—because they’re amoral and there is no personal downside. The choice was simple.
I’ve partially transcribed Sirota’s soliloquy below.
“You know, all of those candidates dropping out and endorsing Biden, they all knew that if it was a gambit that didn’t work, they’d be well-remunerated career-wise, future-political-run-wise, like, that was not a risky gambit.
“Pete Buttigieg—a former McKinsey exec—going in with Biden at the last minute…Pete Buttigieg, at McKinsey, all he did was analyze risk. [He’s thinking] I’m being paid by McKinsey, now I’m going to run for Secretary of State […] and now I’m gonna run for mayor and now I’m going to run for President … it’s all ROI. It’s all, like, now I ran for President and now I’m going to go with Joe Biden and, even if Joe Biden loses, I’m going to go with all of his donors. It’s all, like, that’s how these people think.
“And I’m not even ripping on Pete Buttigieg in any special sense. He’s just, like…that’s a very typical thing. So, all of the people that dropped out and endorsed Biden … Beto … dude, it’s like, awesome, you’re just like everybody else. Congratulations. You’re like everybody else and, like, … so, like, your [Katie’s] point about fair game? I don’t judge it on fair or not fair. That’s just what this disgusting system is.
“And so, you know, Pete Buttigieg and [garbled] and Beto and so on, they’re just amoral actors in an amoral system. And amorality is going to be amoral. And they’re not anomalously amoral, they’re not like sort-of super-villain amoral
“You know, the thing that made Bernie stand out was that, Bernie, he’s exceptionally not amoral and the actual question that remains unanswered—or, answered in this depressing way—is: can you win high office and not be completely amoral? You know, he got to the senate. OK. Can you become president and not be completely amoral? I got no answer for you—other than a negative one. (Emphasis added.)”
The final interview was with Arun Gupta, who has a decidedly different take than Hedges, Horne, Halper, and Sirota. They may have their flaws, but this guy is militantly adamant that anyone who doesn’t agree with everything he thinks in every detail is not only wrong, but actively evil and racist. He starts in by establishing that everything is Trump’s fault.
“Trump basically took class issues and forced them through this racial, ethnonationalist lens. Because people were suffering…”
He acknowledges that people have been suffering for a long time. Why doesn’t he care that only Trump somehow manages to appeal to them? Is it because the Democrats don’t try? Or that people watch Biden and co. hand—and continue to hand—people like Trump a quiver of arrows against the already downtrodden? Is it not legitimate to wonder how helpful it is to vote authority’s handmaiden’s back into power?
Gupta would back off on blaming only Trump sometimes, but he kept circling back to it. He would pay lip service to the possibility that Joe Biden has severe failings, then upbraid anyone who thinks that those might weigh more than he, Gupta, thinks they should.
This guy can’t hear the irony of how a “racial, ethnonationalist lens” is literally what progressives stand for right now. It’s also questionable what sort of empathy he brings to the table when he talks about how he “went to the Midwest” and found that “People, particularly men, were bad at managing their money”, which is just kind of a shockingly insensitive and wrong-headed way of starting a conversation about the poor in America.
He makes it pretty clear that he thinks only the colored poor in America deserve attention — his story about white poverty starts off by victim-blaming, which is deeply ironic, considering his entire political stance. It’s also not surprising because this is exactly the mistake that everyone left of Trump makes—which is why Trump and his ilk pick up votes (they’re the only ones who even pretend to listen or understand).
This explains a lot about why Trump wins those people over. There’s this adenoidal know-it-all telling them that they failed to exercise their privilege and that they should get behind reparations … or, there’s the adenoidal Trump telling them he’s going to help (even though he doesn’t do that).
Gupta also focuses on disproportionality, that minorities are dying in higher numbers than they should be … but the absolute numbers are overwhelmingly white people … and white people know that. So if 14% of the population is black and 60% is white. A disproportionate death tally would be 24/50 … but the 50 is still thinking that there’s a problem, no? How do you make any headway telling the people watching 50 of “their own” die that those people don’t matter as compared to the extra 10 that died “on the other side”?
I’m obviously not arguing that should ignore the disproportionality and fix things for white people first, but that you have to frame your arguments more diplomatically if you’re at all in interested in gaining allies.
Spoiler alert: Gupta and others like him have clearly completely given up on gaining allies. They are instead engaged in a project of purging even those who would be in alignment on most issues. The purity test is alive and well.
The sides exist in America; if you’re at all interested in bridging the gap rather than chiding, excoriating and writing off everyone who doesn’t already believe what you believe at the beginning of the discussion, then your chance of success is nil. The incorrigible are the loudest, but they’re a minority (on both sides, actually). Many people who Gupta considers the enemy are just vastly misinformed, not irredeemable.
Gupta also called anyone not voting for Biden or voting for a third party a “deluded idiot”. He thinks that his skin color makes him better than white people, and so can dismiss out-of-hand the opinion of any old white man like Chris Hedges, whom he calls “terrible” (I thought he was joking at first, but he apparently sincerely believes it). So, essentially, Chris Hedges is the enemy and isn’t active politically and is useless and terrible. Ok, thanks, Gupta.
“If you’re making an argument that no-one should vote for the Democrats or that people should vote for third-party candidates in battleground states […then you’re the enemy]”
Basically, anyone who disagrees with Gupta is insignificant and doesn’t have “skin in the game” (an expression favored by his counterpart zealots on the right) and “just bitches at home” and “they’re just white people and people of color who think like white people” and “I don’t give a shit what these people do; they’re irrelevant.”
Honestly, anytime you basically call people race-traitors (as above), it’s time to look in the mirror, ya damned racist.
It’s terrible because this kind of attitude is exactly what will get Trump either a second term or help elect someone even worse than Trump after Biden’s catastrophic failure. I suppose people just can’t accept that there’s no good answer. Or people see that there’s no good answer and settle for the petty satisfaction of feeling like they’ve made the right choice anyway.
He ends with “if you are arguing that people in swing states should not vote for Biden, then you are an enemy of everything that is just and progressive and good.”
I honestly can’t tell anymore if he knows what Biden is, or if he’s actually claiming that Biden stands for “just and progressive and good” things. It doesn’t matter because that statement is going to age like milk. It’s going to be more like a shift-change at the rape factory. Just like when Obama was elected.
So, to sum up, only Gupta knows how bad Trump is. If you don’t agree with him, then you’re deluded and have no idea how bad the next four years will be. And Trump is a fascist dictator who must go and anyone disagreeing is an enemy.
He really doesn’t think that “white people” (a phrase he used often) can tell him anything because he knows everything better and has come to all the conclusions for you already. Basically, if you’re white, you’re a racist moron and should sit down, shut up, and let POCs run things. Because that’s freedom and progressive and anti-racist. Arun Gupta is an absolutely terrible advocate. He can only preach to a choir because he burns a bridge to anyone who disagrees with him.
This isn’t to say that race isn’t relevant, but that being racist against whites doesn’t magically solve racism against POC. As I read somewhere online: they want to bring back separate drinking fountains, but switch the signs. These people are ideologically dangerous and always have been. Malcolm X expressed more disdain for liberals than conservatives
“The white liberal differs from the white conservative in one way. The liberal is more deceitful and hypocritical than the conservatives. Both want power. But, the white liberal has perfected the art of posing as the negro’s (sic) friend and benefactor.
“The American negro is nothing but a political football and the white liberals control this ball. Through tricks, tokenism, and false promises of integration and civil rights…,”
He was also savvy to media in a way that is still highly appropriate today.
“If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
Self-styled progressives have unfortunately lumped everyone in together and hate the people who are oppressed (poor whites) and love the people who are doing the oppressing (the Democratic party).
So what’s going to happen If Biden wins in a landslide? He’s going to scream “mandate” and try to push his awesome program through, whatever the hell that happens to be: there are the programs outlined on his web site, those in the DNC platform, and the programs he mentions when he knows that’s what people want to hear. These views diverge wildly and often conflict.
Which is the real agenda? Hint: it’s probably a mix, but Biden’s history does not bode well. He would basically have to rule nearly completely differently from everything he’s actually stood for and fought for in order to be a passable leader.
Biden has already caused more harm than Trump, but the argument is that he will be less dangerous in the upcoming term. I think that’s debatable. Trump talks a lot, but fails to act in the large to the degree that Biden has been able to. Trump’s damage comes less overtly and more through negligence and incompetence.
Trump’s “team” (for lack of a better word) will let the nation fall apart. It’s possible that Biden’s would be better here (esp. with regard to COVID-19). It’s also possible that Biden would begin to repair the damage Trump has done to the American Empire, which would be a loss for the world.
The article Joe Biden and the Possibility of a Remarkable Presidency by Bill McKibben (New Yorker) is more hopeful,
“Taken together, a big victory and a transitional attitude [Biden indicating he’s a one-term president] might let a politician whose career has been marked by compromise and caution throw both to the wind. ”
I know McKibben is just trying to put a nice spin on it—throwing some Sriracha on the shit sandwich—but even he has to admit that it’s just pure speculation: “As I said, there’s no real reason to think that this is how Biden views the world.”
Some of the essay is just flat-out wrong as well, as when he writes that “[Biden’s] biggest virtue is the dull (if welcome) one of decency.” So he’s making the same argument as people made for Obama’s taking the reins from Bush (the last absolutely evil Republican, if you’re old enough to remember), but this time about a man who’s spent a career proving he’s not really a decent guy.
It’s a remarkable thing to write about someone who has been involved in—and proudly declaims his hand in the provenance of—much of the most heinous legislation passed in the last 40 years. Patriot Act, Iraq War, Crime Bills, etc.
I think Sirota nailed it above: Biden is basically amoral. McKibben’s essay is a muddled and self-deluding paean to desperation.
That isn’t to say that Sirota himself isn’t susceptible to the allure of desperation (or maybe just punching the clock at his writer’s job). The article At the Debate Last Night, Biden Finally Distanced Himself From the GOP’s Austerity Talking Points by David Sirota (Jacobin) lends more weight to Biden’s (most likely temporary) shift away from austerity in the second debate than he’s probably due.
“During a discussion about the budget, Biden brushed off his old deficit hawk buddies, outright rejected GOP talking points, and instead made the point that the federal government must spend what it takes to rescue cities and states.
“[…] It is hard to overstate how big a shift this is for Biden. He was the guy who spent decades touting his work with Republicans trying to cut programs like Social Security in the name of budget austerity. Now he’s expounding on the need for countercyclical deficit spending. To use a Biden-ism, that’s a BFD.
“The question is whether or not Biden musters the fortitude to stick by the position he expressed tonight.”
The answer is “no”, and I’m basically citing David Sirota himself from the video above, who said, “they’re just amoral actors in an amoral system. And amorality is going to be amoral.”
What in God’s name makes you think that a last-minute change in espoused policy to score points during a televised debate has any bearing whatsoever on what Biden will actually do once in office?
Do you not remember the clip on Stephen Colbert’s show where Kamala Harris gut-laughed at Colbert when he asked her how she could support Biden so whole-heartedly when she’d excoriated him as a racist during the primary debates? She intoned that “It was a debate,” as if that made it abundantly clear that one just lies one’s face off to score points.
That’s obviously how politicians in the States work, for the most part, but Sirota seems to be lending import to their statements when he should know better.
It’s so tedious, though. Basically, the message is: get with the program we’ve designed without your input, no questions asked. Ask any questions and you’re written off as an incorrigible enemy. If you accept the program 100%, then you’re still the enemy because of your skin color (this time white). We’ve heard this all before (against POC). It wasn’t convincing then, either. This approach will fail because it’s not adapted to how people are; it’s not inclusive and not going to find broad support.
I’m all for a “shut up while the adults are talking” approach when you don’t actually need the people you’re dismissing. Otherwise, you’re sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.
Honest question to self-styled progressives: what do you think is going to happen to that 50% of America you’re dismissing out of hand? Are they supposed to throw themselves off a cliff? Are they even part of your country? Are they only allowed to come back in when they’ve learned to behave? How do you see this working?
I know that they misbehave; I don’t approve of them any more than I approve of you, but what do you plan to do with them if they don’t straighten up and fly right? It’s not like you can throw them out—they live here already. Nor do you have the right to do that, though that might come as a surprise to you.
They certainly won’t go quietly.
Another big problem with voting in the Democrats and then pushing them to the left is: with what do people think they’re pushing? Imagine that they’ve handed Democrats the House, Senate, and presidency. The dream, right? Now we can finally get things done. What kind of things? Whatever the fuck the Democrats want. They will have everyone over a barrel because they know that people will vote for them no matter how shitty the candidate, no matter how meager the platform.
There will follow the old adage that ends in “we both know what you are, my dear. Now we’re just haggling over price.”
What are you going to do, progressives? Vote Republican next time around? Vote third-party? (In the voice of Kodos) “Go ahead; throw your vote away.”
Voting out the Republicans or voting in the Democrats is only kicking the can down the road. They’re all useless and immanently dangerous. The Republicans claimed a mandate too. When the Democrats do the same, will it be to address climate change or health care or the pandemic? Of course not. What did they do with their last mandate in 2008? The ACA and $15 trillion of QE to Wall Street.
There is no good option. Put a fork in it.
“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. [1]”
The article The Assange Extradition Case is an Unprecedented Attack on Press Freedom, So Why’s the Media Largely Ignoring It? by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch) describes what is happening to Julian Assange.
]]>“In an Old Bailey courtroom in London over the... [More]”
Published by marco on 6. Oct 2020 23:14:19 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Oct 2020 23:14:28 (GMT-5)
“In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act. [1]”
The article The Assange Extradition Case is an Unprecedented Attack on Press Freedom, So Why’s the Media Largely Ignoring It? by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch) describes what is happening to Julian Assange.
“In an Old Bailey courtroom in London over the past four weeks, lawyers for the US government have sought the extradition of Assange to the US to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act of 1917 and one charge of computer misuse. At the heart of their case is the accusation that in leaking a trove of classified US diplomatic and military cables in 2010, Assange and WikiLeaks endanger the lives of US agents and informants.
“One of the many peculiarities in this strange case is that the evidence for any such thing is non-existent. (Emphasis added.)”
The charges are trumped-up (if you’ll pardon the expression). It is a show trial, a star chamber. There is only the barest pretense of observing societal conventions of justice.
The West, as embodied by the two powers of Britain and the U.S., is interested only in power, in greedily retaining its grip on the majority of wealth, energy, resources, and technology that it seized centuries ago. The only difference between Britain and the U.S. and the worst dictatorships is that the former have better marketing.
It is not interested in having the truth told. The truth is not flattering. Despite the efforts of Assange and Wikileaks, the scales have fallen from far too few eyes—the propaganda is strong. The West weaves a convincing tale about itself, selling the tale to its fellow travelers with promises of personal wealth and power.
What did Assange actually do? He is the founder and former editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks, an organization dedicated to journalism in a pure form, without commercial support. It is crowd-funded and user-supported. He is a publisher and a journalist of the highest caliber.
“What Assange and WikiLeaks did – obtaining important information about the deeds and misdeeds of the US government and giving that information to the public – is exactly what all journalists ought to do.”
Instead of kowtowing to power like other media, WikiLeaks tells the real stories that they wouldn’t—whether because of incompetence or complicity or both. WikiLeaks tells the truth; nothing they’ve reported has been disproven. They don’t offer “spin”—they just provide information. The data speaks for itself. It speaks volumes. These are the sounds that the West seeks to stifle.
Why the West? Is it not Britain and the U.S. that are at fault here? While they are the primary players, the rest of Europe (for example) is complicit in its silence. Where are France’s threats of sanctions? Where are Germany’s? Why do other large countries not flex their not inconsiderable muscle to defend justice?
Where is the rest of the media? The so-called mainstream media plays handmaiden to power, as usual. The article What if Ignored Covid-19 Warnings Had Been Leaked to WikiLeaks? by Ray McGovern (Antiwar.com) points out that,
“(On the chance you are wondering, The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal – as well as National Public Radio – have paid zero attention to the extradition hearing in recent weeks – much less to Judge Baraitser’s Queen of Hearts-style, “off-with-his-head” behavior.)”
The article The Cost of Resistance by Chris Hedges (Mint Press News) describes what lackey Britain is doing to Julian Assange for its lord and master, the U.S. It has been and continues to torture him in a medieval justice system that does nothing to earn the epithet.
“[…Julian] is taken from his cell in the high security Belmarsh Prison at 5:00 am. He is handcuffed, put in holding cells, stripped naked and X-rayed. He is transported an hour and a half each way to court in a police van that resembles a dog cage on wheels. He is held in a glass box at the back of court during the proceedings, often unable to consult with his lawyers. He has difficulty hearing the proceedings. He is routinely denied access to the documents in his case and is openly taunted in court by the judge.”
It is a show trial, a kangaroo court. There is no due process. The outcome is a foregone conclusion. The torture continues to keep him physically weak, psychologically off-balance, and intellectually diminished. It is a message to—a warning—to others who would transgress against the powerful.
“Julian is already very fragile. His psychological and physical distress include dramatic weight loss, severe respiratory problems, joint problems, dental decay, chronic anxiety, intense, constant stress resulting in an inability to relax or focus, and episodes of mental confusion. These symptoms indicate, as Nils Melzer [2], the United Nations’ special rapporteur on torture who met and examined Julian in prison has stated, that he is suffering from prolonged psychological torture.”
He was a towering intellectual, a quick wit, with unshakeable principles. He could be so again, were he freed. He is an Australian citizen whose government has abandoned him. He is being tried for treason against a foreign government. He is being punished for telling the truth. He should not be on trial—he should win a Nobel Peace Prize had this honor not already long-since been tainted by war-mongering recipients like Kissinger and Obama.
“If Julian is extradited to the U.S. to face 17 charges under the Espionage Act, each carrying a potential 10 years, which appears likely, he will continue to be psychologically and physically abused to break him.”
Hedges shares the words of another prisoner of Britain: Roger Hallam, the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion (Wikipedia),
““The days of standing up to tyranny have long faded,” Roger writes from prison. “The life-and-death struggle against Hitler and fascism is consigned to the history books. Today’s liberal classes believe only in one thing: maintaining their privilege. Their one priority is power. The number one rule is: preserve our careers, our institutions at all cost. (Emphasis added.)”
It is these people who are beholden to those in power and it is these people who want to punish Assange for daring to make them feel a twinge of conscience for their complicity, for their having profited at the expense of those less fortunate.
Make no mistake: Britain, as the left hand of the United States, is trying to get away with murder. If they don’t directly kill Assange in prison, they will extradite him to a death sentence in the human-rights-disaster that is solitary confinement in a U.S. federal prison. The article Assange Extradition: The Deadly Magistrate by Craig Murray (Antiwar.com) provides detailed evidence and concludes,
“Even before Covid-19 became such a threat, I stated that I had been forced to the conclusion the British Government is seeking Assange’s death in jail. The evidence for that is now overwhelming.”
The article Julian Assange Must be Freed, Not Betrayed by John Pilger (CounterPunch) is just one of many by one of Australia’s greatest journalists about his friend and fellow journalist. Pilger eloquently describes the effects of Assange’s and Wikileaks’s work.
“WikiLeaks has informed us how illegal wars are fabricated, how governments are overthrown and violence is used in our name, how we are spied upon through our phones and screens. The true lies of presidents, ambassadors, political candidates, generals, proxies, political fraudsters have been exposed. One by one, these would-be emperors have realised they have no clothes. It has been an unprecedented public service; above all, it is authentic journalism, whose value can be judged by the degree of apoplexy of the corrupt and their apologists. (Emphasis added.)”
In his long and storied career as a journalist and documentarian, Pilger has seen myriad examples of tyrannical regimes—official enemies worthy of opprobrium. These rulers turn out to be no worse than our own, when we turn an unflinching eye on them. This unflinching eye reveals that our official enemies are downright clumsy and limited in their vision of power when compared to our own governments.
“As a reporter in places of upheaval all over the world, I have learned to compare the evidence I have witnessed with the words and actions of those with power. In this way, it is possible to get a sense of how our world is controlled and divided and manipulated, how language and debate are distorted to produce the propaganda of false consciousness.
“When we speak about dictatorships, we call this brainwashing: the conquest of minds. It is a truth we rarely apply to our own societies, regardless of the trail of blood that leads back to us and which never dries. (Emphasis added.)”
The logical and unavoidable conclusion is,
“[…] if there is any sense of justice left in the land of Magna Carta, the travesty that is the case against this heroic Australian must be thrown out. Or beware, all of us.”
Or, as Ray McGovern [3] poignantly points out,
“As I think of my good friend Julian, what comes to mind are the desperate words of Willy Loman’s wife Linda in Death of a Salesman:”“He’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall in his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must finally be paid to such a person.”
Free Julian Assange. Fight for Julian Assange. Spread the word.
See the article Nils Melzer Spricht über Wikileaks Gründer Julian Assange by Daniel Ryser (Republik) (or the English translation Nils Melzer discusses Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange by Daniel Ryser, Yves Bachmann (Photos) and Charles Hawley (Translation) (Republik)) for more information about Nils Melzer’s work as United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. His work is well documented at Wikipedia as well.
“Vor unseren Augen kreiert sich ein mörderisches System […] Vier demokratische Staaten schliessen sich zusammen, USA, Ecuador, Schweden und Grossbritannien, um mit ihrer geballten Macht aus einem Mann ein Monster zu machen, damit man ihn nachher auf dem Scheiterhaufen verbrennen kann, ohne dass jemand aufschreit. Der Fall ist ein Riesenskandal und die Bankrotterklärung der westlichen Rechtsstaatlichkeit. Wenn Julian Assange verurteilt wird, dann ist das ein Todesurteil für die Pressefreiheit.”
I laughed out loud at Dore’s riff on Obama’s continued characterization of America’s torture as “enhanced”, starting at about 4:30,
]]>“That’s my... [More]”
Published by marco on 4. Oct 2020 18:12:28 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 4. Oct 2020 18:14:13 (GMT-5)
The video below is a 30-minute analysis of Obama’s short speech at the DNC that provides context from how Obama actually ruled when he was president.
I laughed out loud at Dore’s riff on Obama’s continued characterization of America’s torture as “enhanced”, starting at about 4:30,
“That’s my favorite: enhanced interrogation technique. Enhanced? That sounds like it’s nice. Are you going to turn on some mood music and some track lighting?
“No. We’re going to hook your balls up to a car battery and then take turns drowning you.
“Oh! That kind of … I’ll just take the regular. Don’t make a fuss out of me.”
In the article What Drives Trump?, I pointed out that it’s not just Trump who lacks “acts, logic, integrity, or principles”. Obama talks about “values” that failed to be applied—note the self-exonerating passive voice—when “[w]e crossed a line [and] tortured some folks”.
Dore pauses the video and yells back,
“You’re supposed to follow your values. […] if you don’t follow your values when things are hardest, then they’re not values, they’re hobbies.”
When Biden was asked about ending the filibuster or packing the court (two highly relevant election issues), he responded,
]]>“Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become... [More]”
Published by marco on 4. Oct 2020 17:52:16 (GMT-5)
The article The First Rule of Court Packing is you do not talk about Court Packing by Josh Blackman (Reason) discusses the recent presidential debate.
When Biden was asked about ending the filibuster or packing the court (two highly relevant election issues), he responded,
“Whatever position I take on that, that’ll become the issue. The issue is the American people should speak. You should go out and vote. You’re voting now. Vote and let your Senators know strongly how you feel.”
What the hell does that even mean? I thought it was just wishy-washy dementia-talk. It’s not just that (because it is incoherent; read it again). He doesn’t think he has to address issues because there’s an election on. He is anti-campaigning. He’s like someone involved in a court case saying that they can’t talk about the court case.
His running mate answered in just as confused a manner, but with the same sentiment, Here’s a Kamala Harris (cited from the article above).
“You know, let’s. I think that — first of all — Joe has been very clear that he is going to pay attention to the fact, and I’m with him on this 1,000 percent, pay attention to the fact that right now, Lawrence, people are voting,”
So, no talking about issues before or during an election. For Democrats, the message is:
Obviously, this not only has massive appeal to any voter, it’s bound to swing a ton of voters away from Trump. Are they not even trying anymore? What the hell is this campaign about other than “we’re not Trump”?
Alternatively,
Biden/Harris: The sidewalk’s on fire, so just get in the van.
Voter: But…where are you taking me? What are you going to do with me?
Biden/Harris: Shut up and get in the van.
Biden/Harris: What choice do you have? I have a van to get away from the fire. You don’t want to burn to death. I can’t make it any plainer than that. You’re just going to have to trust me. I don’t have to justify myself to you … because you have no choice. Try not to think about how we’ve engineered things so that we think we have you over a barrel.
Voter: It’s pretty dark in there; what are you going to do to me in there? That van looks pretty shabby; can it even get away from the fire? Are we going somewhere better?
Biden/Harris: *Tap feet impatiently* Remember those people who jumped out of the World Trade Center on 9/11? That’s you. Shut. The. Fuck. Up. And. Get. In. The. Van.
Voter: You know what? Fuck you, creeps. I’d rather burn alive.
We’ll see. It could go either way, but the lessons of 2016 are lurking out there, waiting to be learned again.
I would like to preface (and will re-address in the summary), that it’s pretty clear that Trump is not alone in his motivations. He... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Oct 2020 13:26:01 (GMT-5)
The article The Death of Debate by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) describes what makes Trump tick in what I think is a far more accurate and reasoned manner than most people seem to be able to muster.
I would like to preface (and will re-address in the summary), that it’s pretty clear that Trump is not alone in his motivations. He is just a very extreme example. While there are many U.S. politicians who are interested in doing what they perceive as good for others, many of the most powerful are very clearly in the business primarily for themselves. They may not have started out that way, but they very definitely espouse and promote abhorrent views because it brings them personal power and wealth.
Back to Trump’s psychoanalysis.
Trump’s primary motivation is promoting himself. The thing that sticks out the most in his recently released taxes is that he makes the most money from his own personal brand. This is a happy coincidence, because Trump really seems to be the only thing that matters to Trump. That is, other things may matter, but they take a very definite back seat to the continued adulation of adoring fans. Viewed through this lens, it explains much better what Trump does: he’s constantly calculating how to maintain as much adoring support as possible.
“There is a reason Trump could not bring himself to condemn white supremacists. They love him and he wants their love. It’s not that Trump loves them. Trump loves Trump and nothing but Trump, but to the extent they serve Trump, he will say nothing to lose their love. As for anything else about them, he couldn’t care less.”
Because he doesn’t really have any agenda more important to him than building a cult around himself, his followers’ other beliefs must be secondary. A supporter is a supporter. By endorsing these supporters, he’s not in danger of losing other potential supporters—because those people have already made it abundantly clear that the effort would not be worth it.
In a way, the anti-Trump vehemence obviates Trump’s ever moving toward a more reasonable stance. Why would anyone, least of all Trump, bother even trying to court people who’ve already promised that they will never be supporters? Why waste the effort?
Perhaps a coquettish approach by liberals—wherein they dangle the possibility that they would support him—would tame him into trying to get their support. Or maybe neither side can even stomach the thought. At any rate, the current situation only radicalizes both sides. This is not an accident; see Modern News Media is a Business.
Trump was a lifelong Democrat until a dozen years ago. He doesn’t believe in anything other than Trump. He’s also not particularly adept at anything but promoting himself. He can’t even choose competent people.
“He has no health care plan. He has no COVID plan. He lacks the intellectual capacity and focus to make a plan. He lies shamelessly to try to bullshit his way through his inability to have a plan because, in what passes as the mind of Trump, the object is to make it out the other side. If lying is the only path he’s got, then it’s the path he has to take, entirely justifiable in his contorted capacity to reason if it saves him from exposure as the fool.”
While this helps one understand how Trump ticks, it also reveals that he is not a person that anyone one interested in having a sensible administration would want in there. Quite frankly, anyone so focused on self-aggrandizement is a danger to the rest of us.
Greenfield finishes his article with the following rhetorical flourish.
“Facts and logic matter.
“Integrity matters.
“Principles matter.
“Trump is the death of all that matters. Trump is our punishment for abandoning the things that matter.
“This isn’t to endorse Biden, but to condemn Trump.”
This is a powerful sentiment with which I mostly agree. I would alter it by replacing “Trump” with “Our current government”. It’s not just Trump who’s self-aggrandizing—posturing for power and wealth and reputation. It’s so much of the rest of the government that’s not interested in “facts, logic, integrity, or principles”.
Replace Trump with Biden. Is there now more of any of these four categories? No. The Congress—House and Senate—are also rotten. By all means, get rid of Trump. But it’s basically the “one bad apple spoils the whole bunch” principle, when that is not at all what the problem is. Trump is an excrescence, but only in that he doesn’t bother to try to hide his goals. He’s does what he does—he is what he is—because it is what gains him the support and success that he craves.
Published by marco on 26. Sep 2020 13:22:55 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 26. Sep 2020 14:16:04 (GMT-5)
This video from 2015 takes only five minutes to present the results of a Princeton University study of 20 years of data to determine the amount of influence an American had on which laws were enacted. Regardless of whether Americans were completely against or completely for a policy, there was a 30% chance of it being enacted. From the study:
“The preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy. ”
It seems like the legislature is divorced from the entirety of the American public. It is not. The influence of the top 10% is much, much closer to the ideal—where issues with 0% support never pass and those with 100% support always do [1]—they effectively kill ideas they don’t support and tend to get what they do support (60% chance instead of 30%).
“This is how a bill becomes a law: A special interest hires lobbyists; those lobbyists collect campaign contributions, offer jobs, and then write the laws that Congress then passes to help those same special interests. This happens every day, on every single issue, with politicians of both parties.”
This is one of the most corrupt systems in the world, but it thinks it’s one of the most noble—a veritable meritocracy. The propaganda is so good [2] that everyone buys into it, not just those who benefit. And benefit they do—from 2010 to 2015, the top donators “invested” $5.8 billion to get a return of $4.4 trillion in subsidies, tax breaks, and other support. This isn’t a recent phenomenon: the data for as far back as 40 years shows it has never been any different.
One thing Americans are uniquely good at is believing propaganda that fools them into supporting policies that are actively harmful to them and everyone they know. The old joke about the Soviet ambassador visiting a colleague in America during the (First) Cold War still holds true:
“A Soviet ambassador visits a colleague in America. The American takes him on a tour, showing off capitalism at its finest—suburbs, cars, television, billboards, frozen food, Hollywood—everything.
“His Soviet colleague is impressed with everything, but especially expresses his amazement at how advanced and effective the propaganda is.
“The American is confused, “But you must be joking! The Soviet Union has far more propaganda than America!”
““Yes, of course, … but we don’t believe it.””
Published by marco on 15. Aug 2020 13:15:25 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 15. Aug 2020 16:51:03 (GMT-5)
The article If Biden Wins by Ted Rall is a succinct list of what to expect from a Biden presidency. I’ve cited most of it and added some extra notes of my own.
Together with the article The Senate Just Abandoned the Working Class Without a COVID-19 Relief Package by Meagan Day (Jacobin), Americans should face the realization that they are well- and truly fucked. There is no-one coming to help them. The American Dream is not a lie. They literally called it a “dream”; how much more honest can you get? It has always been a dream for all but those who inherit wealth and the lucky handful of winners in the Panem (Wikipedia) sweepstakes.
If Trump wins, we already know what we’re going to get: pretty much the same as Biden’s list, but executed even more incompetently. There are minor differences on how much lip service will be paid to an anti-racist agenda—Biden/Harris will pay lip service, whereas Trump/Pence won’t—but, in the end, it won’t make a lick of difference where it matters.
There is an argument to be made that executing an abhorrent agenda incompetently is better than doing so competently, but let’s assume that Biden/Harris will be less abhorrent than Trump/Pence.
They’re all committed to reducing rights for everyone—they just differ on whether certain groups should lose rights in greater proportion or more quickly. It’s a difference without distinction to the average citizen. O the lofty goals we have in 2020.
The leaders in the U.S. are in agreement: they had a choice between funneling money to their elite and billionaire donors or to help their constituents. They elected to drop most Americans into a new Dark Age, regardless of race or gender.
In the past (up until the early 70s or so), certain groups’ lack of any of Maslow’s hierarchy was nearly purely due to discrimination, since nearly everyone else was actually having their collective boats lifted in a way that at least resembled a functioning society. Now, though, America’s inherent discriminatory policies mean that minorities and women will be overrepresented—but pretty much everyone’s invited to this poverty party.
With all current and potential leaders committed to policies that will see unprecedented numbers of Americans [1] unemployed, uninsured, and homeless, what good is it to have one’s “identity” (or “identities”) recognized? It won’t feed, house, or clothe them or their children. People with no home, no job, and no prospects don’t really care about whether society recognizes their “truth” or their particular “intersection of identities”. Their priorities have shifted. Until they shift back, they have bigger fish to fry.
I’ve read people’s laundry lists of all of the cool goodies that Biden/Harris will bring. These are the purest fantasy. These fools with their laundry lists will be the same ones who won’t hold anyone accountable when absolutely nothing gets done over four years. Despite decades of disappointment, they think that when a politician says they’ll do something, that they’ll actually work on it. Get Biden in there and lean on him. Bullshit.
There is no reason to expect anything interesting or different or good from a Biden/Harris administration. I would love to be proven wrong, but we have already seen that administration—in eight years of Obama/Biden.
They did none of the things America needed. The military grew, belligerence increased, drone-bombing increased, Guantánamo remained open, Wall Street ruled the roost, mega-millionaires filled the cabinet and decided policy, even the nuclear-weapons program was refreshed and grew. Instead of doing anything significant on climate change, the Obama administration oversaw the fracking boom and the expansion of fossil-fuel production to unprecedented levels.
The Obama administration took a run at health care and the U.S. ended up with the ACA, which is, by all accounts, a disaster. It gives more Americans health-care coverage, but it’s ludicrously expensive and complicated and ends up not providing the promised coverage to many people that it ostensibly covers. You still have a populace wedded to employer-provided private/corporate health-care that is terrified to use their insurance because of prohibitive co-pays and deductibles.
So don’t try to sell me this hopeful bullshit of a rainbows-and-unicorns administration full of sensible, sane, and compassionate policy from Biden/Harris. We’ve been here before. We know how this movie ends. Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Biden already said he won’t do Medicare for All. Harris at first supported something like it, but then backpedaled on it during her campaign. [2] The Democratic Party voted it out of the official platform by 4-1 just a few weeks ago. Hell, Trump is more likely to do it, purely on a whim, and by accident.
Were anyone at that level even interested, the Congress would never pass it. They don’t pass anything except for salary increases for themselves. Executive orders with no legal standing fly back and forth. None of it means anything for a social-safety net that would provide stability to people’s lives.
This is all without even discussing Biden’s dementia or Harris’s tendency to say whatever people want to hear while coincidentally always doing what her rich donors want. [3] Even were Biden able to stay at the helm, he’s been in politics for several decades and has been instrumental in starting wars, surveilling Americans, building up the military, and expanding the carceral state. It’s a marketing coup that most Americans consider the Democrats to be “left of center”.
We know what we would get with Biden/Harris: rule by self-appointed unknowns with financial-company pedigrees (most likely Goldman Sachs). That’s what we got with Obama; Biden would be no more progressive than that and would likely be even worse—especially now that he’s having a harder time than ever hiding his real personality: a mean old man afraid of his own diminishing capacity. [5]
Would this council of philosopher kings (Wikipedia) be worse than Trump’s ship of fools? No. That’s almost impossible.
They would almost certainly have handled the pandemic better, but would also have—just like the Trump administration—ensured that the rich benefited from the crisis. [6] They would listen to experts more—but would take advice that helps the people only if it doesn’t conflict with their benefactors’ wishes. The response would perhaps have been more coherent and more organized and, if not more compassionate, then at least less casually stupid and brutal. [7]
Would they be more insidious because they’re less obviously corrupt? Yes. Biden/Harris would lull enough of America back to sleep just at a time when everyone should be wide awake and rowing like crazy to avoid the jagged rocks. [8]
A stunning feat, to be sure, since America already leads all wealthy nations by far in the number of people living in absolute or just plain-old regular poverty. It also leads the wealthy nations in hunger, malnutrition, and infant mortality, while trailing on nearly all health indicators, including life expectancy.
Those are averages, though. The privileged classes are doing fine; underprivileged minorities have it so bad that they drag the numbers down for everyone else.
Published by marco on 23. Jun 2020 20:12:15 (GMT-5)
The following interview is excellent. I like the discussion between Taibbi and Halper at the beginning (I find them to be entertaining, insightful, and informative, but YMMV), but if you want to skip it, the interview starts at about 31 minutes or so. Or you can watch just the interview as a separate video.
Dr. Cornel West is absolutely on fire in this interview. Here he is offering a nuanced and absolutely correct take on voting for the lesser evil. Emphasis is mine.
“Cornel West: I was not going to run around the country and talk about how wonderful Hillary was. Even though, given the fact that in those certain swing states, I could understand people voting for her. It’s like right now, with Biden, I think we, in the swing states, we gotta go Biden to get the neo-fascists outta there. But, at the same time, you don’t go running around telling everybody how great Biden is. We know just how tied he is to deep structures of domination and policies that promote social misery.”
And here Katie Halper delights West for the first time, with her excellent re-purposing of the phrase “rainbow coalition” to describe the power structure. West and Taibbi follow up with a discussion of how everything is connected, how it’s not just racism—though the racism makes it unspeakably worse for Blacks—but a general suppression of the lower 90% through many, interrelated means.
Again, emphasis is mine.
“Katie Halper: I always think of it as, the neoliberals want to replace a top 1% that’s straight, white, and male with a diverse top 10%. Like, a rainbow coalition that’s slightly more equitable but still totally about power imbalance.
“Cornel West: Absolutely, you see, the imperial hierarchy remains the same. 800 military bases: still out there. Africom: still operable. You still got the policies in the Middle East and Asia and Latin America being promoted. It’s just more colorful now. Ooooh, we’ve got some black generals now. And they love to wave that flag just like the white ones do. In fact, they might even be better at it.
“Matt Taibbi: That’s been a consistent theme of yours over the years, that you can’t argue for racial progress without arguing, for example, against Wall Street corruption and that these have to be tied together and that you have to be suspicious when you see one critique without the other, or with these other issues tied to it.
“Cornel West: Exactly. Even now on the streets, this marvelous, marvelous flow and wave of brothers and sisters of all colors, disproportionately younger, you know, they’ve got to make that connection between police murder, Wall Street crimes, drones, imperial crimes, all being part and parcel of a system and politicians of whatever color, for the most part, beholden to police power, to Wall Street power, and the Pentagon power.”
West argues that, in order to excise the tumor, we have be holistic and color-blind, that we have to understand the many weapons that the upper class uses to maintains control, only one of which is racism. Though he is hopeful that, if we recognize these mechanisms, we can combat them, he is not exactly hopeful that they will change. Instead, it seems that America’s structures are so ingrained and rigid that they will not bend and that they must instead be broken
“Cornel West: The challenge here and, this is where we have to get very, very serious and in some ways sad. You see, there’s a real chance that the American empire does not have the capacity to be fundamentally transformed.
“[…] it will allow for all of the soft power and culture in the world, but when stronger movements on the ground actually begin to bring power and pressure to bear—they shoot us down like dogs.
“The repressive apparatus of the United States is so thick that, if for example, Prince [the performer –ed.] [had] decided to join up with Malcolm X’s legacy and create a movement with his music, he could start off playing a little Kiss and then move on into I Adore, and then the next day, people are willing to move into DC and seize power.
“Prince is a dead man. In America. He’s gone. They will kill you. in. a. minute.
“One can argue, well, everybody does that. But, in the United States, there’s this illusion that you got all this freedom, the social movements have the right to protest and so forth and so on, but in the States, for example with racism, anytime you choose to challenge white supremacy in any serious way, you’re a dead man or woman. Or, if you’re alive, you get character assassination.”
Finally, West again:
“Cornel West: People saying, aren’t you black folks happy? What more do you want? As Malcolm used to say, You don’t stab someone nine inches, pull it out six inches and then celebrate your progress. Even when you pull the knife all the way out, you don’t celebrate, because the wound is so deep, the blood is still flowing.”
The phrase “defund the police” is spectacularly terrible optics and messaging. It’s muddled, can be interpreted six ways from Sunday, and can be easily weaponized by an almost overwhelmingly powerful opposition that is utterly uninterested in a generous, or even honest,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 10. Jun 2020 23:16:40 (GMT-5)
The phrase “defund the police” is spectacularly terrible optics and messaging. It’s muddled, can be interpreted six ways from Sunday, and can be easily weaponized by an almost overwhelmingly powerful opposition that is utterly uninterested in a generous, or even honest, interpretation.
The phrase “Living Wage” also seems quite innocuous and obvious, but has suffered from decades of picking nits. What does a person really need? What’s the bare minimum someone needs to live? Isn’t that enough? It’s tedious, but the point is that messages have to work for you instead of letting your opponents suck all the life out of you with them.
Or take “Black Lives Matter”. You’d think that would also be straightforward, but even with that message, obstinate people managed to redirect energy into explanations that it doesn’t mean that only black lives matter, an argument that is still occasionally belied by an orator with a bit too much fire in their belly. Most of us instinctively got the message, though.
“Defund the Police” is even more vague and takes even less energy to deflect and deliberately misunderstand. Considering how good a lot of people associated with the protests are at messaging, this leads me to wonder whether the message is being promulgated by the state and the right-wing, interested in defusing and misdirecting the whole movement qua revolt.
I’m kind of embarrassed for whoever came up with it. The fact that everyone now has to define what it means is likely to doom anything actually associated with it. The other side knows how to frame an issue and they know political messaging.
If you have to explain it, you’ve already lost. Drop this albatross.
An implicit component of each of the possible definitions is that the U.S. deracialize police. Another is to demilitarize the police.
These problem are endemic, if not immanent. Excising these two components only in the police will do nothing on its own, but it’s a vital component. If America doesn’t fix racism and militarism and its love affair with violence on a systemic level, then whatever we have now will probably rise again.
There is no way to make America “like a European country” without changing its entire attitude toward nearly everything.
America is killing its black people, its poor people. It’s inventing crimes and building a carceral state like the world has never seen. But what it does domestically is actually peanuts compared to what its militaristic, racist, and violent attitude does to people in other countries.
Not only have we forgotten about COVID-19 or the collapse of participatory democracy [1], but we’ve also (perhaps conveniently) forgotten about brutal economic sanctions, ongoing occupations, and military incursions and attacks.
But the issue at hand is America’s inward-pointed violence, specifically toward its poor (and disproportionately black people).
To be precise: American police are shooting American citizens exercising their first-amendment right to assemble with “rubber bullets”—which are not made of rubber—and tear gas, which, as a chemical weapon, is prohibited for use in international warfare.
The article Rubber bullet (Wikipedia) describes the effects of non-lethal “rubber” bullets as follows:
“Such “kinetic impact munitions” are meant to cause pain but not serious injury. They are expected to produce contusions, abrasions, and hematomas. However, they may cause bone fractures, injuries to internal organs, or death. In a study of injuries in 90 patients injured by rubber bullets, 1 died, 17 suffered permanent disabilities or deformities and 41 required hospital treatment after being fired upon with rubber bullets.[6] A review of studies covering 1,984 people injured by “kinetic impact projectiles” found that 53 died and 300 were permanently disabled. (Emphasis added.)”
That’s a lot more dangerous than the mainstream media leads us to believe. I think it’s clear that the U.S. police is more violent and more militarized than other OECD countries and that this is what people want to change.
There are those that will argue that America is already post-racist, pointing to affirmative-action programs or other quota-based mechanisms that purport to “fix” racism.
What these programs do is pay lip service to equality without actually changing anything or without making the powers-that-be give anything up. Despite the ostensible good intentions of these programs, black people are still much more likely to be discriminated against, arrested, and harassed by police. They have lower income and far less wealth (by an order of magnitude, according to Mark Blyth in Mark & Carrie: The Anger Will Out); they were nearly completely wiped out in the 2008 crash; they are disproportionately hit by COVID-19.
Either these programs are completely misconceived or mismanaged, or they were deliberately sabotaged, or they were never intended to “work” in the first place.
Paying lip service to equality doesn’t amount to anything. The situation on the ground keeps getting worse, though quasi-racists will constantly hold up “all of the things we do for them”, effectively complaining about how great black people—or poor people, or unemployed people—have it.
I direct these people to answer Jane Elliot’s question in Being Black by Jane Elliott (YouTube) (1min):
“If you, as a white person, would be happy to receive the same treatment that our black citizens do in this society, please stand.
“You didn’t understand the directions.
“If you white folks want to be treated the way blacks are, in this society, stand.
“Nobody’s standing here.
“That says very plainly: you know what’s happening, you know you don’t want it for you.
“I want to know why you’re so willing to accept it or to allow it to happen for others.”
If everything’s so sunny for blacks and the poor in the U.S., then why wouldn’t anyone switch places with them? [2]
A deficit of principle, obviously.
The organization and most of the people involved are highly suspect and should be rebuilt from the ground up. Some people probably do mean this.
It’s not unreasonable, given the systemic and entrenched corruption and nearly complete disconnect between the goals of the police (growing larger, more powerful, and richer) and the society that pays them for safety and protection and keeping the peace.
John Oliver pointed out that the city of Camden, NJ fired its entire police force and invited them to re-apply to a new organization. Their results were promising.
The police in the states fill myriad roles. They are in charge of homeless people, mental-health complaints, social service, evictions, and dozens of other roles for which armed personnel are not required and are actively detrimental.
These two comments by bitches_love_brie (Reddit) are interesting and seem legitimate. I’ve cited the parts I find interesting, but the full comment includes a litany of useless calls from his logbook that are also interesting but too lengthy to cite.
“I’m a current US police officer, I spent 6 years in the military, and have a 4-year degree. I’m not old and salty, or brand new to life or policing.
“[…]
“Problem is, everyone has a phone in their pocket now, no one wants to risk getting involved, and people know that if they call 911 someone will come and try to solve the problem any time of day, every day of the week.
“[…]
“it’s time for the silent majority to speak up because if the loud people that often represent the extreme ends of the discussion get their way, shit is going to go from had to worse. Vilifying all cops is only going to widen the divide between the public who want to see things improve and the cops who want things to improve. As a good cop (by my own assessment, and by my professional record of car stops, public interactions, and use of force history, all of which I can’t share with Reddit so you’ll have to take my word for it) it SUCKS to be a good cop right now.”
Not to diminish at all what the commentator is feeling, but cops have been under pressure for two weeks now and are losing their shit and can’t figure out how to deal with it. Most of them, however, can take off the uniform and blend in, though, can’t they? They get weekends off from being discriminated against, if they want to.
As another anonymous comment writes,
“I’m pretty sure we are watching the police collectively having the experience of being pulled over for a crime they didn’t personally commit because they “fit the description” and are actively resisting, while the entire world is yelling repeatedly “stop resisting!” and they really don’t like it.”
Without considering the danger—which is not really pervasive and is often caused by their own actions—being a police officer is a very attractive job compared to the utter shitshow that is the job market in America.
In a country where millions were cut down to 29 hours per week in order to avoid having to pay for Obamacare, police get (often extravagently) paid overtime, sometimes guaranteed overtime, and generous pensions.
They get to retire ridiculously early—a friend I graduated high school with is already retired on a full pension and we’re not even fifty yet. This, while the rest of the country contemplates working until they fall into a grave.
This is a serious disconnect: a country trashes nearly every other person’s pension—letting private equity companies just eliminate them with the stroke of a pen—but somehow police retire in their mid-40s with full and quite-generous pensions.
If they spend their 25 years of service drumming up reasons for why they should continue to exist by arresting people for bullshit infractions, that’s even more scathing.
And they almost always get their pensions. For example, the Shooting of Daniel Shaver (Wikipedia) tells the tragic story of a young man who was drinking with friends when someone called the police. Police Sergeant Charles Langley gave him deliberately conflicting orders until he eventually screwed up. Officer Philip Brailsford shot him five times with his AR-15, killing Shaver instantly.
This is obviously bad enough, but they weren’t finished. Brailsford was fired, taken to trial for second-degree murder, and acquitted. Soon after, he declared bankruptcy, and was reinstated as a non-active police officer, had his medical bills for PTSD from the shooting paid for by the department, then retired 45 days later on a $2500/month pension, having put in a whole four years.
He got his pension for life, having retired early for medical reasons brought on by his having murdered a man in cold blood.
The system works. It works very nicely for some.
Speaking of which…
As many people have pointed out, “defunding” is in progress in myriad other areas like education, welfare, infrastructure, healthcare…the list goes on.
The article Republicans Only Want Certain Cops on the Beat by David Sirota (Jacobin) discusses the many ways in which police have specifically already been defunded:
“Republican leaders would have us believe they love law enforcement and cops, but that is belied by an unmentioned fact: these are the same greedheads who have eagerly pushed to defund the police charged with protecting us from the world’s most powerful criminals.”
The EPA under Trump? Eviscerated. The IRS under all presidents? Too poor and understaffed to chase after “big fish” because that would be too expensive.
Corporate crime is essentially not prosecuted. No-one responsible for the 2008 crash that robbed trillions of dollars worth of assets—and wiped out 70% of black America’s equity and wealth—was even charged, to say nothing of prosecuted or sentenced. Almost all of them are much, much, much richer now than they were then—that 70% had to go somewhere, ammirite?
You see? They already know how to do it. They’ve made sure to disband the police for big crimes—the ones they’re most likely to commit themselves—while turning the screws on everyone else.
To control the people, though, Bush invented a whole new Department of Homeland Security—to complement the already existing Department of Defense, which focuses exclusively on Offense—including the gigantic TSA and a massively increased ICE and Border Patrol.
There’s plenty to be mad about and plenty of reasons to want to reform or rebuild the police. There’s also plenty of reason not to trust anyone in power to do so.
It’s going to take patience and perseverance—and, honestly, we may never get there. The odds are long, but what else have people got to do? It’s not like there are any jobs.
A friend just sent me the link How did Georgia get it so wrong (again)? by Chris Cillizza (CNN), which outlines how America managed to combine long lines and long waits to both thwart democracy and start a new COVID outbreak.
“Many admirably waited in long lines through downpours and searing heat, and some stayed beyond midnight to exercise their right to vote. But untold numbers were dissuaded from voting by the lengthy lines and other issues that plagued the primary.”
I’m really asking people like the author of Requiem for George Floyd by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation), whose column I’ve followed for years. I’ve read and liked some of his books (most recently The Long Emergency).
He’s well-informed, rational, and well-worth listening to on a plethora of issues, but on issues of race, he’s utterly awful. He sometimes rises to “less offensive, but still vaguely unsettling”, but the piece linked above sees him rehashing the worst of his old canards.
This seems to be the baseline attitude for people of a certain age in upstate New York, where he lives and where I grew up. I know a lot of old farts from that region who almost uniformly nice people with awful, small-minded opinions on race and poverty.
He is not alone is posing questions that ignore the wide swath that racism has torn through American society. We don’t need to bother answering his questions, but should maybe get people like him to answer Jane Elliot’s question.
To be clear: Kunstler is not the worst of the problem. He seems to at least acknowledge that what he’s saying is wrong, but he keeps claiming that his logic and rationality leads him to only that conclusion.
He’s kind of from the Bill Cosby school: telling people to pull up their pants and to learn to speak English correctly. He writes this seemingly without understanding—or deliberately ignoring—the systemic and brutal practices that infuse everyday life for many black people. You can’t ignore Jane Elliot’s question and you can’t ignore the arrest numbers and you can’t ignore the wealth and employment gap.
If you keep claiming that our society hands blacks everything on a silver platter while ignoring the fact that society actually ends up taking everything away from them, then you’re a racist. Whether you come by this label deliberately or not makes no difference, in the end.
That’s not accurate; let me rephrase. The other part of America is mad at hell at the part of America that thinks that America isn’t perfect like it is.
They think protesters are,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 9. Jun 2020 23:27:17 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Jun 2020 13:03:00 (GMT-5)
A good part of America is mad as hell and not going to take it anymore and a good part of America couldn’t care less.
That’s not accurate; let me rephrase. The other part of America is mad at hell at the part of America that thinks that America isn’t perfect like it is.
They think protesters are, at best, annoying snowflake leeches and, at worst, criminals who should be executed on the spot in the streets for stealing.
It’s amazing to think what the echo chamber of the Internet has done for shoring up people’s resolve in their own infallible opinions. [1] As the article Roaming Charges: Mad Bull Lost Its Way by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) points out, it used to be different:
“It’s enough to make one nostalgic for the accidental president himself, LBJ, who, despite his many other grotesque failings, could at least understand the incendiary rage that ignited the riots of ’68:”“What did you expect? I don’t know why we’re surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.”
The level of understanding expressed by LBJ is no longer evident at most levels of government, to say nothing of much of the population. It’s not just compassion and empathy that have left the building, but also any logic, consistency or, God forbid, a need to avoid hypocrisy.
No matter how stupid or illogical or indefensible the viewpoint, it will be defended from all attack. You can no longer convince anyone of anything they don’t already believe. Attempting to do so leads to an ever-more deeply entrenched mindset, like a tick burrowing into its victim.
The same people who are absolutely comfortable absolving the police in general for the behavior of a “few bad apples” are also able to, in turn, condemn millions of protesters for the behavior of a few “bad apples”.
Those two things easily fit in one head. Those two opinions can easily be espoused nearly in one breath.
Should we not expect the protesters to control themselves? If we’re arguing that police should control their members, then why not expect the same of organizers of protests?
The police are an organized unit who can reasonably be expected to have hierarchy and procedures for responsibility. It is not unreasonable to call them a “system”. The protesters, on the other hand, are ad-hoc and very loosely organized. The individual groups have no control over who shows up or who is a member of any given protest. [2]
It is far less reasonable to expect the protesters to control the actions of all members than to expect the police to have some accountability for its members. The police are a cohesive unit; the protesters are not.
There is another difference as well: police are trained and have the duty to uphold laws and protect citizens. They are exactly the people, however, of whom the least restraint is expected, who are quickly absolved for horrific behavior, often seeing no punishment at all for crimes for which non-police would spend years in jail.
On the other hand, everyday citizens, with no training, are expected to act cooly and calmly in the face of horrifying scenes of violence when they were just exercising their first-amendment right to peaceably assemble, which they almost all do. They are expected to avoid any sudden moves or panic or do anything else untoward that would then earn them a well-deserved shooting from a nervous, terrified, and trigger-happy (albeit ostensibly trained) police officer. [3]
The police also exercise collective punishment, which is illegal in all other forms of combat in the world. If one protester mouths off, they’re all collected, kettled, and arrested. They’re all tear-gassed, they’re all hosed, they’re all shot with rubber bullets, the batons fly more-or-less indiscriminately.
We have overwhelming video evidence by now of how the law acts toward its citizens when push comes to shove. It is not flattering.
There is little to no anarchic or left-wing part of the protest. This is a mainstream protest. You don’t have to be left-wing or an anarchist to welcome change to the brutal, racist, unequal, and cruel system that rules the U.S. It might help to be one of those things, but a healthy, normal dose of compassion and common sense is more than enough to get you on the right [4] side of history.
There is no sense of fairness for some people. They ask why people can’t just protest peacefully when they disparaged peaceful protest on the handful of rare occasions when they acknowledged it at all—to viciously eviscerate Colin Kaepernick, for example. [5]
These are the same people who hear about a prostitute being raped by a cop and wonder what the problem is. She obviously deserved it; she’s a whore.
They do not care about justice or morality. That is the great failing of American society, an utter disregard for ethics and morals. A breathtaking lack of philosophical underpinning. A virulent anti-intellectualism. They pay lip service to goodness, but it’s hollow—they really only look out for their own and fuck everyone else, when it comes right down to it.
It is so twisted that otherwise good people see literally no issue with asking whether George Floyd really was trying to pass off a fake $20. They don’t see that it doesn’t matter. No matter what he did that day, there is no (legal) death sentence for it. They don’t understand how stupid and mean and evil it is to think that way. They never will. Not until something happens directly to them.
And when it does happen directly to them, they’ll go on a jihad that burns undiminished thirty years later. Then they’ll definitely get it—because it’s happening to them. Then it matters more than anything else and anyone who doesn’t think so can go straight to hell.
But when it happens to someone else? Those losers deserved it. That girl who got killed? Wasn’t she on drugs? Wasn’t she a slut? The town mattress? That guy mouthed off to the cops before they beat all the teeth out of his mouth, no? I guess he shouldn’t have mouthed off. I guess he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The cops sought him out because they were bored? [6] Oh. I guess he should have kept his mouth shut, then.
An 18-year–old girl claims that two police officers raped her. The press coverage focuses nearly exclusively on whether they are legally allowed to obtain consent from a person in their custody in the state in which they work. This is madness. How can police legally have sexual congress with prisoners? How is that a thing? Why are we even discussing whether she gave consent? [7]
Oh, because we don’t know her, so she was probably asking for it. Fuck her, anyway. She should have known better. Probably mouthed off to the cops.
People are passing this thing around on Facebook. I know these people. They would swear up and down that they are not racist, that they have black friends, that they … yada yada yada.
The title is horrific and the article is not fake news, so it easily passes Facebook’s new filters, which might have flagged it.
A cursory search showed the first few links from FOX and The Daily Mail, both obviously unimpeachable sources. There are other links but all of them contain the word “indicted” or “charged” or “alleged” in the title and initial content. I could find nothing about an actual conviction or trial.
Why would it be so far already? Oh, because the article is from October 2018. What was the point of posting it on June 7th, 2020? Why is it suddenly trending to the point that it ended up on even my pathetic Facebook page?
I cannot know, but can only strongly, and with much regret, suspect, that the people reposting this and upvoting it are doing so because it shows that black people are all the same—just irredeemably evil. Look at those two so-and-sos. The posters can’t quite bring themselves to write the n-word (yet [8]), so they pass around a picture with baby rapists on it.
You know what I mean. Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink.
I must conclude that the point of posting this in June of 2020 is to say that the protests are bullshit because black people get what they deserve and everyone should just calm down and go home and let the cops do their jobs before more fucking babies get raped.
They can’t say this or write this, but they can post this picture, which more than adequately expresses their opinion that if you think that Black Lives Matter, then you are pro-baby-rape. Simple as that.
Speaking of whom, the article Is This the Last Straw? by Mamadou Tall (Medium) wrote,
“Colin Kaepernick summed it up perfectly when he said, “when civility leads to death, revolting is the only logical reaction.””
Which reminds me that I just watched a documentary about Colin Kaepernick a few days ago. It was on TV. Did you not see it? I think I know why: it’s in German and it was broadcast on Arte in Switzerland. I wonder whether there is even a distribution in the States. It’s called Colin Kaepernick: Amerikanischer Held or “Colin Kaepernick: American Hero”. It’s quite telling that the movie had to be made in Europe.
Tall continues,
“This murder seems like the last straw, but is there such a thing as the last straw with racism in America? No matter what we do we find ourselves back at square one, back in the same state of mourning and anger. Racism is a part of America’s identity and it’s impossible to shake it. Emmett Till should have been the last straw, Rodney King should have been the last straw, Amadou Diallo should have been the last straw, Trayvon Martin should have been the last straw, and George Floyd should be the last straw. In reality, this will continue to happen, it’s in America’s DNA.”
None of this is new. I hope something good comes out of the revolutionary attempt this time. It’s hard to imagine that simple reform will do any good, as it will almost certainly be subverted nearly immediately by whatever remains in power.
This series of tweets by Sean Trainor (Twitter) tells the story of a ride-along with a high-school-friend-turned-police-officer:
“My classmate was so bored that he’d punch pretty much anyone’s plate into the database. But he devoted special attention to beat-up cars or drivers who looked “out of place” — which typically meant black or brown drivers in predominantly white neighborhoods. […] for the most part, he spent the night driving around aimlessly.
“[…] a colleague of his had pulled over a car for some trivial reason […] and then discovered that the driver was, as I recall, an ex-convict driving with an expired license. The guy (who was white) had gotten out of prison earlier in the week and hadn’t had a chance to renew his license. When he got pulled over, he was driving around with his wife and young kids.
“Not content to leave this poor guy with a warning, the officer who initiated the traffic stop asked him to step out of his car for a conversation. As they were talking, more and more bored cops rolled up, including my classmate.
“Not surprising, the situation kept getting more intense. The guy who had been pulled over looked increasingly stressed as more cops materialized. And the cops responded to his stress with heightened levels of aggression. Eventually the scene came to a boil.
“[…] he wound up face down on the curb, his hands cuffed behind his back. His family looked on screaming and crying as the cops hauled him away. […] because this guy had violated his parole, he would likely do a multi-year stint in prison.
“And that was night: a full shift devoted to manufacturing crime — desperately searching for reasons to pull people over and then harassing people until they snapped.
“In short, nothing he did made anyone safer. He didn’t protect or defend a damn thing, except white supremacy and class domination. His entire shift had been devoted to profiling, harassing, and intimidating people.”
He mixes some humor—mostly dark, with very little of his usual wackiness or memes—with an exceedingly well-researched and -written video essay on racism and policing... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 8. Jun 2020 23:15:48 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 9. Jun 2020 09:13:29 (GMT-5)
John Oliver has put together 33:32 that are 100% worth watching. The video is linked below and it is titled, simply, “Police”.
He mixes some humor—mostly dark, with very little of his usual wackiness or memes—with an exceedingly well-researched and -written video essay on racism and policing in the U.S.
He starts with a quick run-down of the peaceful protests and the violent reaction of the state against it. He plays, in full, a 30-second message delivered by a pissed-off citizen to LA police chief Michael Moore, delivered in an open forum held on Zoom.
“I find it disgusting that the LAPD is slaughtering peaceful protesters on the street. I had two friends go to the protest in Beverly Hills a couple of days ago and the protest was peaceful until the police showed up with their excessive riot force, shooting rubber bullets and throwing tear gas. IS THIS WHAT YOU THINK OF PROTECTING AND SERVING? BECAUSE I THINK IT’S BULLSHIT! FUCK YOU MICHAEL MOORE! I refuse to call you an officer or a chief because you don’t deserve those titles. You are a disgrace. Suck my dick and choke on it! I yield my time. Fuck you!”
Oliver moves on to a tight encapsulation of the history of racism and policing in the U.S., focusing more closely on events since the late 60s. He doesn’t leave out Bill Clinton’s many exhortations to put “100,000 more policemen on the streets.”. Instead, he positively dwells on it, which is completely fair, as Clinton was uniquely responsible a four-fold increase in prison population during his democratic and liberal reign.
At this point, Oliver very briefly addresses the media response so far, which is to focus almost laser-like on violence on both sides, as well as spending 90% of the time discussing looting. He does not go into this line of reasoning, because,
“[…] if you’re asking why spontaneous decentralized protests can’t control every one of its participants more than you are asking the same about a taxpayer-funded heavily regimented paid workforce, you can also — in the words of this generation’s Robert Frost — suck my dick and choke on it.”
With that baseline established, Oliver moves on to address the very real problem that police are massively out of their depth and made to do myriad jobs they were never intended to do (taking a swipe at Jared Kushner here).
“While we should absolutely be angry at the police right now, we should also be angry at the series of choices that left them as the only public resource in some communities. And, on top of all of that, we’ve made those choices even more dangerous in recent years by needlessly arming police to the fucking teeth. (Emphasis added.)”
Next, he segues to a segment on the militarization of police, not only with equipment but with an ingrained attitude of unbridled violence and completely unearned superiority. Here, Oliver plays a clip from one of David Grosse’s seminars, in which we are treated to his hideous tutelage delivered from his narrow-eyed, inbred-looking face.
The next section deals with “Obstacles” that have historically blocked any attempts at bringing policing back in line with its original goal—and, quite frankly, the goal that it already has in nearly every other OECD country. Unsurprisingly, the problem is endemic and wholly unquestioned and thus-unpunished racism combined with absolutely poisonously amoral and overwhelmingly powerful police unions.
Oliver lets some of the absolute criminals at the head of these organizations speak for—and thus, damn—themselves. The final bit of this segment is a whole crowd of officers smiling and cheering Donald Trump when he tells them to use more police brutality on people they’ve just arrested. Not only should no-one condone violence as punishment—already illegal—but he’s talking about people who’ve been neither charged nor indicted nor prosecuted. And Trump and the police laugh and agree that they don’t fucking care.
The next item is, of course, the legal checks on police, which is in tatters, at least partly due to Qualified Immunity, which is basically that the officers can always say that they were “just doing their jobs”—no matter what they did. It’s as if Nuremberg had never happened and changed the shape of international law.
Once again, America shows its exceptionalism by simply not acknowledging moral and philosophical advancements that more-civilized peoples have long since accepted. Were they to do so, how would they continue to subjugate the poor and, specifically and exceedingly brutally, people of color?
Several times, Oliver makes sure to note for the hard-of-hearing that “this didn’t start with Trump”; to make sure, Oliver lets Joe Biden speak for himself, in a recent speech in a church, opining that the solution he recommends is that police be trained to shoot people in the leg rather than the heart.
Oliver sums Biden’s contribution up with,
“That lack of imagination is not particularly surprising coming from Joe Biden, who is truly the getting-shot-in-the-leg-instead-of-the-heart candidate right now.
“And while that’s obviously absurd, the instinct that Biden just displayed there, that the question is not if an officer should shoot someone, but where, is shared by many politicians.”
Oliver next covers “defunding the police”, because the measures we’ve used so far “aren’t going to cut it” because “in many cases, you’re dealing with an entrenched police culture resistant to any effort to compel reform.” Oliver lets Tucker Carlson utterly mischaracterize what it means to “defund police” before telling us what it actually does mean:
“Defunding the police absolutely does not mean that we eliminate all cops and just succumb to The Purge.
“Instead, it’s about moving away from a narrow conception of public safety that relies on policing and punishment and investing in a community’s actual safety net: things like stable housing, mental-health services, and community organizations.
“The concept is that the role of the police can significantly shrink because they are not responding to the homeless or to mental-health calls or arresting children in school or really any other situation where the best solution is not somebody showing up with a gun.
“That is the idea behind “defund the police”.”
The state will resist this with every fiber of its being because that is what the state does. The police are the army of the state. They will not stand idly by as their role and their share of the power and affluence is reduced. Expect resistance. Expect the Navy, Army, Air Force, and Marines.
Even Chris Hedges in an interview with Jimmy Dore called The Ruling Elite Has Lost All Legitimacy (YouTube) has finally had to move a bit from a 100% pacifist position [1]—because the State will. Just. Not. Listen. Every peaceful move has been met with a counter-move that meant lost ground and more suffering. The short-term suffering engendered by semi-violent revolt may be the only way to avoid even more long-term suffering.
When Oliver says that this “is going to sustained attention and sustained pressure over a long period of time”, he’s absolutely right. This is where I wonder whether the spark that has been lit is finally burning hotly enough to not be extinguished by the few crumbs that the state and its elites will eventually throw to the masses to settle them back down.
Oliver says,
“It’s going to be far too easy for nothing to meaningfully change here because that is what has always happened before”
Nearly at the end, Oliver even mentions the Kerner Commission and its report from the late 60s, whose conclusions contain nearly literally all of the measures we’re considering today—over 50 years later, as if it were a new problem to tackle. Even at the time, the social scientist Kenneth Clark said,
“I read the report of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of 1935, the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of 1943, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot [1965].
“I must again in candor say to you…it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland with the same moving picture reshown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.”
Oliver deftly lets an amazing woman give the final words of his show. Here he shows a video of an extraordinarily eloquent, passionate and seemingly completely extemporaneous speech by Kimberly Jones from the full video How Can We Win by David Jones Media (YouTube).
“You can’t win. The game is fixed.
“So, when they say, why do you burn down the community, why do you burn down your own neighborhood…it’s not ours! We don’t own anything! We don’t own anything.
“Trevor Noah said it so beautifully last night: There’s a social contract that we all have. That if you steal, if I steal, then the person who is the authority comes in and they fix the situation. But the person who fixes the situation is killing us!
“So the social contract is broken. And if the social contract is broken, why the fuck do I give a shit about burning the fuckin’ football hall of fame, about burnin’ the fuckin’ Target?
“You broke the contract when you killed us in the streets and didn’t give a fuck. You broke the contract when, for 400 years, we played your game and built your wealth. You broke the contract when we built our wealth again, on our own, by our bootstraps, in Tulsa—and you dropped bombs on us. When we built it in Rosewood and you slaughtered us.
“You broke the contract. So fuck your Target. Fuck your hall of fame.
“As far as I’m concerned, they can burn this bitch to the ground.
“And it still wouldn’t be enough and they are lucky that what black people are looking for is equality and not revenge.”
Hedges actually said, starting at 31:56, that.
“Ishmael Reed was a good friend of mine in Oakland. He was very angry at Antifa, for showing up in Oakland during Occupy and smashing the windows of local businesses. He said, ‘look, I don’t have a problem with smashing windows…but drive up to La Hoya, where Romney lives, and smash his windows.‘
“And that’s what’s interesting about this uprising: they’re not burning their own neighborhoods. Fifth Avenue in New York got shellacked. Now that’s different and it shows a kind of class consciousness.
“Which, I don’t think that property-destruction or attacking the police…I understand it, but that’s not the same as to condone it. I don’t think that that’s going to be effective. What I think is effective, in a kind of dark way, is that idiot Trump, taking peaceful protesters outside the White House and using pepper spray and rubber bullets to remove them so he can stand in front of a church in his welcome-to-fascist America speech. That will really ignite the protests. (Emphasis added.)”
Now, he still says that he doesn’t condone violence, but damned if he didn’t grin from ear to ear when he said the word shellacked.
Also, as emphasized above, Hedges also sees Trump now as a catalyst that will keep the fires of the revolt going longer than previous revolutionary fits and starts. He acknowledges that it’s “dark” because short-term people are going to get hurt, but in the long-term, the revolution will reduce suffering—there is, perhaps, no other way.
Published by marco on 31. May 2020 22:37:32 (GMT-5)
A man named George Floyd was murdered by four police officers in Minneapolis last week. One kneeled on his neck for over eight minutes, while two others kneeled on his torso and one stood by and watched. They seemed more-or-less unperturbed that they were being filmed by witnesses. The video picked up George’s pathetic pleas to let him up.
The police had been called by a shopkeeper who suspected Floyd of having passed a counterfeit $20 bill. Floyd was in his car nearby when the officers arrived on the scene. Police removed him from the vehicle, handcuffed him and pinned him to the ground, kneeling on his neck and body for over eight minutes, the final two of which he was, according to them, “unresponsive” (he apparently had no pulse).
By the time EMTs arrived, he was already dead and could not be revived. He was pronounced dead at the hospital soon after. See the Wikipedia article for more information.
George Floyd was executed in the street in broad daylight on the suspicion that he had tried to use a fake $20 bill. Swift justice from self-appointed judge, jury, and executioner.
Does that sound harsh to the officers? Is it possible that they made a mistake? That their use-of-force led to an unforeseeable accident?
How could this accident have avoided? Was he really resisting arrest? No, the video belies that claim. He was handcuffed prone. He was not a threat. They were armed with pepper spray, truncheons, and pistols. He had no weapons and was face-down on the ground with his arms pinned behind him in cuffs. He couldn’t even have gotten to his feet alone.
Where was the threat? Why were they sitting on him? Had he perhaps been disrespectful? How could they ignore his pathetic mewling? Why did they not even care that they were being filmed? They obviously thought that they were perfectly within their rights to teach this POSPOC a lesson. Let people film it—then they can show the lesson to others. That should keep the other animals in line, That’s what they were thinking.
Anyone without a badge who did what they did—even without the unfortunate code—would have charged with assault and battery. Certainly the officers felt secure that nothing really bad would happen to them, no matter what the outcome.
These officers don’t see people like George Floyd as human beings. It’s not that they don’t care if they live or die, but that they get what they deserve. And they’re not alone in thinking this.
Look at the reaction of at least half of the rest of the country: George should have known better and not been counterfeiting money. Right? These people don’t care that it’s not a capital crime. They don’t care about cruel and unusual punishment (that was a poor choice of words on the part of our founders, as this type of punishment is no longer unusual). They don’t care about trials or evidence.
A black man was out of line and putting him back in line killed him. Tough titties.
You gotta break some eggs to make an omelet.
I’m reminded of the photos from Abu Ghraib, which soldiers took of themselves, evincing the same attitude toward what they clearly didn’t consider to be other human beings.
These are the people we entrust with the power of state violence to protect us, to enforce our laws, not break them. Or so the story goes.
The article White Supremacy is the Virus; Police are the Vector by Nick Pemberton (CounterPunch) makes an important point, though in a circumlocutory manner,
“If the cops are the problem, we are absolved. This horrifies me. Perhaps yes it is a privileged horror but a horror nonetheless. I very much fear the death of white guilt. As toxic as it is, it’s the best we got.
“Forgive me but just as I see the prisoner as fully human, I also see the policeman in the same light.
“[…]
“I see the police officer doing his job when he kills the black man. To me this is far more horrifying than him being evil […]
“[…]
“Not to extradite the problem by washing our hands but to admit that maybe if I was raised in the same way this cop was raised, or if I had the same job he had or if I had the same mental illness he had or what have you, well that could have been me.”
That is: the real horror is that the system is working as it was designed to. People ask when will the looting stop? It will probably stop when the officers responsible are arrested. But that’s just the vector. The disease is still at large and will strike again.
When should the looting stop? Now. It’s a waste of effort and energy. When should the revolution begin? Also now.
Pemberton asks white America to understand that it is at least partially by the grace of their upbringing that they have the luxury of pointing the finger at the police. There are many who have failed to be indoctrinated despite their upbringing but more than enough otherwise nice people who have the most horrific opinions about their fellow human beings, their fellow citizens.
Pemberton continues,
“I do see the police as working class. They operate on the front lines for the capitalists and the white supremacists while we attempt to socially distance ourselves from the days they accidentally fulfill our own ideology and hatred. I say this not as a conspiracy but as a believer in the subconscious racism. I know that most ruling class white people would shoot a black person quite quickly if they went through the police academy. (Emphasis added.)”
Because the problem isn’t a strong state, or a government per se. The problem is a corrupt government, one that works for only a privileged class. The working-class police should actually be there for the downtrodden and disadvantaged, to protect them from the ravages of the privileged elite. Instead, they work for the elite, because they are fed table-scraps in the form of higher-than-average salaries for a locality and, usually, ridiculous amounts of overtime and membership in one of the only surviving and very strong unions in the land.
Pemberton is spot-on, though: most people would look away, walk away, assuming that the police have a good reason for doing what they’re doing. After all, just like the police know in their guts that nothing really bad will happen to them—white males FTW—these other people also know in their guts that this kind of police assault will also never happen to them or to anyone they know. That’s why they don’t care. Because why should they care if a bunch of animals get what they deserve while they’re trying to steal what other hard-working people have to earn? So goes the logic, right? It’s so easy for them to convince themselves of their righteousness in their horrific racism.
The mechanics of this argument are employed everywhere: thinks back to the 80s and 90s when AIDS raged across the world. It took forever for treatment to gain traction because it was just happening to a bunch of homos who couldn’t keep their dicks out of each other. Othering is probably the most powerful social driver humans have.
Pemberton continues,
“Who needs a strong government, including a strong community-controlled police force more than people of color? Who is more ravaged by crime than these communities? And the crime I mean isn’t just street crime, such as the McMichael dad and son duo, but also crimes such as Flint water. We can’t have it both ways here and say all government is bad when it is the most white and privileged who can survive without it.”
The call to “get rid of police” is made from a position of privilege. The underprivileged want police, but they want them to stop attacking them. Instead, they want to be “protected and served” as more than just an expression, but as an actual credo.
“To say we don’t need police, they’re all bad, well that’s easy for some people to say. Without the police who is to say that MAGA killers wouldn’t be lynching people in the streets?”
“To beat the virus of white supremacy we must control the vectors. We must hold them accountable. But the virus is white supremacy. […] We shouldn’t just be scared of the cops. We should be scared of becoming them.”
“Slavoj’s insight that Trump is hated because he is the last thing left-liberals see before they see the class struggle also applies here.”
I just want to reiterate that I agree whole-heartedly: anyone who hates Trump to the exclusion other political opinion, anyone who needs to get rid of Trump above all—is likely blinded to the class war that will continue even when Trump is dead and gone.
And that goes double for anyone who thinks Trump will save them: how do they think that Trump has his forces in check? This comment (Reddit) shows Trump’s National Guard troops following an MRAP (it’s a fucking tank, people) up a neighborhood street in America, bellowing at people to go inside. They gave no warning to those that remained on their porches—where they had every right to be—before exhorting their comrades to “light ‘em up” and then firing ostensibly non-lethal ordnance at innocent civilians, who are citizens of their own country.
You know what Trump supporters are saying, though? If they have their Trump signs in their yards or on their houses or on their cars, then they’ll be spared. Anyone who subscribes to this viewpoint does not care about the rule of law. They do not have principles.
They are saying: “I have no principles other than a belief in the law of the jungle predicated on my belonging to a group that has classically been the apex predator.” Shorter: “I got mine, Jack.”
As noted on Redacted Tonight: ~293~ U.S. Spy Mission Against Assange Revealed by Anders Lee (YouTube), Anders and Lee discuss whether “Should guys with guns be called to deal with somebody who’s got a fake $20 or a bounced check or somebody peeing in a fountain. We call guys with guns—and women with guns—to come deal with all kinds of shit that they should not be involved in.” Anders pointed out that he actually grew up in Minneapolis and used to work in a store near that neighborhood and the “policy used to be to just not accept it [the counterfeit bill]”.
The Death of George Floyd, in Context by Jelani Cobb (The New Yorker)
“The video of Floyd’s death is horrific but not surprising; terrible but not unusual, depicting a kind of incident that is periodically reënacted in the United States. It’s both necessary and, at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated by race.”
Comment by Leonardo Jacobs (Reddit.com):
“Some dumbass: Burning an American city to the ground won’t bring back George Floyd.
Leonardo Jacobs: Bombing Middle East countries won’t undo 9/11.”
Citing Malcolm X by Kentah Gwanjez (Twitter)
“A hundred years ago they used to put on a white sheet and use a bloodhound against Negroes today they have taken off the white sheet and put on police uniform, they’ve traded in the bloodhounds for police dogs and they’re still doing the same thing”
“But he didn’t die of strangulation guys it was the drugs and counterfeit money that killed him.”“When Floyd stopped moving and became unresponsive, Kueng checked for a pulse and said he couldn’t find one.
“Two minutes later, Chauvin removed his knee from Floyd’s neck and the ambulance arrived.”
This next article notes that there is a difference in how other police departments are reacting to this murder. Black people are still being murdered and America is still nearly hopelessly and probably irreparably racist, but it’s getting better.
The article A Second Chance For Black Lives Matter by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) lays out the facts quite well.
“But unlike the dead men before, the reaction wasn’t to defend the practice and explain why it’s necessary or justified. It wasn’t even to tar Floyd with whatever was available, a prior, a random accusation, anything, no matter how irrelevant, to remind us not to care too much about his killing because he just wasn’t worthy of living.
“[…]
“Notably, Chief Arradondo didn’t suspend them pending an investigation, but fired them. Don’t be surprised if they don’t stay fired, as union arbitration will be used to challenge the discharges. Or they will find a new home in a neighboring force. There is a possibility that the cop whose knee killed Floyd may be the subject of criminal charges. Or not.
“{…}
“Chief Arradondo gave up four names of four street cops whom the brass condemns. This alone will outrage the rank and file, the street cops who believe that no one who doesn’t walk the mean streets understands them, their job. They scoff at the brass, who concern themselves with politics while the street cops concern themselves with the First Rule of Policing.”
Another article, Tennessee police chief tells officers who ‘don’t have an issue’ with George Floyd arrest to turn in badges by Aris Folley (The Hill) cites a tweet:
“There is no need to see more video. There no need to wait to see how “it plays out”. There is no need to put a knee on someone’s neck for NINE minutes. There IS a need to DO something. If you wear a badge and you don’t have an issue with this…turn it in.”
The following comment by W. Patrick Swanton (Reddit) comes from a retired Waco, Texas police officer:
“What you did was kill more than a human being today. What you did was kill a piece of America that law enforcement officers everywhere will have to pay for. You not only killed George Floyd, but you also killed a very fragile thing law enforcement strives to maintain today called trust.
“I, along with thousands of other real cops watched in horror as you kneeled on the throat of not only your community but ours as well and killed something you may never get back […]
“I speak for thousands of officers when I say you are not a part of us and your actions can never be justified in any way, shape, or form.
“[I hope they are] brought up on criminal charges and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
There seems to be hope that the baseline attitude has changed, but it might not be nearly enough this time. Let’s hope we don’t ruin everything by insisting on passing purity tests for woke-ness.
The article Chauvin Charged, But Is It Legally Sufficient? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) tackles the legal wording in the complaint against the police as well as the statement of probable cause filed by the police.
“Yet, the complaint filed by the Hennepin County Attorney made almost no effort to assert that the elements of the charge were met, that Chauvin was “perpetrating an act eminently dangerous to others and evincing a depraved mind, without regard for human life.”
“While the video clearly showed Chauvin’s knee on Floyd’s neck, which was naturally assumed, for obvious reasons, to have been the cause of death, that alone does not suffice to meet the element that it was an “act eminently dangerous.” It’s hardly an undangerous immobilization technique, but it’s also not an uncommon restraint, and is a permissible use of force in Minneapolis. That it’s only supposed to be used to restrain someone actively resisting gives rise to a departmental violation, but doesn’t elevate a lawful use of force to an eminently dangerous act. (Emphasis added.)”
In the charges, the medical examinerpolice citing preliminary ME results pointed out “potential intoxicants” as a possible cause of death, so I think we’re right back to the usual bullshit. The statement of probable cause includes the following:
“The Hennepin County Medical Examiner (ME) conducted Mr. Floyd’s autopsy on May 26, 2020. The full report of the ME is pending but the ME has made the following preliminary findings. The autopsy revealed no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation. Mr. Floyd had underlying health conditions including coronary artery disease and hypertensive heart disease. The combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system likely contributed to his death. ”
Here’s a much-shorter video from another angle, showing that there were three men sitting on the victim at once. The original 8.5-minute video is also linked in the Greenfield article, but this one suffices to show the situation.
So a handcuffed man was pinned to the pavement by three men for over eight minutes, the final two of which he was unconscious and the officers had confirmed that he had no pulse, but this was somehow an accident due to his heart condition and “potential intoxicants”?
I understand that, scientifically, certain intoxicants can’t be ruled out until a final report is made. I also understand that this might be seen as exonerating by some—if he wasn’t strangled, then he just happened to die of a heart attack as he was being brutally assaulted—but it’s like the kid who blames the cat for pulling its own tail—”I was just holding it”.
The article George Floyd death: Why has a US city gone up in flames? by Jessica Lussenhop (BBC) learned me a thing or two about a corner of the country about which I’d known little and assumed much.
“The Twin Cities, as Minneapolis and St Paul are known, are still overwhelmingly white − about one-quarter of the population is non-white − and its neighbourhoods are still highly segregated. Most people of colour live on the cities’ north sides.
“They were shaped by racist red-lining policies dating to the early 20th Century, when black families were not allowed to buy homes in certain neighbourhoods.”
I’d known about Robert Moses’s red-lining in NYC because I’d lived there. I knew about his majestic Cross-Bronx Expressway that he used to segregate the Bronx in the same way as described above for St. Paul. I guess NYC is not alone in its horrific though denied racism. The policies do so much more damage than an individual act of violence, about which much more later in this article.
For those for whom the death of human beings isn’t enough—especially when they’re people of color—let this next case remind you that the police are indiscriminate in their hatred of the lower classes. They may subjugate black people more, but they are indoctrinated to hate all poor people.
And it’s not just the police: everyone in America—no matter how poor they are themselves—is trained to hate other poor people. The state religion is that everyone deserves what they get: the rich and the poor. All is as it should be—just the way late-stage capitalism wants it.
This comment about Kelly Thomas (Reddit) links to a photo of a poor man who was,
“[…] a homeless man with schizophrenia [who] was beaten and tased into a coma by 6 members f of the Fullerton Police Department (CA) on July 5, 2011. He died 5 days later. Three officers were charged with manslaughter, but none were found guilty”
The photo includes an exhibit from the trial where the man’s piteous and nonthreatening pleas with his assaulters were listed:
The officers beat him mercilessly, despite his pleas. See the Wikipedia article for more information.
Individual incidents of violence are not rare and are not purely racial. The police are shock troops in a class war with a strong racial component.
Looting is what black people do when they step out of line. When white people do it, it’s called “arbitrage”.
Who Exactly Is Doing the Looting, and Who’s Being Looted? by David Sirota (Jacobin)
“Working-class people pilfering convenience-store goods is deemed “looting.” By contrast, rich folk and corporations stealing billions of dollars during their class war is considered good and necessary “public policy” — aided and abetted by arsonist politicians in Washington lighting the crime scene on fire to try to cover everything up.”
Comment by Warren Gunnels (Reddit.com):
“Looting is the wealthiest person in America (Jeff Bezos) increasing his wealth by $40 billion in a pandemic while his company (Amazon) pays nothing in federal income taxes for 3 years, receives a $104 million tax refund, ends hazard pay and denies paid sick leave to its workers.”
Comment by Ryan Knight (Twitter)
“You want to talk about “looting”? Over the past 30 years the top 1% gained $21 trillion in wealth while the bottom 50% lost $900 billion in wealth. That is the only looting that I care about.”
Protestors Criticized For Looting Businesses Without Forming Private Equity Firm First (The Onion)
“I understand that people are angry, but they shouldn’t just endanger businesses without even a thought to enriching themselves through leveraged buyouts and across-the-board terminations. It’s disgusting to put workers at risk by looting. You do it by chipping away at their health benefits and eventually laying them off. There’s a right way and wrong way to do this.”
No, We Should Not Condemn Uprisings Against Police Murders Like George Floyd’s by Peter Gowan (Jacobin)
“Yes, we should condemn the looting of the Global South by Western militaries and multinational corporations. We should fear the terrifying possibility that the COVID-19 vaccine will be enclosed, privatized, and sold for profit; and the looting of underdeveloped nations and underinsured people that would ensue.
“We should fight back against the looting of underdeveloped nations’ coffers by odious debts and structural adjustment programs being drawn up and imposed by international institutions at this very minute.”
“Should we blame working-class black people for lashing out at a government and economy designed to repress, exploit, and subdue them; during a pandemic in which capitalism has made it near impossible for them to survive? Should we participate in this ritual condemnation even though our media consistently treats identical acts of property destruction by sports fans as simply revelry and exuberance, and corporate looting of working-class communities as business as usual?
“[…]
“If you care about looting, turn your eyes to the militaries, the police, the pharmaceutical companies, the private equity ghouls, the landlords, the real estate speculators, and the billionaires. And demand that a world once looted from the vast majority be now returned to them.”
Killer Mike held a press conference with the Atlanta mayor to plead with people to stop destroying property—to not attack the CNN headquarters. He’s trying to be the voice of reason and doing a wonderfully passionate, emotional, eloquent, and seemingly extemporaneous job of it. Masterful and moving.
“We don’t want to see a Target burn. We want to see the system that sets up for systemic racism burnt to the ground. […] Stop making people be so fearful and give them hope.”
In a similar vein, Cornel West was allowed to hold forth at length in an interview with Anderson Cooper.
“I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment. Our culture is market-driven with everybody for sale, everything on sale […] What we’re seeing now in America is chickens coming home to roost. […] What we are witnessing is a lynching at the highest level. I thank God that we have people in the streets. Can you imagine if something like this happened and nobody cared? […] Unfortunately, it look as if the system cannot reform itself.”
It’s nice to see that brother West has got his mind right once again. He spent some years wandering in the wilderness during the first few Obama years. He is absolutely right that the system cannot reform itself—because it doesn’t want to. Why should it? As far as the system is concerned, everything is working as designed.
It’s a race problem yes, but it’s so much more a class problem. That’s why putting “black faces in high places” just assimilates them into a different class. The skin color doesn’t matter; the hierarchy does.
It’s not that white people can’t speak out, but they should really shut the fuck up about rioting for a few days and see where it goes. There’s no need for us to voice chiding opinions right now. Especially if you’re going to reprimand those animals for misbehaving. Especially if you said nothing when armed white men stormed state capital buildings because they didn’t want to wear masks. Or if you said nothing about protesters blocking ER entrance lanes at hospitals—all while carrying AR15s.
We all know the powers-that-be are secretly delighted while publicly scolding whenever a Target goes up in flames or a Louis Vuitton bag is stolen. They know that they’ll be able to use that handful of examples to represent the “whole lot of ‘em” and regain control in no time whatsoever.
The article Protest, Uprisings, and Race War by Tim Wise (CounterPunch)
“Those who have rarely been the target of organized police gangsterism are once again lecturing those who have about how best to respond to it.
“Be peaceful, they implore, as protesters rise up in Minneapolis and across the country in response to the killing of George Floyd. This, coming from the same people who melted down when Colin Kaepernick took a knee — a decidedly peaceful type of protest. Because apparently, when white folks say, “protest peacefully,” we mean “stop protesting.” (Emphasis added.)”
He makes the salient point wonderfully: there is no acceptable way for subjects to revolt. Anything they do other than bow and scrape and suck up their own misery is stepping out of line. They are like children of old: to be seen and not heard and, honestly, not even to be seen. Just clean the public bathroom when no-one important is in there and move on.
Wise goes on,
“We [Americans] are here [America] because of blood, and mostly that of others. We are here because of our insatiable desire to take by force the land and labor of others. We are the last people on Earth with a right to ruminate upon the superior morality of peaceful protest. We have never believed in it and rarely practiced it. Instead, we have always taken what we desire, and when denied it, we have turned to means utterly genocidal to make it so. (Emphasis added.)”
This is the crux of it: the people rioting are being as American as they know how to be. They have stopped being subservient—but they are the wrong ones doing it. They are exactly the subjugated peoples who should be making everything run smoothly for those who used violence to subjugate them before.
Wise continues,
“To speak of violence done by black people without uttering so much as a word about the violence done to them is perverse. And by violence, I don’t mean merely that of police brutality. I mean the structural violence that flies under the radar of most white folks but which has created the broader conditions in black communities against which those who live there are now rebelling. (Emphasis added.)”
This is a powder keg of injustice lit by George Floyd’s murder. This is a large swath of America admitting that they don’t believe in America anymore. And it’s not just black people—this is really a class war, after all—but anyone who knows that the game is rigged against them, who knows that their services are forced from them in what in any fair world would be called a slave system (we call it a “gig economy”).
People are rioting partly because they care about their lives, but also because they no longer care what happens to America. America has never done anything to show them that it cares about them. People have finally (maybe) given up. And thus, “burn it to the ground” seems like as good an idea as any other.
That’s always been the danger of bringing people too close to desperation. The U.S. ruling classes used to be much better at controlling the masses, at tempering desperation with hope to keep its subjects under control. No longer. The rulers have gotten meaner and meaner—in the sense of “stupider and stupider”—they’re piggy-eyed greed overwhelming any instincts they might have had. They forget—or likely never learned—how the system actually works. And now they’re breaking it—or may have broken it.
Maybe that’s ascribing too much thought to it. There are certainly people who are there to spread mayhem and steal while the stealing is good. Still, in the scale of violence, burning down a Target store is peanuts. The real violence is state violence and it is perpetrated even more insidiously; in an overwhelming number of cases, it gets its victims’ acquiescence.
“Zoning laws, redlining, predatory lending, stop-and-frisk: all are violence, however much we fail to understand that.”
This is a point also made by Slavoj Žižek in his book on Violence: the larger the violence, the more likely it is to be subsumed in the tapestry that underlies a culture. How easy it is to moralize about so-called looting and rioting when you control the terms of the debate.
“[…] it is bad enough that we think it appropriate to admonish persons of color about violence or to say that it “never works,” especially when it does. We are, after all, here, which serves as rather convincing proof that violence works quite well.”
I suppose that’s the main point: at the same time that we enjoy the fruits of our past and very-much ongoing violence, we admonish against using our weapon against us. It’s hypocritical, but makes sense as a strategy. We’ve never been much worried about being hypocritical.
“What is worse is our insistence that we bear no responsibility for the conditions that have caused the current crisis and that we need not even know about those conditions.”
The first rule of Fight Club is we don’t talk about Fight Club.
And, just in time, the article Roasted Coffee by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) lands in my newsfeed. I’m going to pick on Greenfield, not because he’s particularly egregious, but because his article is right there, ripe for the picking. What’s he going to do? Tell me I’m blogging wrong? I praise him for a different article in a previous section.
Greenfield writes,
“Cornell West may be right, that the system can’t reform itself, at least not to his satisfaction. It gets better. It gets worse. But it never gets fixed, and never to everyone’s satisfaction. Even as people try to fix it, it just gets more broken under the weight of good intentions coupled with simplistic solutions, hysteria and outrage.”
I agree that “good intentions coupled with simplistic solutions, hysteria and outrage” are the source of much grief in the world. But not even half of the parties responsible for a large part of the current boondoggle of public policy in America can be said to have had “good intentions”.
He writes that “[i]t gets better. It gets worse.”, but goddamn if it doesn’t seem to break the same way for the same beneficiaries most of the time. Even when it breaks for the underdog, it’s just on the surface. Below the surface—where it matters—the proper and ordained beneficiaries are still cleaning up. They win no matter what. And others lose no matter what.
It stays the same with barely a blip of difference for the overall goal: keeping a large supply of what is essentially slave labor available in order to keep the world functioning so that Greenfield can go motoring in his Healey with the Missus. As much as he and I can sympathize with what’s going on, we cannot, not really. We may have started out suffering or poor or uncertain, but the world rewarded us for hard work. That’s not how it works for everyone. Some people can’t win for losing—by design.
So up rears that word “privilege”—but it’s not impossible for those of us who benefit from privilege to be aware that we do. I know that Greenfield does (I’ve been reading him long enough). Telling people who’ve never benefitted from a single privilege—who suffer from anti-privilege wherein they can do no right—what the right solution is—and it’s not rioting—is kind of horseshit.
The U.S. is already a dumpster fire for 99% of the people living there. Greenfield knows it, but instinctively, he’s going to try to keep them from burning it to the ground in a way that will affect his 1% way of life. I know how he feels. When the world burns, my own privilege will burn up with it. I have the benefit that I don’t actually live there anymore, but I’m still saddened to realize that America may be too dumb to avoid driving itself off of a cliff.
“But burning a Starbucks won’t stop police from acting upon their presumption that black men are more likely to be violen[t] criminals.”
Burning the Starbucks doesn’t have a point. It’s not going to fix racism, but it’s also not meant to. It is an excrescence of a poisoned system. It is underprivileged, underfed, undermotivated, undereducated, and probably some criminally-minded people acting out. When a riot starts, the rats enter the sinking ship. [1]
A lot of people have never been given any indication that what they do matters at all. They’ve never benefitted from a positive feedback loop, as I have. No matter what they’ve done, the system has called them garbage—useless refuse who should be happy to suck pondwater, who should be happy for the dribs that circle the drains where they’re told they deserve to live.
It doesn’t matter. Be a bad person? Get killed in the street. Be a good person? Get fucking killed in the street.
They are doing what they’ve been taught, just like we are. They have their role to play and we ours. They act the part of mindless apes hooting and hollering at the fire they’ve lit—and we hoot and holler to defend the status quo that guarantees our own subjugation to the true rulers. Our scraps are just bigger than theirs. The masters of the universe do this on purpose to get our allegiance and have us play the role of scold for those lower than us on the totem pole.
The question is always the same: will we hold it all together for one more go-round? This time, however, it’s being asked in the context of an economy absolutely shattered by COVID-19. This time, there may not be enough scraps to go around to keep all of the myths in the air. The corporations via the Fed are getting their share, as usual. Americans—”main street”—were already not getting their share. If enough people stop believing the myth, it doesn’t matter how loudly Greenfield and Co. clap—Tink’s gonna die.
It’s coming down.
Here in Europe, the May 1st protests are ostensibly worker-positive, union-positive, leftist, peaceful marches celebrating labor—but are, often enough, infected with “riot tourists” who show up to ruin it for everyone.
Who gets coverage in general? The guys breaking shop windows.
Are there a lot of them? No, the numbers in Zürich are usually quite minuscule when you read the police report the next day.
Who gets coverage in business-friendly papers? You better believe it’s those damned leftists and their inherently violent tendencies—we should totally ban all unions, just to be on the safe side.
Published by marco on 23. May 2020 23:36:57 (GMT-5)
Introspection is not easy. To really examine one’s own drives and implicit assumptions takes patience and, above all, humility. The first time you dive down, you may not like what you see. Who you think you are may be only a surface representation—something you’ve plastered over a bundle of atavistic core principles that you’ve never bothered to evaluate, question, or correct.
So it is with American hegemony, which has never not thought itself noble. People of all nations have a jingoistic belief that they are better than everyone else—a belief that is, in some ways, essential to maintaining a society. But in no other nation in the world does this belief lead to so much death and suffering as for Americans—who are led to believe so strongly in their superiority that they stride forth into the world to make everyone else believe it as well.
The article What Does Winning Mean in a Forever War? by Patrick Buchanan (Antiwar.com) includes the following statement,
“We have failed to reorient the defeated nations to our way of thinking. We have failed to win the peace.”
This is factual. In the first sentence, though, it already feels like he’s lamenting the fact that we were unable to exert our force successfully. Instead of using a word like “conquer” or “browbeat” or “subjugate”, he writes “reorient”. I’m quite sure none of America’s vassal nations feel like that would be the appropriate word.
In the second sentence, he reveals the reason for his choice of words: he still thinks that the U.S. onslaught over the past century has been for the noble task of “win[ning] the peace”. So, here we have Buchanan, an American proponent for peace, who still can’t see past using overwhelming American force to “win [a] peace” that was already there in the first place.
Buchanan makes his general disdain for any people or its principles other than his own evident in the next few sentences.
“While we can defeat our enemies in the air and on the seas and in cyberspace, we cannot persuade them to embrace secular democracy and its values any more than we can convert them to Christianity.
“John Locke means nothing to these people. As for our Bill of Rights, why would devout Muslims, who believe there is but one God, Allah, and that Muhammad is his only Prophet, tolerate the preaching of heresies in their countries that can cause Muslims to lose their souls? (Emphasis added.)”
That the U.S. has been unable to conquer other nations is not due to its own bungling—to say nothing of the immorality at the core of the endeavor—but because the target populations are so recalcitrant, so stubbornly moronic as to fight to the death of their very last citizens rather than see the light of the shining city on a hill that is the glory of American society, the obvious pinnacle of human development.
He develops the argument to the following point,
“Millions of Muslims are familial, tribal, nationalistic, resistant to foreign intervention and proudly anti-Enlightenment.”
Buchanan seems to utterly miss the irony that this statement nearly perfectly describes the American people as well. On the one hand, there are countries throughout the world who cling, bloodyminded, to the notion that they should be left in peace to live as they see fit; on the other, we have an equally bloodyminded America, intent on bending every nation to its own deranged will, to mold it to its unsustainable, wasteful, demented, and overwhelmingly childish vision.
Here again, Buchanan can’t help but get a dig on the to-be-conquered peoples: that they are “anti-Englightenment”. These people are benighted souls who need to be “saved”: a crusader mentality (he even uses the word “crusades” in the next citation).
Ironically, of all of the supposedly civilized and advanced peoples of the world, no other could be more appropriately deemed anti-Enlightenment than Americans, who have been trained to be nearly rabidly anti-intellectual. In America, at this point, the querulous demand to know “why listen to experts; what would they know?” no longer even sounds dissonant—it’s become common sense for most.
Buchanan continues,
“With our “democracy crusades,” we have been trying to conquer and convert people who do not wish to be converted. Moreover, we lack the patience and perseverance to change or convert them. (Emphasis added.)”
In this short essay, Buchanan repeats his by-now standard, implicit understanding that American values should be promoted throughout the world, that we have a right to do so. Even when he admits that “they” do not wish to be converted, he laments that we don’t have the perseverance to force it on them. He laments several times that we have “failed” in what is, in essence, a noble and laudable mission.
His core message is that America should give up and leave the world in peace. That is, his heart is in the right place, but he comes to the right conclusion from a very twisted and immoral ideology—that of American exceptionalism,
“If they don’t attack us, why do we not just leave them be?
“Our enemies in the Middle East do not defeat our military. They outlast us. They apparently have an inexhaustible supply of volunteers willing to give up their lives in suicide attacks. They are willing to fight on and trade casualties endlessly. They do not subscribe to our rules of war.
“They tire us out, and, eventually, we give up and go home. (Emphasis added.)”
Once again, he utterly fails to see the irony that a statement he thinks perfectly suited to describe the bloodymindedness of an implacable, unreasonable, and suicidally stubborn enemy…also describes his own country perfectly. It arguably describes them even better.
His suggestion that they “do not subscribe to our rules of war” is reflexive hogwash. When you’re defending your own country from an overwhelmingly better-equipped and -armed enemy, all bets are off. It’s ludicrous that the U.S. attacks countries all over the world—almost inevitably carpet-bombing and strafing them from above—then whines that they don’t play fair if they fight back in any way. It would be laughable if the U.S. weren’t killing so many millions of people while it throws its tantrums.
Even the way they describe any resistance is designed to demean the techniques of the enemy. Consider what the U.S. or its allies does to prevent troop movements: it mines roads and harbors. When an enemy does it, they are using IEDs—improvised explosive devices. They are not mines when the enemy uses them—they are ad-hoc and inadmissible, the weapons of cowards and cheats, unlike the honorable landmines used by the U.S.
Buchanan continues,
“They refuse to surrender and submit because it is their beliefs, their values, their faith, their traditions, their tribe, their God, their culture, their civilization, their honor that they believe they are fighting for in what is, after all, their land, not ours.
“They are not trying to change us. We are trying to change them. And they wish to remain who they are. (Emphasis added.)”
Here he almost gets it right, but I detect more than a bit of judgment in the emphasized statements. They aren’t actually fighting for their own values, they only “believe” they are doing so. Were they to see the light (of the shining city on a hill that is the glory of American society), they would stop fighting because then they would see the error of their ways.
He strongly suggest that they would rather remain the patriarchal, enslaving, most-likely-bestiality-loving monsters that they are rather than to be democratized into loving McDonalds and American automobiles and rolling over to American hegemony.
By what right does America think this? By the right of overwhelming firepower. By the right of having cowed all other nations into letting it run roughshod over the weak and overly/unfairly resourced. Might makes right—and America still has 10x the military might of its nearest competitor, none of whom really has any chance of slowing the American bulldozer. All attempts to convince the U.S. through reason have failed.
Though Buchanan does his damnedest to sound reasonable—and he is genuinely anti-war—he is still an American exceptionalist unwilling to question the core reasoning behind his nation’s aggression.
He writes that “[a]s imperialists, we Americans are conspicuous failures”, but it seems more a lament. He seems to wish that we were better at it, that the destiny of America is to rule the world, that the greatest problem is that America is failing in its duty to lead the peoples of the world to greatness—whether they want to or not. He simply prefers that they do it militarily but, somehow, peacefully. There is much contradiction in his position.
Still, reality bites. The pandemic is showing that America isn’t really even capable of ruling itself. This fact has been evident for a long time, to those willing to look past the bluster and lies and the near-constant self-adulation and celebration of ephemeral and grossly unequal wealth.
It is exactly this poor planning of its own society—the hyper-consumerism combined with happy motoring, ex-ex-ex-urbs, monopolistic consolidation, skyrocketing inequality, a completely unhinged economy filled with non-jobs and misery—that leads America to wage its criminal wars.
It needs oil. It needs a lot of energy. It never occurs to America to just trade for it, as other countries do. No, America’s intuitive and by-now deeply ingrained solution is to assume that it already belongs to them—and not to the piteous and pagan savages who live on top of it. From there, the rational solution that occurs to the American is to seize what has always been theirs.
This is not a laudable or moral stance. This is piracy. We are the baddies. [1]
Yes, America is bad at running an empire. But, It’s just as bad at running itself. It performs horrible crimes against humanity in both endeavors.
“If voting could bring change, they wouldn’t let us vote”
In an interview of Noam Chomsky by Mehdi Hasan, Noam pleads his case for “holding your nose” and voting for Biden.
Noam’s done this for decades. We could be generous and perhaps appreciate his optimism about presidential elections—he... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 2. May 2020 00:32:03 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Nov 2022 12:54:47 (GMT-5)
“If voting could bring change, they wouldn’t let us vote”
In an interview of Noam Chomsky by Mehdi Hasan, Noam pleads his case for “holding your nose” and voting for Biden.
Noam’s done this for decades. We could be generous and perhaps appreciate his optimism about presidential elections—he never gives up and tells us that there’s no-one worth voting for. Instead, Noam always sees a lesser evil and votes for it—and tells everyone else to vote for it, as well.
This time, though, Noam’s more adamant, using for-him quite fiery rhetoric to drive his point home, even edging very close to ad-hominem territory for those who would choose not to vote for Biden. This unfortunately puts him in a not-very-austere group who choose to call anyone who doesn’t agree with their political choices “fools”.
Noam does nothing to soften the blow of his argument. He makes no concessions to people’s feelings about their own politics; he doesn’t even address the concern that, should one vote for a lesser evil, one is still voting for evil. He says nothing of complicity or how to deal with it.
I think Noam Chomsky might be right but, at the very least, he’s going about it the completely wrong way. He says in the interview: “If you decide that you want to vote for the destruction of life on Earth […] this time, the future of humanity is at stake.” Jesus Christ, Noam. If the future of humanity rests on me voting for Biden, then put a fucking fork in it. It’s done. And good riddance.
He seems to have forgotten that it would be nice to offer some sort of a preamble, an amuse-bouche as it were, to make voting for Joe Biden more palatable. Ever heard of foreplay? Instead, he cites historical precedent to liken anyone who doesn’t vote for Biden to the schmucks who “let” the Nazis rise to power. He literally says that if you don’t vote for Biden, you’re voting for Trump (in swing states, bla bla fucking bla). [1]
What is the difference between choosing to be shot in the head once or twice? What is the point of choosing “once” instead of “twice”? You’re dead anyway. Is there no value to not partaking in a system that asks you to choose your own mode of execution? Chomsky’s doesn’t address this question.
Is there a bar below which one should not go? Is it never possible for both candidates to be such mendacious, unreliable, and possibly senile liars that voting for either one is fraught with peril? That one’s soul and self-respect are on the table? Noam would reply that your self-respect is worth nothing when compared to the threat of nuclear war or climate catastrophe.
I understand that having Trump as president leaves these risks high, but I don’t really understand how they’re significantly lower with Biden at the helm—or, let’s not kid ourselves, whoever will be in the driver’s seat for him (Jill?).
Another argument is that one candidate’s policies are likely to harm the less fortunate more than the other. Noam—and others—beg us not to abuse our privilege because we are in a societal position that is largely shielded from being catastrophically affected by our choosing self-respect over the lesser evil.
That we choose a third-party candidate precisely because we want to express a hope for a better world for those people does not matter to Chomsky et. al. The U.S. electoral system is the way it is and Trump is so dangerous that “expressing a hope” is a luxury we do not have.
Bollocks.
Noam says that anyone who doesn’t vote for Biden is voting for the end of the human race.
Double bollocks.
How the fuck is voting for Biden going to save anything? Biden’s object of worship Obama restarted nuclear-weapons programs. He started new wars, destabilized Africa, rattled sabers at the Russians, and did nothing about North Korea.
How is Biden safer than Trump nuclear-wise? How is he more likely to tackle climate change? I could barely even write that joke of a sentence.
The answer is that Biden is marginally better than Trump, who’s a complete wild card and wildly incompetent at anything other than self-promotion, but it doesn’t matter because we’re missing orders of magnitude competence across the spectrum and getting a single person elected—even if it is the president—who’s even 50% better than Trump (and I’m being generous because Biden truly is awful in his own right)—doesn’t make a difference that matters.
There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between Trump and Biden and I wouldn’t be able to tell you who’s worse for the American people. The place that America has gotten to today is the work of Democratic and Republican presidents.
What they all were is corporatists who toed the line and sold the country to the rich and sold an unsustainable pipe dream to everyone else. Trump vs. Biden is four more years of that dangerous and useless horseshit no matter what. Biden and his handlers wouldn’t do a goddamned thing for the climate. The Democrats will not prepare America better for the next pandemic. No-one can restart the American economy.
Jesus, it’s so tedious to watch the same wasteland and paucity of thought and vision in election cycle after election cycle. It’s even more laughable now because Biden is just so bad. Is Noam not concerned at all that Biden will collapse far before the finish line? What then? What viability does the Democratic Party have if their chosen candidate completely implodes? Do they scour up something else? How viable will that be? Is Noam not interested in discussing fallback scenarios if his all-in strategy on Biden becomes physically impossible?
As the article The Placeholder by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) writes,
“Joe Biden for President is Emperor’s-New-Clothes caliber deceit, requiring a rank-and-file so marinated in falsehood they couldn’t tell you the difference between a red light and a green light.”
Bernie was old, but vivacious, even spry. Biden is just old, the poor guy. How can Noam not even address the fact that the Democrats have chosen an avowed supporter of segregation and great friend to the most virulent racists American politics has ever produced, a great friend to the banks and insurance and credit-card companies, who has a seriously bad history of touching women and little girls and has a rape accusation hanging around his neck? What’s not to love?
Even his old affable charm is gone, robbed by a late-onset dementia that’s clear to anyone who watches him speak for two minutes. Are we not concerned that this is the man who should lead us into the teeth of COVID over the next two years, but he hasn’t proposed a single policy since the pandemic began?
He’s had one softball interview that he completely bungled, failing to read coherently from cards he shouldn’t have needed? What the actual fuck, Noam? How bad does the other candidate have to be before you just throw your fucking hands in the air and say that even you, the eminence grise Noam Chomsky honestly doesn’t know what the fuck we can do to save this idiotic, suicidal country?
This is highly irritating because when I watch Noam Chomsky, I like his normally nuanced take on world affairs. But I don’t really need to be treated to a 91-year–old man lecturing me that my political opinion is completely irrelevant in the United States because the two-party system has once again engineered a non-choice. I could just watch 30 minutes of CNN instead.
I know simultaneously that Noam is probably right and that Trump will get re-elected even if everyone who listens to Noam and his co-signers on his letter [2] votes for Biden. It doesn’t matter because there are only two parties and one has a candidate that his voters inexplicably worship and most of the people voting for the other party would do so because they hate/are terrified of that candidate (it’s Trump, by the way).
I know Noam’s been getting kicked in the teeth for a long time, but he seems to lack vision. I guess he’s thinking we’re like an abused spouse: the most important thing is to get the abuser away from America.
What is the end-game for the strategy he recommends? There is none. America is seriously fucked either way. Because it’s purely reactive; instead, we need to strike, to be pro-active.
Noam and co. are all just following the rules and the rules are not made by them. We can’t let Trump be elected again because he’ll pack the Supreme Court. Fuck it. If he packs it, throw them out. The whole point of making Supreme Court appointments lifelong was to ensure that a justice’s impartiality was not impinged by having to run for office. If justices are compromised from the get-go, then they’re already not impartial. They have to go. RESET SHIT.
Goddamn, people. None of our opponents are following the rules that they made for us—and they are fucking cleaning up out there—but you’re trying to fight them by adhering to those rules. Good luck with that. This is ridiculous. The game is rigged, [3]. Open your eyes.
How in the name of FUCK do you ever expect to get a good candidate? Talk about controlling the narrative: the Republicans have got the entire political will of possibly progressive people talking about whether they will vote for a fucking dishrag like Biden while SARS2 rages through the world and climate change is having a cigarette out on the back stoop, but will be coming back in any fucking minute now.
Instead of focusing on anything real, anything left of Phyllis Schlafley is staring into their navels or onanizing furiously on Twitter and doing literally nothing about any real problems—because the system won’t let them. Boo hoo.
It is seriously time to take the system down. To set shit on fire.
There’s never been a better time: It’s mostly dismantled right now anyway. The country has never offered less to its people relative to what it should be offering than now. It has never looked weaker in my lifetime. The cracks have never been this evident to this many people. It is time to strike.
And striking does not mean voting for Joe Biden because he’s a shitty candidate even when running against Trump. Think about that: he’s running against Trump and he’s the hold-your-nose-and-vote candidate. How fucking terrible can you even be?
He knows exactly how everything works—and he’s right about nearly everything. You won’t find anyone who knows more than Chomsky. And he knows how to recommend how to fix things. But, and this is painful to say—he’s also been losing the game his entire life. He’s created a tremendous amount of awareness, educated millions, and is acknowledged everywhere but his country of origin as the world’s leading intellectual—possibly of all time.
But he’s had zero success in fixing anything about his own country. He’s only been able to document the evil, not avert it. It’s gotten orders of magnitude worse. Maybe it’s because no-one listens to him.
The path he saw coming in the late 50s/early 60s? The nation didn’t listen to a thing he had to say. They did exactly what he said they would do and learned nothing but that it worked for them. They also learned that they could make Chomsky toothless: he’s never interviewed in America. His writings do not appear in American media, for the most part.
So he and his friends are not really the go-to people for ideas on how to fix any of this. Well, we can listen to their ideas, but their follow-through has a lousy track record. They have no idea how to wrest power from the bad guys. Vote for Biden. Are you fucking kidding me? That’s your answer? Might as well go home and get blind-drunk right now.
This is two elections in a row now. The last time it was warmonger Clinton. Trump won in an unprecedented come-from-behind [4] win. Now that it’s been firmly established that competence is not a requirement—and neither is showing competence or hiring competent advisors—we have to believe that he can be elected again.
He will. Easily.
Because literally everyone you listen to about issues and policies and electability is nearly always wrong about everything. That includes Noam Chomsky, who’s been advising our voting choices for most of my adult life: hold your nose and vote for Gore, for Kerry, for (Hillary) Clinton.
Noam also said to vote for Obama, who was a different kind of disappointment. He actually won but could see that he couldn’t do anything to really change the country, so he didn’t even try.
I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt that, at least at the beginning, he really did want to change things for the better.
Instead, he just made sure that his legacy would be that people think he was a great president, which was enough for him. His signature legislation, the ACA, is a nearly laughably inefficient and expensive gift to private healthcare with premiums and deductibles so high that SARS2 tore it to shreds like a Rottweiler going through toilet paper.
And you know everything else he did. Extrajudicial killings, Wall Street bailouts, etc. A continuation of Bush’s years. He started new wars. He was America’s first black Republican president. And people are crowing about how Obama tried to prepare the country for pandemics, but Trump broke everything. Kind of, I guess. Superficially.
But Obama had eight years as president and he left us with an America with an exploding prison population, a gig economy, sky-high health-care costs, a rotting infrastructure, a larger military, seven wars, no plan for economic shocks (because why build one? It’s not like those ever happen).
It’s not like having a pandemic stockpile of masks would have helped avoid a 30% unemployment rate engendered by a fantastical economy not started by but definitely re-started and promulgated by Mr. Obama.
He also had a chance to change things fundamentally because America was in deep shit then, too. Not as deep as now, but pretty deep. Instead, he punished no-one, dumped 16 trillion of cheap loans (hundreds of billions of saved interest) into the laps of the criminals who perpetrated the problem and then jetted off to go kite-surfing with Richard Branson eight years later.
Also, he’s publishing some books reminding us about how smart he is and also stepping in to fucking kill Bernie’s campaign like a consigliere. So, no, Obama would not have “prepared” the U.S. for SARS2. But maybe no-one could, with the legislative dumpster fire that is Congress.
Congress is just as shockingly inadequate and incompetent as the President. Or it would be shocking if it wasn’t so familiar and humdrum by now.
You might as well run the poop emoji for the Democrats. Chomsky et. al. would tell us to vote for it because it’s better than Trump and everyone’s given up hope on the Republicans seeing reason and choosing someone else.
Did you ever think about that? That we’ve basically given up on changing the minds of 50% of the voting public? And we’ve effectively given up on getting the 50% of the electorate who never votes to vote? Sure, we’re also doing everything we can to make voting harder, that’s true.
But that’s also playing by their rules. They make rules that you have to vote to change things. Fine. Then they make it so only two candidates can run, neither of whose spider-graph for political opinion overlaps even 5% with yours. Then they make you vote on a workday, during working hours. Then they make it take hours and hours.
Maybe you’ll catch a deadly disease while you’re there. Maybe you’ll get fired. Roll the dice.
Wanna vote by mail? 20% chance you don’t get the ballot. 20% more that they lose it or don’t count it.
This is bullshit. Stop. Playing. By. Their. Rules.
It’s not worth it. I’m not saying don’t vote.
But man, we have to think about how we can get out of this, don’t we? Like, for real? It’s not even cynically funny anymore.
Bernie tried to wake up the non-voting public. It didn’t work. At all. He was also seriously undermined by the Democratic Party. But that’s to be expected. Forget them.
But then what? Another party? Another candidate? Is that even possible? Not in America, that’s for sure.
And don’t even get started on the degree to which the elitist and managerial media control the narrative to the very last detail. Remember, up top, where we discussed how they’ve got you deciding whether to vote for that ass-clown Biden or throwing your vote away and getting four more years of Trump.
It’s time for a mutiny. Storm the gates. No weapons, please. Seriously.
The time has never been riper because SARS2 has fucked up our shit pretty hard. The U.S. government is on the ground. Maybe we should focus our efforts on not letting it get back up until it says uncle. Or maybe just put it out of our misery.
Because it’s pretty clear that the U.S.—uniquely among the grown-up nations—doesn’t know how to deal with something like SARS2. It doesn’t have a clue. It is ideologically weaponless against it—utterly incapable of even conceiving of the most obvious solutions.
And neither Trump nor Biden nor any of the elected officials with any clout can fix it. They don’t even know how to keep people afloat during the lockdowns. They’re letting everyone run out of money. “Checks” will show up maybe in August. $1200 for several months. “Suspensions” of payments, but no jubilees.
Who are they kidding? They’re building a population that will finally be ready for revolution—because they will finally have nothing left to lose. Because it will finally have been made crystal clear to even the truest of the true believers that the so-called American Dream is not for them. [6]
We finally have leaders stupid enough to have forgotten that you have to let a crumb or two fall from the table or the natives get much too restless. America might finally be having it’s “let them eat cake” moment.
The only thing that can save us from Trump now, quite frankly, is SARS2. I don’t think it will kill his administration, but it might kill him. He’s in the risk group. I bet it won’t because that’s not the kind of sense of humor God has. It could kill Biden, but God’s much more morbid than that. It’ll probably take out Bernie and give the movement a martyr that will definitely split the anti-Trump vote and shoo Trump right in for four more years.
As I’ve expected him to do since he was elected in 2016. Garbage in, garbage out. [7]
I wrote this rant a few nights ago and then saw the video below, where Greenwald echoes my sentiments nearly exactly.
See Sanders is too good for this worldcountry, where I cite a Reddit rant as follows,
“[…] the truth is that there is no system of government ever designed, nor could one ever be created, that could survive and prosper with a population as arrogant, stupid, selfish and short-sighted as the average American.”
One friend sent me this article 8 MORE Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic (Off-Guardian), which includes varied citations from varied experts. The site is for people who’ve been kicked off of the comments section of the Guardian (hence “Off-Guardian”). The formatting and... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Apr 2020 22:56:54 (GMT-5)
One friend sent me this article 8 MORE Experts Questioning the Coronavirus Panic (Off-Guardian), which includes varied citations from varied experts. The site is for people who’ve been kicked off of the comments section of the Guardian (hence “Off-Guardian”). The formatting and flow are terrible, but some of the information is OK (e.g. “He suggested that the real figure for the number of cases could be 10 to 20 times higher than the official figure. If he’s right, the headline death rate due to this virus will be 10 to 20 times lower than it appears to be from the published figures.”) but it’s mostly speculation.
Until we know more, we’re proceeding with the right strategy. We stay cautious in the face of a paucity of information. Once we know more, we can react less stringently, if the information bears out such a strategy. Perhaps for the next pandemic, we can be better-informed. For this one, we are where we are.
The local Consumer Reports in Switzerland K-Tipp took it upon themselves to publish their own feelings that everyone is needlessly overreacting by pointing out that deaths where the flu is involved aren’t considered flu deaths. I.e. patients that die of complications which the flu perhaps exacerbated are considered to have died of the underlying condition, not the flu. In the case of Coronavirus, the methodology is the opposite.
A scandal. They have truly discovered that the Coronavirus would be only as bad as a seasonal flu if they weren’t being treated differently in the statistics to … what? What would be the reason? For Switzerland to deliberately kill its own economy as part of some mass hysteria? A global hysteria? That seems to be their theory. That were the clear-eyed and -headed editors of the K-Tipp at the tiller, we would be navigating this crisis with much more aplomb and much less fuss.
What they don’t explain away is the extra deaths, not only in Switzerland, but in many other countries. The morbidity numbers are way above the norm everywhere. These deaths have been attributed to COVID because it makes sense to do so. What else would you expect? What do they suggest? Should Switzerland use the methodology they use for the flu and, instead of reporting COVID numbers, they say that COVID isn’t a thing, but that their heart-attack numbers in March and April are through the roof, for utterly mysterious reasons?
That would be super-useful. It’s an interesting thing to point out, but the magazine could have come to the conclusion I just came to above, instead of promulgating the implication that COVID isn’t really a thing, that over half the world is sitting at home because of mass hysteria. They do no justice to the intelligent and well-trained medical personnel who are doing their damnedest to steer us through a crisis for which we are economically prepared, but not very socially or ideologically prepared.
Hence this article: people just can’t believe that the world can tell mankind what to do, instead of the other way around. But people are dying. Countries that deviate from the recommendations have much higher death-rates. The report for K-Tipp is what one can expect when things go right, when the plan works. Then they’ll complain that it was a hoax because, paradoxically, not enough people died.
Damned if you do; damned if you don’t. K-Tipp should go back to telling me whether I should buy my Rioja from Lidl or Aldi or telling me which bicycle helmet is the safest. They should leave their Trump-like conspiracy theories to journals that deal in these topics instead of scaring their aged subscribers into thinking that nothing is going on.
Their letters page is an echo chamber of people thanking them for their efforts in combatting the misinformation disseminated by the government. That would be all of the governments of the world, I guess. Unless Italy is killing people in droves—or OMG lying about it—just to support the Swiss government in its efforts to swindle its own people into … what? Shit, what do they want? People to stay at home? To destroy their own economy? To what purpose? You can’t just make a conspiracy theory: you have to work on motive a bit.
Other readers just attributed it to incompetence through and through and thanked the consumer magazine for taking time out of their busy schedule of evaluating cooking butter vs. premium butter to set the record straight vis á vis medical statistics. They noted that the government was stupid or crooked or incompetent enough to rely on experts, which was their downfall. Because everyone know that experts don’t know anything, by definition. It’s really nice to see that the U.S. doesn’t have a monopoly on this kind of thinking.
The article Turning and Churning by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) sanely and calmly discusses the “debate” about COVID and the effects of the lockdown on the economy.
“Here’s what I think about the disease just now (subject to further evidence): it’s not just another flu. It operates differently, it’s more lethal, it affects many organs and can damage them permanently, and it spreads rapidly. That seems to have been the consensus of public health officials the world round who promoted the lockdown policy – and it’s hard to believe that they all got snookered into that.”
This is the part that the haters don’t seem to talk about: they’re proposing a worldwide conspiracy or worldwide incompetence without a motive and without describing how it would possibly work. They lean on the statements from unimpeachable sources like consumer magazines or right-wing neoliberal politicians (see below) and discount all of the information that’s inconvenient to them, while keeping the information that serves their purpose (e.g. play down number of deaths, but cling to the 2-3% figure that no country has right now and that was cited at the beginning of the year, based on China’s data, which they are also now claiming is faked while at the same time citing the parts they like).
Those that are worried about the economy are blaming the lockdown measures instead of the utter flakiness of an economy that couldn’t even survive a love tap to say nothing of a lockdown as severe as this one. The economy has been a house of cards for decades and it’s been super-fragile and even more fantastical since 2008. But it’s the lockdown that’s at fault, not the fragility of the stupid system that they built. Kunstler continues
“The plague didn’t cause the economic crash. But the lockdown response certainly accelerated, amplified, and ramified it. The crash happened because we built up a hyper-complex, over-scaled, just-in-time economic system with all its ecological redundancy edited out for the sake of efficiency, making it hyper-fragile. The system’s basic power module (fossil fuel) was failing on a cost-basis and we tried to compensate for that with debt. The debt got out of hand in both sheer quantity and from the dishonest games that bankers and politicians were playing with it. All of this happened for the reason that most things happen in history: it seemed like a good idea at the time. (Emphasis in original.)”
The article Quarantine Day 37 by Carol Miller (CounterPunch) also urges caution with “opening back up” or “going back to normal”:
“For everyone dying to go back to work I ask for extreme caution. You might actually die, or someone you know and love might actually die.
“Somewhere between 25% and 50% of the people infected with COVID-19 have no symptoms. The US has not tested enough people to truly understand the scope and life cycle of this virus in the US.
“[…]
“I was notified again on April 18th, after a 4th round of COVID-19 tests, that I am still positive for the virus. I still have no symptoms.
“I am a poster child for all the unknowns of OCVID-19. How long will someone carry the virus with no symptoms? How long will someone with virus be contagious? If there are shreds of virus clinging to the nasopharynx are they actually contagious or noncontagious? Science has no answer to any of these questions yet.”
But let’s get back to dodgy and shady ideas and theories. The article A Third Solution by Paul Buchheit starts off quite well, with the following summary:
“it’s not “just the flu”. It is something much more dangerous. Catching this virus is a bit like playing a round of Russian roulette. […] For those of us less at risk, the danger is still present, but it’s as though the gun is pointed towards someone else, someone more vulnerable, because we can easily pass the virus along to them without even realizing that we have it.
“There’s also the issue of long-term effects. This disease is new, so we really have no idea. It’s likely that more severe cases, those requiring hospitalization, present serious risk of permanent damage to the heart, lungs, and other organs. […] We also don’t know how long immunity lasts or what will happen if people catch it a second time next year. We hope that it will be milder the second time, but it could be worse.”
The rest of the article devolves into suggesting a “third solution”, which is really the first solution everyone would want: full tracking. Because Buchheit created GMail, he seems to think that he can give something a new name and the venture capital funding will come pouring in for his new venture of testing everyone all the time. He might be right. Of course, there a few technical hurdles in the way, most of them math- and physics-based.
We’d all love to have every person be tested every morning non-invasively and with 100% accuracy and self-reporting, etc. but there are a lot of hurdles between where we are and that utopia. He’s not telling us anything that we don’t already know, but we need a plan to get there from where we are (which is at about 2% tested in most OECD countries, to say nothing of herd immunity of 60-70%).
This sounds like the advice people like this love to give to the poor who can’t afford to feed their families. They come up with the bright idea that those people should make more money. Not helping.
The article Can We Stop Using the 60,000 Death Projection Number? by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) points out that the NYT, as recently as April 23rd, was still using 60,000 COVID-related deaths as a ceiling for the U.S. On that day, deaths were just a hair under 50,000 and were still increasing at a steady clip of about 2,000 per day.
Or there’s the article Roaming Charges: Killing Yourself to Live by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch), which points out that Citigroup analysts were confident that 60% of the American public could be tested by the end of April (6 days away at time of publication) and 95% by the end of May. This, although only 1% of the population had been tested at the time and less than .05% were being tested per day. They would have to pick up testing by 140x (or 14,000%) in order to hit that target.
They predict, based on their numbers, that 90% of the workforce could then safely return to work by mid-May. That a bank is this bad at math—even CitiBank—is frankly unbelievable, so they’re clearly just lying to manipulate the stock market. Or maybe they’ve been talking to Paul Buchheit, cited above.
Or there’s this video Herbert Kickl zieht Bilanz “Kanzler Kurz hat Menschen bewusst in Angst und Schrecken versetzt!” (YouTube) (German) that another friend sent me, commenting that this guy is finally willing to speak truth to power and to shame his fellow parliamentarians for having turned Austria into a police state as their COVID response, when Sweden is showing the world that another way is possible, that COVID can be held under control with only slight restrictions on gathering size, but otherwise stores and restaurants can stay open.
All numbers in the following discussion are from early Sunday morning, April 26th (World-o-meters).
Despite Herr Kickl’s vehemence, he’s comparing against only Sweden, which he describes as a paradise of no-COVID/no-restriction/booming-economy, unlike all of the other chickenshit countries. But we can compare Sweden very nicely to Switzerland and Austria because they are all pretty much the same size, population-wise. Today’s numbers show that Sweden has 20% more cases than Austria and are growing at ~600 cases per day where Austria is below 100 cases per day and is basically ready to start the “dance”. Sweden danced first without using the hammer. Also, they’ve tested less than 1% of their population where Austria and Switzerland are at about 2.45% and 2.85%, respectively.
It doesn’t look like dancing first is actually working for Sweden, though (just like failed for the UK, which entertained the idea only briefly). Their increase in cases is steeper, their total deaths are 4x higher than Austria and they’re only at the beginning of their intensive infectious period (see the chart to the right). Without using the “hammer” that other countries have, it’s unclear how they’re going to keep their infections under control. It’s most likely that they’re not: their approach looks like they’re going for herd immunity, as England did, at first. It soon spiraled out of control for England. It is likely to do so for Sweden as well.
Just because it takes a few weeks longer or the pattern looks slightly different doesn’t mean that Sweden has found a magical solution to COVID that escaped everyone else. But let’s put a pin in that. Herr Kickl staked his career on the numbers; I’ve got no skin in the game, but I’m betting against him. If he “wins” and Sweden “wins”, then we all win—as long as we can figure out how they did it.
Switzerland currently has more cases than Sweden overall (~29,000 vs. ~18,000) but Sweden already has about 35% more deaths than Switzerland. For closed cases, Sweden is showing a 69% mortality rate from COVID, which is about twice as high as anyone else (and is also kind of shocking). I’m hoping that’s a statistical anomaly that will drop down as more of the milder cases recover. Switzerland is also at ~200 new cases per day, which is 1/3 of Sweden. Switzerland and Austria are dropping; Sweden is still increasing.
Of course, it’s possible that these numbers are wrong or off by a lot. We’ve all heard about how the tests might be too negative or too positive or improperly applied or not applied enough or applied to the wrong people or improperly reported or … a million other things that can happen with statistics. But they’re all we have—and they’re all that Klickl had too when he police-state–shamed his fellow parliamentarians. We should all be willing to acknowledge error bars instead of projecting an impossible confidence.
It makes no sense to yell at parliament about their “drastic” measures a few days ago, when no-one really knows how this is all going to work out for Sweden. I would check back in two weeks and see how it went before drawing any conclusions. There’s a good chance that it will follow England in a delayed and desperate lockdown—a delay that they will likely pay for with avoidable deaths.
But, hey, they got to eat in restaurants longer while we all sat at home, so that’s something.
Published by marco on 26. Apr 2020 22:24:22 (GMT-5)
So here we are, six weeks in to a lockdown of society and slowdown of the economy, due to a particularly nasty virus. We knew it was coming, just like Japan and California know that an earthquake is in the offing. Unlike for earthquakes, we didn’t really prepare too well for pandemics. How could you? Until one happens, you just look like Cassandra. Why waste all of that money and restrict all of those freedoms for something that might happen? We don’t know when, we don’t know how severe, so YOLO.
People all over the so-called civilized world are complaining about the loss of freedom entailed by COVID-containment measures. They’re getting impatient. They can’t understand that the world has changed (perhaps temporarily) and that, for right now, we’re not in charge. We don’t determine when things happen.
It’s like with climate change: if the sea level rises, you move away from the coast. If there’s radiation, you wait for it to dissipate. If there’s an asteroid strike coming, you drink. With this virus, we have some control over the shape of the impact, but we can’t prevent it from happening. We can’t just wish it away after a few weeks because it’s bothersome.
We can wish it wasn’t the way it was, but we should be very careful about listening to quacks and crackpots telling us the story that we want to hear: that it could be all over and we overreacted and it serves us right for not having listened to them in the first place. The first wave of those idiots have already fallen. Others are spared from the effects of their own advice and live on to be stupid another day.
I just heard a couple of DJs on Swiss radio say that, when the measures are loosened on Monday, they plan to go out and buy a whole bunch of hand-sanitizer, etc. They even joked about turning around and selling it for a profit.
This is where the wheels come off of the freedom train. The freedom to do whatever you want is contingent on you doing it in a way that doesn’t impinge on everyone else’s freedom to do the same. On a high level, society imposes rules and regulations and laws to shape a way of life with the desired balance of well-being, happiness and freedom for the people that matter. Optimally, that’s everyone. Practically…not so much.
These factors depend on each other and they are prioritized in different ways by different societies, which is why there is no one, single, acceptable solution for everyone. The propaganda within which one steeps is crucial in determining which measures you’re willing to not only put up with, but consider to be unimpeachable. This is why different countries have different reactions.
So, if people start to exercise their freedom in ways that impinge on others, but are still within the bounds of the current rules and regulations, it is society’s job to adjust its rules and regulations to restore balance. This can happen when something like COVID smashes everything to bits or when people just start to develop new habits, like when society does its job too well and people take the comfort that their framework of laws provides for granted and then think that they can just get rid of the framework. You can try—and it might even work, at first—but it’s most likely to fail, because herds don’t do too well without fences. Temporarily, yes; but, in the long run, they’re all over the place. Chaos.
So, back to the whining about loss of freedom because stores are imposing limits on purchases or the government is restricting price-gouging or limiting groups of people or determining how many people can be in a store or canceling concerts or handing out tickets. This feels like a limitation on freedom imposed on you, personally, by the government. It is not. It is the government reasonably employing a new—and, in most cases, temporary—regulation, to address a new—and (hopefully) temporary—situation imposed by an agency not under anyone’s control (COVID, in this case).
Your freedom is defined by the rules and the situation. If there’s enough food for everyone, then you can eat all you want. If there isn’t, then you can’t. Anything else is immoral. When society or the government prevents you from exercising a freedom that no longer fits the current situation—which was caused by no-one—then it’s not the government that’s the asshole: it’s you.
A lot has changed since then.
I wrote the following at the end of March.
Bernie is now almost mathematically unable to win the Democratic nomination.
Then this article got away from me again.
A lot has changed... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 14. Apr 2020 22:54:54 (GMT-5)
I titled and started writing this article on March 6th.
A lot has changed since then.
I wrote the following at the end of March.
Bernie is now almost mathematically unable to win the Democratic nomination.
Then this article got away from me again.
A lot has changed since then.
The Democrats were always going to nominate Biden.
The country needs Bernie right now.
In light of the massive changing of the facts on the ground engendered by COVID-19, Bernie should rescind his commitment to support whoever is nominated as a Democrat.
Watch the debate from the debate from Sunday on March 15th: Bernie clearly thinks Biden is despicable and that his behavior in this time of crisis is beyond the pale. He calls him out on lying again and again, on not knowing the facts—he even tells him to shut up. [1]
Bernie should run as an independent.
Bernie should keep running until the U.N. is forced to intervene in U.S. elections.
The fraud is rampant. Voter suppression is striking. Party machinations with ballot-switching. Gerrymandering. No-vote lists.
All Bernie can do is to keep going, pressing against the rubber bands holding him back, until he either breaks through or is thrown back, as he was in 2016.
I hope like hell that he breaks through. He won’t break the system. It’s already broken for most of us. He can only break it for those who have their boot on our necks.
Ok, so now it’s April 9th and Bernie has dropped out of the race.
This article got away from me again.
The article We Have Won the Ideological Battle by Bernie Sanders (Jacobin) is a transcript of Bernie’s speech when he bowed out of the presidential race. The article Thank You, Bernie Sanders by Ronan Burtenshaw (Jacobin) details what he did for the movement and the article Bernie Supporters, Don’t Give Up by Eric Blanc (Jacobin) discusses the way forward for progressives and socialist.
I don’t think there is a way forward without a revolution. It doesn’t have to be a violent revolution but, if even the COVID crisis isn’t enough to drop the scales from America’s eyes, then I don’t know if there is hope in that country without a complete reset. Nearly every other country in the West has fled back to its progressive roots. These are the countries doing the best in this crisis.
In other places, the analysis has begun to determine why Bernie failed. Bernie did not fail. The system failed. The system is configured to disallow dissent. It worked beautifully. For the second election in a row, Americans have the choice between two horrific presidential candidates.
There is no need to minutely examine the reasons why a certain group of voters didn’t go Bernie’s way. Not when the following elephants are in the room:
Against this level of brainwashing, there is no way that anyone is going to convince anyone of anything that they don’t already believe.
In the poorest regions of America, due to be hardest hit by Corona and unemployment and the coming economic depression (at least in America), Trump support has surged. They think he’s doing a great job. You cannot fight that. You’ve lost before you begin.
You can’t get elected as president despite the electorate.
I’ve written recently about this:
If you can’t get an electorate to vote for their own interests, then the candidate who runs on their interests will lose.
The article Voters Won’t Risk Their Lives for Joe Biden by Carl Beijer (Jacobin) makes some good points, which I cite at length.
“Bernie Sanders lost because our political establishment, having presided over decades of declining hopes and living standards for the poor and working class, has created an electorate that has rightly lost faith in democracy.
“Bernie Sanders lost because decades of deliberate propagandizing by the Republican Party, routinely accepted by an inept and complicit Democratic opposition, has entrenched among voters the self-fulfilling conventional wisdom that America is a center-right nation that would never elect even the most moderate democratic socialist.
“Bernie Sanders lost because decades of media consolidation has placed our most powerful ideological institutions in the hands of an ever-shrinking faction of oligarchs. And their control of the media, in a million overt and subtle ways, guarantees a basically insurmountable opposition campaign against any politician who steps a millimeter outside of Democratic orthodoxy.
“[…]
“Bernie Sanders lost because the institutions and system of neoliberal domination in the twenty-first-century United States, while showing clear signs of dysfunction and decline, have yet to collapse beneath the contradictions of capital; and until they do, no amount of activist enthusiasm or strategic savvy or socialist vision or political ambition is likely to prevail against them.”
Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
It’s like dating. The woman who says she’ll never date anyone under 6 feet tall is never going to do that. You can’t convince her otherwise. It doesn’t matter that this condition is actively hurting her. America is like the dumbest part of the dating world, with completely unreasonable demands that make no sense and don’t at all line up with what it really needs.
If Bernie campaigns for Joe Biden, as he did for Hillary Clinton, then he will have capitulated entirely to the Democratic machine. There is only so far that Bernie is willing to go. It’s unclear why he refuses to cut ties to the Democratic Party. He’s got nearly literally nothing to lose. He’s already lost his whole campaign.
Another Sanders Betrayal by Laurie Dobson (CounterPunch)
“Let me put this in clear terms: Joe Biden, the Democratic Party choice for President- a man with diminished mental capacities, is going against one of the most ruthless contenders in Presidential history, Donald J. Trump. On Bernie’s watch, and with his participation by concession, the Democratic Party will be utterly destroyed in November, and will have richly deserved it.”
Roaming Charges: The Condition Our Condition is in by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Leave it to Jacobin magazine to play the “hope card” after Sanders got smoked by a weaker, underfunded opponent not even his own supporters are enthused about. If there’s “hope” it’s not with the Democrats, who responded to HRC’s loss by nominating someone to her right, a rapist who “pals around” with segregationists….”
I think that the U.S. will be so different by November because of COVID that perhaps only a Bernie-like person could save it. Bernie has walked away twice now, preferring to stay cozy with a clearly compromised Democratic party than to lead a revolution.
How does Bernie quit now? Biden is on his last legs, health-wise. Maybe Bernie is, too. Who knows? But why shitcan a giant revolutionary movement and let it subside beneath the waters with nary a ripple? Doesn’t he care what his supporters think? Did he ever?
He’s got a rape accusation hanging around his neck that the establishment is doing its best to ignore, but that even they won’t be able to stave off forever. Can you imagine if Biden makes it to the fall? Trump will be able to run to the left of Biden on sexual assault. I can see it now: “Joe, I like the ladies too, but #lookbutdonttouch”.
For Christ’s sake, the Dems and the Woke are setting up a hypocritical loophole for Biden that’s big enough for Trump to drive a truck through with this whole Tara Reade accusation that they’re deliberately ignoring because she went after the wrong guy. They let Al Franken get thrown under the bus—too progressive and mouthy—but they’ve invested way too much time and effort in Biden to let some floozy ruin it for them now.
The article As The Goldbergs Flip, The Sham Is Revealed by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) sums it us well:
“But what [they’ve] done by [their] desperate avoidance of the only real question at hand, […] is proven that reliance on facts, reason and due process to determine whether a rape has occurred hasn’t changed at all, and the laundry list of excuses is just that, facile nonsense to cover up the failure of facts, reason and due process. The only difference is whether the man, this time, is a guy they want to destroy or not. Nothing more.”
The Dems and the media think they have everything under control because they’ve got their kowtowing brainwashed Maddow-loving idiots on board and chanting their mantra. Trump and the Republicans will eat them alive and barely break a sweat. They do not care. They will also have the luxury of taking down an opponent that is actively helping them do so—by being nearly unbelievably hypocritical.
Bernie just refused to attack Biden on any of his major flaws. Biden will not shut up about his friends Trent Lott and Strom Thurmond: Trump could run to the left of Biden on integration as well. In September, American TV will be plastered with pictures of Biden holding hands with a hooded Strom Thurmond and Trump will sweep the black vote, too.
I wonder how they strong-armed Bernie into quitting, though. I’ve read that Obama wheedled him into it, but I think he threatened him, a la Breaking Bad or Ozark. He probably threatened his wife, family and (maybe) legacy to force Bernie to see the light. Or maybe Bernie was just tired.
He’s old, perhaps tired, perhaps understandably frustrated and not very hopeful. Ralph Nader has the right ideas and has a lot of energy, but is also too old by now. AOC? Still too young, but maybe it doesn’t matter. She’s got a great tweet game, but has also been tacking toward the Democrats rather than DSA when required.
By November, Biden will be so irrelevant that no-one will even remember that he was ever a nominee—much like Beto O’Rourke or Pete Buttigieg. Trump may still be around—he’s proven to be able to adapt to many situations, no matter what else you can say about him. Biden has in no way shown that he can do so.
A country with 30% unemployment, in a full-blown depression with 2 million dead from a single virus will definitely be focused in a way it hasn’t previously been.
It’s April 14th and there you have it: Bernie endorses Biden. Bernie just likes him. He promised he would endorse the Democratic candidate. It’s like Bernie doesn’t care what anyone thinks as long as he keeps his word to the Democrats. Those tendrils must run very, very deep.
The following four-minute video sums things up very nicely. Camp makes the point that Bernie doesn’t “understand what a political revolution is”. [4] A revolution starts because something is wrong. Biden is more of the same. Slightly different than Trump (maybe), but wrong. Not addressing the problem the revolution wants to solve. Camp: “A revolution does not endorse the exact fucking opposite thing.”
Bernie said all along that he would do exactly this. He literally said he would endorse the nominee. He’s capitulated early. He’s endorsed before the nomination. I think he’s just tired of fighting. So Bernie’s not the guy, I guess. Much of his platform is, though.
Camp:
“A revolution does not give up.
“A revolution does not back down.
“A revolution does not decide the math is against us.
“A revolution does not concede that it’s over.
“A revolution does not say “the writing’s on the wall”.
“A revolution does not get in bed with corporate America because you couldn’t win.
“Stay angry.
“Now is not the time to endorse the status quo. Now is the time to fight for something different, something new, some large-scale change.”
All along, progressives have been told to hold their nose and vote because nothing could be worse than Trump. Trump is going to seize power. He’s going to establish a dictatorship. He’s going to cancel elections. Isn’t is quite obvious that Trump’s ambitions don’t extend that far? He seems to have found his sweet spot with his nightly COVID press conferences. He hasn’t consolidated federal power in any way. He’s outflanking the Democrats on the left, somehow inadvertently proposing to cover everyone’s medical bills.
But he’s not a dictator. He’s too lazy for that. He just wants attention. Now he has it. A lot of it. Also, he really likes giving people nicknames and delivering occasionally very funny zingers at his opponents. [5]
But progressives will take the blame again when Trump wins against Biden. I wrote the article Blaming the Greens Nine Months in Advance about an open letter from February where many eminent scholars were already searching about for culprits for the inevitable loss to Trump.
This was before the Coronavirus, though, which definitely is the only thing that Trump might bungle enough to not get elected. His mastery of the news media [6] and the news media’s mastery of public opinion will probably combine to grant him even more control of the narrative than usual.
Something else might stop Trump, but Biden won’t even be a speed bump. I don’t even know how to describe the shitstorm that is about to rain down on the Dems.
Vote for a revolution. Vote for what you want. Don’t settle. Go down fighting. COVID changes everything. Build something new and better from the ashes.
Bernie is gone, but may his movement live on.
This course of action was recommended in the article Bernie Sanders/Joe Biden Debate: Go Out Swinging by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)
“The Warren-Maddow tête-à-tête was a perfect symbol of everything Sanders spent his career renouncing. Heading into a pandemic that left the richest country in the world paralyzed for lack of hospital beds, a functioning coverage system, and testing capability, our upper classes wept over rando Twitter meanies.
“Whether he wants it to be or not, the coronavirus disaster is a pitch in Bernie’s wheelhouse, highlighting the massive structural obstacles we face precisely because our electoral system is weighted against serious people and in favor of industry-backed nitwits and sellouts.
“Our medical bureaucracy is choked with waste and inefficiency and stays that way by mutual consent, with Republicans entirely opposed to health care reform, and Democrats merely opposed to any change that inconveniences insurers and pharmaceutical companies. The Sanders campaign was a promise to break up this conspiracy of inaction.”
But Bernie didn’t go hard enough.
The article Blowing in the Whirlwind: As Ye Sow, Joe Shall Ye Reap by Chris Floyd (CounterPunch) discusses this framing at length.
“For it’s a fact that most Americans – who get what little political news they care to imbibe from casual glances at the media – will never have heard a single report about Sanders that wasn’t negative in some respect, or in all respects. Again, this goes double for casually liberal Democrats, who get their news and views from the NYT, MSNBC, NPR, CNN, CBS, ABC, WP, etc. There, Sanders is portrayed either as the horned spawn of Chavez and Che, come to ravage your 401k and execute millionaires in Central Park – or else as a unicorn-chasing fantasist with no sense of gritty, savvy realpolitik, which dictates that we must always hew slavishly to the centrist mean.”
“Overwhelmed, battered, beset, anxiety-ridden, suffering, confused, many people don’t want to hear that hard work and big changes will be necessary if we are to have a chance for things to get better. They just want to latch on to something that will let them feel – if only for a moment – that the anxiety can go away, that someone up there in the circles of power will take care of it for us.
“This is not the wisest course when faced with overwhelming crises – but it is an entirely natural and understandable one. When you couple this natural reaction to extremity with the aforementioned systematic effort to undermine and thwart the Sanders’ campaign, then it’s not surprising you end up with a blank screen like Joe Biden as your candidate.”
The following video has an excellent recap of shenanigans:
This was before the Democrats held a primary in a state where only 2.5% of polling stations were open and they called it a fair election.
The article “Bernie Sanders Has Inspired a Mass Popular Movement” by Noam Chomsky (Jacobin) goes into a lot more detail about the problems Bernie’s revolutionary movement wanted to address (it’s not dead, but it’s no longer his movement).
“These are all specific problems. They’re not completely unique to the United States, of course, but they happen to be exaggerated here because of the nature of the society — that it is business-run to an unusual extent, and this business community is militant and organized. The Chamber of Commerce and other business organizations are fighting a bitter class war.”
“This is a class war that goes on constantly in the United States to a level far beyond other comparable societies. You can see this in many ways. If you take a look at CEO salaries relative to workers’ pay the gap, especially since the 1980s, is far higher in the United States than it is in European societies. These are all crucial issues in the United States which require a very intensive effort.”
“The reason why Sanders is vilified in the media pretty much across the spectrum is not so much because of his policies. It’s because he has inspired a mass popular movement which doesn’t just show up every four years to push a button but is acting constantly — pressuring — to achieve changes and having some success. That’s frightening for the business class. The role of the public is to be passive spectators and not to interfere.”
“Among Republicans the only ones that received even a slight majority were Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and Breitbart, which is an ultraright website. Even the Wall Street Journal is considered too far left for most Republicans. You just listen to Rush Limbaugh someday. You’ll see what kind of information people are getting. For Rush Limbaugh, science, government, and the media are pillars of deceit — and you just have to listen to the ultraright instead. That’s what Republicans, almost half the population, are getting as information.”
“In the 1920s the labor movement had been killed — inequality was soaring, it was a capitalist paradise, and there were no popular movements. In the 1930s, it all radically changed — that can happen again.”
The article To Defeat Corporate Hate, Bernie Bros Must Channel Martin Luther King by Nick Pemberton (CounterPunch) offers more hope for how to continue post-Bernie.
“Fascism is about us vs. them, as Jason Stanley points out in the latest episode of Counterpunch radio. An enemy is needed. I would never compare Bernie to Trump, or left to right. But we have to ask serious questions about how the present age of fascism has degraded our political life. We aren’t talking about style here. We are talking about a principled resistance to the weakness of hate. It takes work. Just as resisting any form of power does.”
“In any kind of defeat of another person, we feel that same sick feeling. That feeling that before I took down someone else, I was small. We don’t look at the system that rewards such behavior. We don’t ask in what way can I free myself from this feeling that brings both of us down? I see this temptation to become better than others through political expression. However, this mentality runs contrary to the political stance itself which is asking how can we all get to a better society. If we can accept that each of us is vulnerable, capable of both good and evil, each of us became who we are from the context we arose out of, then our only priority becomes changing the context itself to make it more enriching for all.”
“Imagine if a response to being called a hate-filled Bernie Bro went something like this: I choose not to profit off of other people’s suffering, I choose to oppose the system that does, I believe in love, the power of it, in both my heart and yours, I don’t hate you, in fact I love you, it is because of this that I come with my sincere message, no matter the cost to me, because I fear for our civilization and our planet. I believe in love, and despite this opportunity to present myself as someone superior to you, despite this opportunity to degrade you, I will not,”
]]>“If Clinton got Jill Stein’s Green votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Clinton would have won the election. Thus, the Green Party’s decision to run in those states,... [More]”
Published by marco on 14. Apr 2020 21:28:04 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 14. Apr 2020 21:59:52 (GMT-5)
The article An Open Letter to the Green Party About 2020 Election Strategy by Noam Chomsky, Bill Fletcher, Barbara Ehrenreich, Kathy Kelly, Ron Daniels, Leslie Cagan, Norman Solomon, Cynthia Peters, and Michael Albert (LA Progressive) gets to its point relatively quickly.
“If Clinton got Jill Stein’s Green votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, Clinton would have won the election. Thus, the Green Party’s decision to run in those states, saying even that there was little or no difference between Trump and Clinton, seems to us to be a factor worthy of being removed from contested state dynamics, just like the Electoral College is a factor worthy of being removed across all states.”
Let’s just get Trump out, then we can fix everything. Just like we fixed everything after Bush. It doesn’t matter who it is. (Spoiler alert: It won’t be Bernie [1]). Fix nothing. Shit on allies. Typical mainstream faux-progressivism. Defeatist horseshit, assuming a tight race because the Democrats suck so hard. But let them try to win again by asking the Greens not to run, like that’s the problem. Like Hillary won.
“Similarly, if these Stein voters did indeed erroneously believe that no harm could come from casting a vote for Stein in a close state in a close election, that also to some degree was surely a result of Green campaigning insisting that Green voters bore no responsibility for the 2000 election result.”
This is not surprising because Chomsky has actually been telling us to “hold our noses and vote” for decades. How the fuck do these éminence grises want to convince us the Green Party matters?
They’re still blaming Nader for the 2000 election? The last time they ran a pathetic milquetoast named Al Gore, who utterly failed to inspire a nation because he was tacking too hard to the right. Or in 2004 when it was again Nader’s fault that another boring milquetoast John Kerry. I respect many of these authors, but they seem to be blinded to the reality that a real candidate who wasn’t slavering to fuck over the American people for four years in place of the Republicans would sweep any idiot the Republicans could offer, regardless of how many electoral machinations they managed.
“[…] dispiriting to remove themselves as a factor that might abet global catastrophe via a Trump re-election.”
Hahaha. Credibility is zero. Climate crisis averted if you get not-Trump? Like with Obama? We’re all going to die in the climate conflagration, but at least I’ll have my pride. Honestly, the whole human race can take a flying leap, but I’ll have my self-respect. If it comes to a decision like that, then we can put a fork in it. We’re done, anyway.
You all, on the other hand, will have written a letter blaming the Democratic Party’s inevitable loss across all elections on the Green Party nine months in advance this time. I’m sitting over here in the comfort of a country [2] whose Green Party just grew by leaps and bounds in the last elections because it’s been allowed to do so over the years. Also, we have parliamentary representation (percentage of votes corresponds to percentage of seats).
“Greens tell Democrats “to stop worrying about the Green Party and focus on getting your own base out.” We agree on the importance of Democrats getting their base out, starting with nominating Sanders, or, at worst, Warren. But how does that warrant the Green Party risking contributing to Trump winning?”
Fuck you all. There is no other answer than Green or an alternative party. The Democratic Party is so catastrophically unappealing that it can’t get elected without cheating and special help. So be it. The U.S. is fundamentally broken. What Chomsky et. al. are saying is that there is no hope but from revolution.
And how does your advice look now? Now that a doddering Joe Biden is drooling his way to the nomination? His platform is shambolic. He can barely string two sentences together. He’s got a rape accusation that the mainstream media is doing its utter best to ignore—unlike every other rape accusation against anyone else in the last five years. They claim that they won’t have to explain this one away, because it’s not credible. Trump does not follow their rules. He will cudgel the Dems so hard with it that they won’t even make it to September with Biden. Trump. Doesn’t. Care. He doesn’t play by the rules that these naive authors seem to think people still play by.
There were other reactions, such as the article Sorry Chomsky and Friends, The Green Party isn’t the Problem by Nick Pemberton (CounterPunch), which excused the authors generously at the very top:
“This is going to be a charitable response to a condescending letter. I trust it is not the author’s finest work, as all of the authors of said letter are brave heroes in the fight against corporate rule. We applaud them for their work and stand in awe of their courageous stands against the ruling class. Becoming distracted by counter-productive leftist infighting is a small sin for such heroes and will not be judged harshly.”
I agree with this sentiment.
Pemberton continues, though, disparaging the authors for ad hominem attacks:
“Today is not the time to be dismissing anyone’s efforts to fight against the corporate rule as “feel-good”.”
Then he makes the point that is salient: that a reasonable person can have decided that neither party candidate is right for an American and fuck lesser-evilism. Is it an elite attitude to risk Trump? Just because one is from a class largely unaffected by Republican machinations?
“[…] one were to listen to Stein, they would surely find that Clinton and Trump did not literally believe the same things, but that either candidate winning would be, in her view, an unacceptable outcome for the future of the country.”
We’ve watched lesser-evilism for forty years. The country sinks further and further down the toilet while the Democrats do nothing to stop it. Instead, they fight the Republicans for power and donors.
“We should be asking the Democratic Party why they continue to endure their own base having their vote suppressed. Is it because they ultimately have no interest in challenging their own donor base and that voter restrictions in fact keep the party voting to the right, where the Democrats are most comfortable? In this spirit, we should not be turning people away from the polls, no matter who they vote for, but rather be focusing on welcoming all voting strategies.”
“To make this a specific Green Party problem rather than a shift in corporate consolidation of power is perplexing.”
Pemberton goes on to theorize that if the goal is to stop Trump, then Bernie should never have run—because it’s a distraction. [3] Therefore,
“We could all be happier if we stopped with these expectations of justice and just accepted our role as peasants to the corporate class. This would be peaceful, I don’t deny it.
“[…]
“But even if we accept the ruling class thesis that the working class simply is too uneducated and idealistic to ever vote for its own interest, even if we accept this shockingly classist argument laid out in the letter, we would have to concede that such a pivot is impossible for the human soul.”
The problem is that lesser-evilism doesn’t work for even rational people—because they are, after all, people.
“These are the dynamics. It’s not rational. It’s not good. It’s merely human. It’s just the natural way to respond. Capitalism has left us so commodified we are alienated from not just the political system, but our own friends, families and souls.”
“I would have no problem voting for Joe Biden. But that’s not a good thing. It just isn’t. I would do it, I follow the line of rationale. However, most people are just better than that. Most people are. For most people they got their bills to pay on that Tuesday, their kids to take care of because daycare is that expensive, their two jobs to work, their joblessness to drug themselves out of.”
Good point. Chomsky and Solomon are out of touch. I’m Surprised Ehrenreich is as well, but she’s no spring chicken. People find Dems unappealing because they’re fucking Saruman. You wanna fuck me? Fine. What am I going to do to stop you? But I’m not going to say please and thank-you and mean it.
The following is a collection of more citations from the Pemberton article, which was really quite excellent.
“We can’t be telling people not to despair before we fix the conditions of despair. We cannot be telling people to get over themselves and their distrust in politics before we fix the corporate stranglehold on politics.”
“It is in this sense I see both Warren and Sanders as positive steps. If the corporate class was smart, they’d roll with them. They’d self-correct and go home with money. But that’s not how the corporate class is either. They are just as irrational and sad as we are. Just as desperate. Not for survival. Not for dignity. Not for peace of mind from humiliation. Not for freedom from abuse. But just desperate for more bullshit. Can’t we see these two sides aren’t coming to the table?”
Pemberton offers an alternative: Have the Democrats be less shitty. (But we all know that’s not going to happen.)
“Life under the Democrats is better. Trump is a unique danger. The Green Party has no path to victory. Want to have people vote Democrat? Make the party accountable to their electorate. When we do this in reverse we forego democracy. It’s a harder and longer road. It may mean more Trump victories. It may mean the end of the species before we fix it.”
Money quote.
“We are dealing with half the country that doesn’t vote. A few more leftists won’t move the needle. I wish we were that important.”
“The Stephen Hawking quote being thrown around that humans die from greed and stupidity isn’t all true. We die from idealism and hope too. We die from our recognition that we have rights and that we should fight for them. We die from our sense of dignity. We die from stubbornness and independence. We die from our desire to be free, to be somebody in this cruel world, to make it a better place. And we all do die. One day. But let it be fighting for the collective good. Let this sacrifice be one that makes our world better. This is the Bernie Sanders gamble. I’m sorry, it is. It’s one that says enough is enough. We won’t take it anymore. And we’ll see where the chips fall.”
“I sometimes share that desire for us to be less human. To be able to be realistic, to not feel. Wouldn’t that be easier? But no, our leaders are irrational. Our billionaires aim to kill us all and don’t care. Who are we to be lectured? Let us try, at least.”
“No, people just want their material rights taken care of. This despair is universal. It’s the personalized neoliberalism. We’re talking about politics here. Politics. Get people homes, jobs, water, food, leisure time, air, schools, health care, roads, etc. That’s what it is. No one needs their wildest dreams here. The rich do, and that’s why they destroy stuff.”
“Now is the time to love every single person in the room, tell them they are beautiful and tell them the ruling class is trying its very best to kill us all for an extra buck. We must join hands in an organized force against said power and assert that the power of love is stronger than the power of capital. There is a concrete structure here. Love, when multiplied, defies this cynical logic that you are a spoiled brat with dreams.”
“The job is hope. The work is hope. The mission is hope. If we can’t believe, who are we?”
Money quote again. The open letter strips away too much, obviating the reason we don’t just vote Republican.
“That if we continue the fight, whatever and however we see that fight, the ruling class will have to answer, at least for a moment, to their profiteering ways at the expense of public health.”
“It’s about supporting all of us crazies day in and day out. What is it to exist? Have we gone mad? We must do the hard work of political hope and organization every day. Elections don’t change anything. People do. The madness of people to believe that they can and will make a difference in this brief journey from womb to tomb. The elections will come, and they will go. The people must hold their own organizations throughout the year to challenge whoever is in power to accurately reflect the will of the people.”
“Rather than blame the few people who have enough hope to form a political party that they believe in, we should be asking critical questions about why the majority of Americans have lost hope, and what we can do to inspire them into further action. In this spirit, I find any letter telling the Green Party not to run to be unproductive. Rather than blame and shame each other, we should be supporting each other’s fights against corporate rule and Mr. Trump. Just as Mr. Trump is a product of corporate rule, corporate power has been strengthened under Mr. Trump.”
“It is true that if the Stein votes in these states went to Clinton she would have won. Where in the letter does it say if the Gary Johnson votes went to Trump, he might have even won a plurality? Of course that’s not included as it would be too much of a balanced argument to make.”
Who says these were Democrats voting Green? Weren’t some disgusted Republicans who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for either Clinton or Trump?
“If the nomination goes to Biden because of the Democrats’ repeated treachery against their own progressive voters, then it begs the questions, ‘Is this even a democracy worth fighting for?’ Trump will win in a landslide, but of course, it will be the Green Party to blame. It always is.”
From Pemberton’s article:
“This is evident in Jill Stein’s proposal to have Bernie Sanders run in her place on the Green Party line.”
“But Sanders, like the writers of this letter, like[s] to have it both ways. They like to say they want to stop Trump, but they also want to radically change the course of the Democratic Party with an agenda completely in opposition to most of their Washington based politicians and corporate donors.”
“If we are being honest about our goal of stopping Trump, we would nominate Joe Biden right now. We would stop this costly primary that only furthers the real divisions between the Democrat’s base and donor class. We would adopt the lovely communist mantra of “Blue No Matter Who” and abstain from all criticism of Mr. Biden, who is the clear frontrunner for not only corporations but many low-information voters.”
“Had he shut up and stayed home the differences between Clinton and Trump would have appeared wider, given we weren’t so focused on the differences between Sanders and the establishment.”
“One could argue that we need the specific left language of a Sanders or Stein. Without this all the dissatisfied people would have had no ideological or material grounding for their distrust and more would have joined the fascist Donald Trump, who echoed the same dissatisfaction but with far different specific solutions.”
“The reasons being that there are more important rights than the right to vote or the right to self-expression, or even political organization. I would argue that the rights to air, water, food, shelter, reproductive rights, safety, freedom from concentration camps, etc. that Trump is dismantling are far more important than our right to self-expression.”
“Now if you get corporate money, you’re corrupt. True enough. But to make this a litmus test obviously exposes the Democrats. I’m sorry. Bernie must know what he’s doing here. Still, he’s right, of course. We need a radical transformation of society. You just can’t have both goals at once. I don’t buy the argument that Chomsky often has which is if you just get your leaders to be a little more liberal you have a greater chance to protest for something better, and so on. No! Once again, this is ignoring real data here. The politics go back and forth between the parties. There’s no ever-greater leftism here that happens naturally as soon as we get centrism in office.”
This sounds almost literally like Žižek.
“I am convinced [Bernie’s] success is that he talks very little about specific policy. He is constantly addressing the corporate power in the room and calling them out. This gives people great joy. Our lives are captive to this corporate greed and corruption. We feel helpless as they build and pollute through our lands, lock us up, bomb us, and cut our wages and health care. We hate these people. You have someone come in and say I’ll tinker here and there it doesn’t work. We’re tired of it. Maybe that makes us too full of hope or whatever. Maybe that makes the Green Party too much fun, or whatever. But sorry. Maybe we need some hope. Maybe we need some fun. And maybe we don’t trust anything else about politics. Life isn’t that much fun with the corporate stranglehold around our necks. For many people, life under both political parties just keeps getting worse. Whose fault is that?”
I... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 13. Apr 2020 15:50:14 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 14. Apr 2020 08:32:45 (GMT-5)
A few days ago, I read the article America Will Struggle After Coronavirus. These Charts Show Why. by David Leonhardt and Yaryna Serkez (NY Times), which has very nice charts showing a gaping inequality chasm in the United States. It’s really nicely done and drives the point home in a way not often discussed so openly in the mainstream media.
I was honestly wondering what to make of it, simply because I was waiting for the other shoe to drop and for the NY Times to blame Trump and/or Russia for the whole debacle, even though their charts stretch back to the late 70s/early 80s. The U.S. mainstream media are the world champions of “discovering” a real problem but then blaming the wrong suspects, so that anyone who tries to do anything about it ends up fighting windmills rather than the actual giants. [1]
I was helped along by the article Thank You, Bernie; Screw You, New York Times by Laura Flanders (CounterPunch), which captured the problem I had with the NYT article perfectly:
“It is the essence of American liberalism to trash radical dreams and then dance on them. And that’s just what the New York Times did the day after Bernie Sanders bowed out of the Democratic race for the nomination. On that day, in a special editorial, the editors of the very same paper that disparaged his every move opined that America is divided and our democracy corrupt and launched a series promising to report on just the sort of transformative policies Sanders advocated.
“[…]
“In the Times’s world, it’s apparently ok to bemoan a society and an economy that privileges the rich over the poor, but it’s unacceptable to run for the presidency on a promise to reverse those priorities. (Emphasis added.)”
That’s it in a nutshell: the progressive pose in the United States can never be anything more than that, because the only ones privileged enough to be able to consider anything other than mere survival necessarily suckle at the teat of the same system that keeps the 99.9% submerged and gasping for breath.
Anyone in that mindset wants to be able to think of themselves as one of the good ones without thinking about how their own lifestyle is predicated on standing on a hill of skulls. How without the giant inequality gap, none of their lives would look anything like they do, that their own talents and skills in no way explain how they consider themselves to be worth $200,000 per year while others struggle on $25,000. For the typical Times reader, this does not bear thinking about because it’s the house of cards on which not only their net worth, but their self-worth, is built.
Laura Flanders is absolutely right to call out the Times for their bullshit in suddenly discovering inequality mere days after they’d just accomplished a year-long task of squashing the only presidential candidate who’d recognized it 50 years ago and had spent every waking moment trying to do something about it. Only once they’d helped make sure that good ol’ boy Joe Biden was going to be the nominee—and that there was no longer a danger of upsetting the status quo that finances not only the Times, but most of its readers—was it safe to go back to pretending to be progressive in earnest.
]]>“I can’t be the only American whose response to the pandemic is to think seriously about moving to a country with a functioning government,... [More]”
Published by marco on 13. Apr 2020 11:10:17 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 1. May 2020 23:56:42 (GMT-5)
An American, originally from New York City and now living in Vermont, mused in the blog post Why Has Germany Been Effective at Limiting Covid-19 Deaths? by Jason Kottke,
“I can’t be the only American whose response to the pandemic is to think seriously about moving to a country with a functioning government, good healthcare for everyone, and a real social safety net.”
No, thank you.
The world neither wants nor needs American refugees. [1]
They would almost certainly be the most entitled refugees the world has ever seen.
And talk about integration!
Learning the local language?
Forget about it.
Even the ones I’ve met who’ve moved without an impetus of desperation mostly just keep speaking English “because everybody just speaks it anyway”.
Please, think again.
Try to see your choice through the lens of the rest of the world. You live in a country that has arrogated more power and wealth to itself than any other in history.
And you’ve done nothing with it but piss it away on bombs and billionaires.
What makes you think things would go any better anywhere else? What makes you think you’re not fundamentally broken and you won’t just bring your problematic lifestyle to wherever you are?
Don’t underestimate how much a part of the U.S. you are, despite you likely thinking that you’re opposed to everything that is the American way. America is quite different from most other OECD countries—which is why things have fallen apart there so much worse than anywhere else.
You are part of a populace that is woefully and—let’s not kid ourselves, willfully—brainwashed.
Just moving your ass to a different, better country will not make you happy. You will be miserable because that country will fail to live up to the lunatic expectations engendered in you by America (why can’t I go shopping at 3AM?) and you’ll make everyone around you miserable with your complaints.
You’ll nearly inevitably end up in an enclave of English-speaking refugees, complaining about the locals and reminiscing about an America that never was, where Slurpees were giant-sized and gasoline was cheap and everything was sunshine and rainbows. You’ll have forgotten why you left—because that’s how memory works.
If you want to leave only now, then it likely wasn’t the reprehensible ethics and utterly amoral behavior that’s been evident since at least post-WWII that finally put you off of America. No, it was when America’s behavior finally affected you personally.
You let your leaders run roughshod over most of their population—to say nothing of the rest of the world—as long as you got your slice of the “American way of life.” It’s only once they finally broke their end of the agreement to you (like they’d already broken it to 99% of the unwashed masses) that your wandering eye started roving to greener pastures.
So just sit tight.
Perhaps soon, and assuming their own plans for handling this pandemic go reasonably well, Europe or China may execute a reverse Marshall Plan to get the U.S. back on its feet.
And don’t worry too much…
…we all need you to redeem those T-Bills somehow.
The entire comment is well-worth reading, but I’ve liberally selected the bits I liked the most.
A democracy cannot function without actual citizens.
]]>“I think most people would be very... [More]”
Published by marco on 25. Mar 2020 21:51:22 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 25. Mar 2020 21:52:05 (GMT-5)
I found this truly excellent comment by Remember-The-Future (Reddit) on /r/bestof—and it truly is one of the best things I’ve read on Reddit.
The entire comment is well-worth reading, but I’ve liberally selected the bits I liked the most.
A democracy cannot function without actual citizens.
“I think most people would be very unhappy if Sanders supporters put the blame where it truly belonged. Because the real problem with America is, and always has been, the quality of its people.
“[…] the truth is that there is no system of government ever designed, nor could one ever be created, that could survive and prosper with a population as arrogant, stupid, selfish and short-sighted as the average American.”
His take on Trump is something I’ve been saying since Trump took over the Republican race:
“Donald Trump is not an anomaly. He didn’t appear suddenly, he was born here, and lived here his entire life. He made a fortune selling tacky, overpriced, gaudy junk – and Americans bought it, and elevated it to a status symbol. He grifted, lied, swindled and stole – and the American justice system enabled him and empowered him. He said shocking, disgusting, horrifying things – and our media gave him a megaphone. And he did everything possible to demonstrate that he was a stupid, petty, arrogant and cruel man unfit in every way possible for any office in existence – and a nation of stupid, petty, arrogant and cruel Americans turned out in droves to propel him to the highest office in the land. Trump is the real American. (Emphasis added.)”
On Democrats:
“Democrats […] blame the Russians for fanning the flames of hatred and division, but they never ask why those fires were alight in the first place. They talk about “what’s practical” while propping up an economic system that crashes every seven years and has failed the vast majority of those under its dominion and sneer at anyone who points out these obvious facts while advocating for alternatives. They answer questions of morality with words like “pragmatism” and rage against anyone unwilling to compromise their ethics.”
And, finally, on why Sanders stands alone, without endorsements from pretty much anyone already in power:
“The truth is that Sanders didn’t compromise enough to build a coalition – because in order to build a coalition in America the compromises you have to make are moral ones.”
Go read the original comment and throw the guy an upvote if you have an account.
]]>“when we speak of epidemics, and even pandemics... [More]”
Published by marco on 20. Mar 2020 23:55:04 (GMT-5)
The article Why the Developing World Cannot Flatten the Curve with Coronavirus (COVID-19) and Beyond by J.P. Linstroth (CounterPunch) addresses the global inequality—not just that between classes/strata in first-world societies—that will doom many to the worst effects of COVID.
“when we speak of epidemics, and even pandemics like the Coronavirus (COVID-19), we must understand that medical care is unequal in our world today. We must understand that “power structures” control who gets medical care and who does not. We must understand that so-called “first world nations” will be treated for the Coronavirus and in all likelihood the “developing world” will be left behind.
“[…]
“What I am talking about here is “structural violence”, that is those structures which keep in place the inequalities which exist in our world today. Such inequalities are power structures by keeping the developing world, impoverished, and by disallowing equal access to health care […]”
Published by marco on 20. Mar 2020 23:54:55 (GMT-5)
The excellent article The Art of the Phony Peace Deal by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch) expresses strong suspicions that the co-called peace deal with Afghanistan that should see the removal of US troops is instead chock-full of the standard caveats and conditions that US loads upon its vassal states. The only real fix for America’s hyper-militarism begins at home, with its people no longer supporting it.
“Look, dearest motherfuckers, I don’t like to be the killjoy here, I really don’t. But when you cut deals with an empire that runs on perpetual violence, you’re really doing little more than shaking hands with the devil, and that fucker can give you way worse woes than the coronavirus. The only deal you can make with a bully state as colossal as the one I exist in that can possibly lead to anything remotely resembling peace is the kind that says get the fuck off my lawn or your Yankee ass is grass. This kind of peace only happens when American anti-imperialists assist their comrades overseas by putting our knee on Uncle Sam’s throat like we did to get out of Nam. Anything else is just an inevitable imperial shakedown. (Emphasis added.)”
Published by marco on 19. Mar 2020 23:24:38 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. Mar 2020 23:27:40 (GMT-5)
Much of the world is in an unprecedented lockdown that has completely changed the face of the global economy. The gossamer castle of globalization has been put on ice—perhaps temporarily, but hopefully for good. We can at least hope that the extremely unequal and cruel form that it had doesn’t return.
This is a particularly trying crisis for a world full of people who don’t even understand the minimal basics of how their world even works. The world works smoothly without them knowing anything about economics, technology, physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, to say nothing of something esoteric like virology. That was part of the appeal—everything was taken care of. The soma of technology smoothed over the cracks of inequality and made a two-sided class war an effective impossibility.
Now, though, a world sunk into its own navel is forced to wake up and do something, forced to actually think and make decisions. Until now, we were allowed the luxury of believing every phantasm, every superstition. Our active participation and understanding had long since stopped being necessary for our continued existence.
Now we are suddenly and brutally dragged into the harsh light of a new reality where going along to get along will no longer be as easy as it was. Perhaps the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is to convince mankind that it had evolved beyond evolution.
This population must now suddenly really start to believe in invisible creatures that can kill them, that communicate death in for-them mysterious ways. Science and logic are no longer abstract things that nerds do while the cool kids send sext each other. Knowing stuff is now life-and-death important and many are playing a futile game of catch-up that they are doomed to lose.
They must learn to deal with effects of actions that are not immediate, that are not visible—the effects are delayed by a couple of weeks. Atavistic instinct is useless. It is the rational brain that must come to the fore. It is this up which our foundering ship relies and I fear for the result.
A discussion on SRF1 [1] today had one participant begging the other two to understand that the measures taken this past Monday can only be judged in a week or two. There is no value in discussing pros or cons when the experiment is still running. Filling the airwaves with gotcha journalism and “hot takes” is a waste of everyone’s time and energy. Good riddance. The new age of enlightenment can’t come fast enough.
You see this old attitude in those who still say silly things like “The economy will only put up with a lockdown for so long” [2]. These people don’t realize that the economy finally has to take a backseat because the basics are no longer guaranteed. The desires of the economy only mattered when there was nothing else to worry about. Even then, it got way too much attention, but that’s how the world used to work. It no longer works like that.
You can’t just send people back to work when science says that they will all contract COVID-19, overfill the hospitals and start dying by the hundreds of thousands just because the economy is bored with not making money for rich people. I mean, you could do that, in the old world, the pre-COVID world, where it was OK to make people throw their lives away for “the economy”. This shock is finally big enough that people are (hopefully) going to ask questions.
Now, when the world has slowed down, who’s going to start back up when their life hangs in the balance just because someone on TV can’t get over the fact that the way the economy works has fundamentally changed? Those who say that the money will run out and we’ll have to start things back up in April—no matter what—are fooling themselves.
We have to see how things are—they might be worse than expected—and then make a decision. The facts will determine our next plan of action. We are trying to avoid overwhelming death counts. It looks like that finally matters more, perhaps because Europeans are on the line. The Americans, on the other hand, seem to have opted to save their ideological fantasy of how an economy is supposed to work rather than their people. History will judge them harshly, I think.
This lockdown in several countries is intended to flatten the curve—to avoid exponential growth in COVID-19 cases that would drown even the best health-care system. The pandemic and its effects will be with us for much longer. The impact will change society forever.
This change is completely at-odds with all of the stories we’ve been told about how the world is supposed to work. All of a sudden, there is very socialist talk about not letting anyone drown in their own debt or problems—at least in the more compassionate countries. Other countries are having trouble coming around, having long since become accustomed to ignoring the suffering of its poor and disadvantaged, which has grown over the last several decades at a rate nearly equal to that of COVID. [3]
Some European governments must simply adjust their policies slightly, moving more heavily to the left in order to avoid deaths in numbers that no population would accept. Others must swing more drastically away from an austerity they’ve imposed on their lower classes. Basic morality will no allow that continue—if it does, there will be real revolution. Even the more economically liberal parties [4] look like raging communists right now, pleading that we must do what we can now—and then see how we balance the books later, when we have room to breathe.
Because of this, many Western governments (other than the U.S. and the UK) are suddenly faced with being planned economies—without having been able to plan for it, at all. We are all—temporarily—communists right now. The government decides which businesses stay open—which are essential—and which must close. The government will decide how to most effectively use the available materiel and resources to feed and house and heal its population until it no longer needs to. How do you supply a quarantined population of millions with the minimum of stuff they need to survive without going crazy?
Some businesses will be saved; some are beyond hope. It’s doubtful whether the airlines will be even a semblance of what they were. As one commenter noted:
“There should only be two responses to a bailout request:
“If it’s a vital industry, nationalize it and keep the workers on the job.
“If it’s not a vital industry, guarantee income for workers and let the investors eat the loss.”
This is a good start, but it should go further. Workers in obviated industries will need time and money to retrain. With so many jobs just gone in a shrunken economy, an at-least temporary UBI will be nearly inevitable. It may be that in all but name, but that’s what it will be. That’s what people are talking about when they say that “no-one should fall through the cracks”. But it will have to be something substantial and realistic and it will have to be ongoing until the endgame of this crisis is clearer.
In his book Rigged [5], Dean Baker discusses many better ways of “bailing out” failing but essential private industries. One way is to offer a tax refund in exchange for non-voting shares. if the company makes money, the government makes money. It’s a straight-up investment. That’s another way of semi-nationalizing more-recalcitrant industries.
But we should be very clear that the government—the one with all of the money—sets the terms. We can control how the money is used—instead of just pumping it into stock buybacks and CEO pay, like the previous tax cut. Boards and management that did exactly this with their last round of government largesse should stand at the back of the line for handouts and should perhaps be forced to re-invest in their own companies before they get any bailout money. If they refuse, then they get nationalized, their workers get saved and they can take a long walk off of a short pier.
Dean has been publishing a lot of good ideas on his site: When It Comes to Bailouts, Nancy Pelosi Is in the Drivers Seat by Dean Baker (Beat the Press) and Andrew Sorkin Gets the Bailout Basics Right, but Debt Is Not a Problem by Dean Baker (Beat the Press).
“Anyhow, we can debate the relative merits of these proposals, but the basic point is right. We don’t know how long we will effectively have the economy in a freeze mode, but we need to make sure that workers can survive this period, and then companies are set to pick up and run again once it is over. That is why it is so important to have a plan that keeps workers on their companies payroll even if they are not actually working.”
Of course, there will be sacrifices to make, but it shouldn’t be the same ones that we’ve been taught to accept in past crises. The government should strongly consider which businesses can handle the impact (i.e. did they just lose profits or did they actually lose money?), to what degree the industry is worth saving in the form it had (looking at you, airlines) or whether some parts should just be nationalized (possibly, healthcare … the Swiss insurers are all going to have their hands out).
The government will have to plan where they get the most bang for their buck, where they can impact the most lives, save the most families and incomes and put the most stuff back on track with our tax money. Something like an airline will bleed a ton of money out of the coffers. Saving small businesses will be a drop in the bucket compared to that.
And how do you effect such a plan for a population that has been trained to live in a completely different situation? The notion of solidarity hasn’t been completely eradicated, but it has been superseded by austerity, by individualism, by identitarianism, by so many other things. People will have to re-learn what it means to rely on each other. In order to do that, they’ll need to really see each other.
Because we are literally all in this together. If enough of us diverge from the common plan, it will all be for naught. It won’t be easy. Especially if the “old” dog-eat-dog, everyone-on-their-own society is still in place, with no safety net. Many countries already have an adequate safety net—or can dust off and re-inflate the one they’ve been starving with austerity for the last 12 years. The U.S., though, will have to rethink nearly everything it believes about how to run a society. They have done a spectacularly poor job of preparing for a post-COVID world.
As Naomi Klein said on Coronavirus, The Election, And Solidarity In The Midst Of A Pandemic by Jeremy Scahill (The Intercept),
“And so it is all the more important to put in that safety net, put in that floor so that people feel a degree of safety and clarity that the basics are taken care of. You will have health care. You will have housing. There’s a jobs guarantee in it, all of this. It takes aim at the rampant feeling of insecurity of everybody just having to look out for themselves because nobody is looking out for them that makes these crises so much harder to handle.
“One of the things that is causing so much stress right now is hoarding. It is the fact that people are so convinced that nobody will look after them that there’s no functional state that they’ve stripped supermarkets, right? And they’re hurting their neighbors, and they’re not doing it because they’re terrible people. They’re doing it because they’ve internalized a lesson that is not wrong, that they have to look after themselves.”
I would also add that people have also been taught to forget anything they’ve ever learned about morality or ethics—anything that they may have incidentally heard in a church. All of that pablum falls by the wayside once one’s personal existence—or that of one’s close family or, even more strongly, one’s children—is under threat.
So people are acting as they’ve been trained to act. We’ve been trained to be egoistic hyper-consumers in a bottomless market of infinite resources and opportunity—for those not too lazy to go get it. We are not at all mentally prepared for a world like this.
This doesn’t just go for the neoliberal quasi-free-marketers, it also goes for those who wallowed so deep in their comfort that they imagined that the froth of their mundane and quotidian problems were real problems. They were not real problems. They were just the only left to focus on once everything else was humming along just fine for these people. They were fed, clothed, housed, and entertained. So they made up shit to do. They found causes that suddenly no longer matter when the basics are gone, when the chips were down.
The article The Check’s in the Mail by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) describes it like this,
“But just as there are no atheists in foxholes, there are no oppressed in a pandemic. For the time being, the primary function of government is to keep the most people possible alive and kicking, both physically and economically, and we can argue about how bad a job it did later, when we no longer have to worry about whether people will die of COVID-19 this month, starve this month, and can get back to the really important issues of what words are most traumatic to young people.”
COVID-19 drew the world back into a very tight focus. It’s a lot harder to jump on a brigade to cancel someone on Twitter for having failed to properly appreciate Caitlin Jenner’s courage when you’re trying to figure out how to keep your job or your apartment or your life.
Just to be clear: the old world didn’t die overnight. The current way of doing things is still on cruise control, so there are, for example, still cruelties being visited upon the official enemies, subverting a true solidarity in the face of this global crisis.
The article Stop Tightening the Thumb Screws, A Humanitarian Message by Kathy Kelly (AntiWar.com) discusses that the crippling export and banking sanctions against Iran have not been lifted. The sanctions affect medical supplies as well, which is a war crime at any time, but even more damaging now, when Iran is struggling with the outbreak, just like the rest of us.
The article IMF Refuses Aid to Venezuela in the Midst of the Coronavirus Crisis by Vijay Prashad, Paola Estrada, Ana Maldonado, And Zoe Pc (CounterPunch) notes that the IMF has refused any aid to Venezuela, out of hand, concluding that “the IMF denial of the $5 billion request from Venezuela […] is a violation of the spirit of international cooperation that is at the heart of the UN Charter.”
Hopefully, the U.S. death grip on global foreign policy will relax when its health-care chickens come home to roost. Obviously, I hope that the U.S. gets it together enough to protect its citizens—those citizens include most of my family—but it does not look good right now. At any rate, perhaps COVID will distract America enough that it can no longer browbeat the world into allowing it to put its boot on the next of Iran, Russian, and Venezuela. Maybe the Saudis will even stop killing all the Yemenis, who’ve been dealing with a 10x COVID-style disaster to their health and economy for over five years.
Economically, there is no point of talking about a depression vs. a recession. The face of the world will have changed when we all creep back out of our cubbyholes. At least, I hope it will have. I hope that people will perhaps have realized that the things they’d been taught to chase and want didn’t matter that much, in the end. They made do for months without them. Are some habits broken? I think they might be. A revolutionary moment—and opportunity—is coming. We must be brave enough to seize it, to not squander it with petty squabbling over material goods engendered by the exact same class that got us all to fight in the prior world, the world before COVID.
People will have become accustomed to what were intended as emergency measures. They will not understand why it was possible to provide such measures temporarily, but not permanently. Politicians will be stuck trying to come up with a convincing answer—because there is none.
The former world was a Ponzi scheme designed to given them as much as possible from most of the people while giving them as little as possible while still avoiding outright revolt. It was a complex construction. It is gone. Perhaps something very similar will replace it. God knows that our lords and masters will do their damnedest to put us back in our cages, to get us back to work producting excess value that they will hoover up and hoard for themselves, like beady-eyed, unthinking Smaugs.
But COVID will have taught many that the “minimum” that they can expect to be provided to them is much higher than they’d previously thought. For a brief moment in time, COVID, in role of Toto from The Wizard of Oz, has pulled back the curtain, to reveal the mean, penny-pinching and avarice-filled people behind it. [6] The genie is out of the bottle and the world of “acceptable” politics will (hopefully) have drastically shifted. At the very least, we can hope that austerity in Europe will have been consigned to the dustbin of history.
The myths we’d all been taught to believe that there wasn’t enough money for certain things will have turned out to have been false. What was always missing was political will. When the chips were down, some governments responding correctly and others will be judged harshly for their failure to respond—first and foremost, with many, many more victims than need have been.
Norway and Denmark have announced plans with which they will keep businesses and people from being unduly impacted by this. That is, if there is pain to dole out, then everyone should get impacted equally. But no-one should lose their job or income or apartment for what is, after all, a temporary stop of the economy. Think of it as a very long weekend. You wouldn’t fire someone for not showing up on Good Friday, Saturday, Sunday or Easter Monday, would you? Of course not; that makes no sense. Do you not pay them? Of course you do. It’s the weekend; it’s a holiday. They’ll be back on Monday. Your business was closed anyway.
So why would you have to fire anyone when the entire economy is taking a very long weekend? It will be back, in one form or another. There will be the metaphorical Monday at some point. At that point, those businesses will pick back up where they left off. Those people will be able to do their jobs again. You can’t just ask people to stay home for the common good and then let them lose everything. The Swiss government has also said that they will make sure no-one is unduly harmed. They will announce their plan soon for how they will handle it. I suspect it will look a lot like the Danish and Norwegian plans.
I’m hoping fervently that this time we the people can take advantage of a shock to force through a change that benefits all. I hope that we can use the facts on the ground of global crisis to once-and-for-all prove that the world we had, the economy we had, the inequality we had was not only never necessary but was utterly inadequate for anything but the so-called happy path.
The perfectly humming machine working exactly as the architects intended—as unfair as it was for the 99.9%, it worked spectacularly well for the 0.1%—shattered catastrophically at COVID, dumping everyone off. Maybe we can grab the reins and tell the former masters of the universe to sit down and shut up while the grownups do stuff. Scientists and statisticians and medical staff should rule the day.
Tomorrow, in Switzerland, at 12:30, we’re all supposed to go outside, on our terraces, and applaud for the medical staff of the country for one full minute. It sounds silly if you’re still part of the jaded, old world but it’s a small sign that there’s a chance that the new world that is emerging may have its priorities much straighter than before.
As Chuck Mertz said on Only accumulating: We are trapped in the imperial infrastructure of coal. (This is Hell!) on March 18th,
“Let’s be honest with ourselves: we all might have [COVID]. But it is in this time that something wonderful might happen. As we tear ourselves away from each other and self-quarantine, now, with so much time on our hands and so little work to do, let’s pull together while separated. Let’s get together communally, virtually and start imagining what the world will be like when we’ll finally be able to reenter it. What is the next world we want after this one? Because this one is done.
“You know the wealthy and their fascist friends are already considering their new future for us and it will not be pretty.”
Predicting an endgame is useless at this stage. We don’t know when or even if there will be a vaccine. We’re in completely uncharted territory. No-one alive has ever seen anything like this. The confluence of so many people, in such an advanced civilization—one capable not only of spreading a virus very efficiently with global links, but also one capable of keeping an economy going via remote-learning and remote work, and also potentially capable of designing and producing a vaccine within a reasonable time frame—is new.
I agree with the article Coronalinks 3/19/20 by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex),
“[…] this might look like titrating quarantine levels – locking everything down, then trying to unlock it just enough to use available medical capacity, then locking things down more again if it looked like the number of cases was starting to get out of hand. This would eventually develop herd immunity without overwhelming the medical system. A paper yesterday out of Imperial College London (discussed here) said the same thing, arguing for alternating periods of higher and lower quarantine levels based on how the medical system was doing.”
This is also what I’ve heard discussed by the excellent podcast series, Coronavirus-Update by Christian Drosten (NDR/YouTube), which is in German and has a podcast for every day since the beginning of March 2020.
However, there are so many people that it would take nearly forever to apply this strategy. The thing is: we may not have a choice. As long as there’s no vaccine, we can only build up immunity naturally—by getting the disease and hoping we recover from it. Some of us will not. A number of us that was heretofore considered unacceptably high. But there’s nothing for it. Mother Nature is in the driver’s seat for the first time in a long time. And she don’t give a fuck if you have to pee.
So, we’re just buying time, flattening the curve (as discussed above), until we get a vaccine. What if we never do? The shape of humanity changes considerably. But it was going to do that anyway—and relatively soon—because of climate change. COVID is just much more sudden and brings our precariousness into much sharper focus. The changes we saw coming due to climate change are here, now, upending our economy and our society, much sooner than some of us expected. [7]
We’re going to be living with COVID for a long time, There are some who say that the recurring strains of flu—and the accompanying millions of illnesses and tens of thousands of deaths—are all descended from the 1918 strain that killed 40–50 million people. COVID may simply become a recurring thing for us as well.
We can hope for a vaccine, but it won’t come quickly enough that we won’t need an interim plan right now. Keeping the economy on a simmer and basically using our medical services to “titrate” the population through the illness to immunity is maybe the best chance we have until we think of something better. There is no other way that isn’t even more disastrous. Just “ripping the bandaid off” (as the UK suggested) would generate a pile of corpses like the world has never seen.
So, we’re stuck with it, regardless. There is no quick and easy way to “grow” our way out of this. I’m personally holding out hope that COVID will force us to structure our societies—and their economies—in more sensible, resilient and robust ways. The practice will certainly come in handy when we finally feel like dealing with climate change like adults. [8]
The drop in worldwide, superfluous economic activity is definitely a welcome boost for the efforts to combat climate change. If nothing else, we might see a reduction in CO2 PPM after the first six weeks of European and American lockdown. Dare to dream.
The article COVID-19 reduces economic activity, which reduces pollution, which saves lives. (G-Feed) makes an interesting point that the reduction in economic activity (and its accompanying pollution) due to COVID means that it has actually saved 50,000 lives so far.
The overall thrust is to present what she terms “conspiracy-theory-like”... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Feb 2020 12:23:27 (GMT-5)
The essay Hillary, Donald & Bernie: Three Who Would Make a Catastrophe by Nicky Reid (CounterPunch) is an extremely lucid and accurate summary of the 2016 and upcoming 2020 U.S. Presidential elections. Reid is an excellent and entertaining writer. [1]
The overall thrust is to present what she terms “conspiracy-theory-like” histories of the 2016 election, extrapolating to the 2020 election, which stars many of the same characters (e.g. Bernie and Trump). She starts with a warning that history isn’t fact and that entertaining so-called conspiracy theories isn’t any worse than just believing conventional wisdom: one must consider all sources with healthy skepticism.
As she puts it:
“The reality is that history in and of itself is not black and white science. At its most accurate it is a collection of narratives, different perspectives from the ground floor that could easily be described as conspiracy theories. What appears to be a conspiracy theory from Arlington or Manhattan, looks a lot more like bad memories from Hiroshima or Tuskegee. Any true revisionist historian must become a collector of conspiracy theories, viewing all available narratives with a healthy grain of salt.”
The problem domain is as follows:
As Reid puts it:
“How can an insider’s insider with such impeccable credentials like Hillary Clinton fall so devastatingly short to an irate babbling imbecile from the tabloid gutter of the 1%? [The Democrats] still haven’t figured it out and they know it, and they know that victory will elude them until they do.”
Though Reid’s version is a far-more entertaining read, I will summarize her history of 2016:
Hillary used Bernie to defray a burgeoning socialism over which she would have no control, essentially using him as a sheepherder, a role he was willing to play as long as he could get his message out (knowing—or thinking he knew—that he had no chance at nomination or election). This tacit alliance would turn out to be much more advantageous to Clinton than Bernie, whose power only grew throughout the campaign, but who was then helpless to go back on his word because he is a man of principle (something Clinton was counting on, although she couldn’t understand it at all).
Hillary also used Trump to destroy the Republican opposition, thinking him far too foolish to have legs in the long run. This, too, blew up on her, as she’d vastly underestimated the frustration and foolhardiness of the general populace. Having had no real contact with anyone who isn’t a millionaire in decades, this wasn’t too surprising.
According to Reid, these two best-laid plans of Hillary blew up:
“And so Hillary found herself married to the task of sabotaging her own puppet’s primaries, while the upheaval on the right that her backers fostered with round the clock coverage became equally unruly.”
Enter the third conspiracy theory: Russiagate. At the same time the most ridiculous of the three theories (Reid’s first two, her own, seem to be just a recounting of facts) and also the one that’s now part of accepted history (e.g. canon). This would have less influence on the 2016 election and more on the history leading up to the 2020 election. It’s no surprise that this one blew up as well, although it seems to live on with 9-11-conspiracy-like persistence as “accepted truth” in very powerful and influential circles.
Which takes us to 2020, where we watch the Democratic party pumping the brakes on Bernie again because he’s out of their control and speaks against 95% of their platform. They’re deliberately sabotaging the only candidate who would wipe the floor with Trump, muddling the results in Iowa and New Hampshire, but then losing all control in Nevada, where Bernie was irrepressible. At some point, they’re going to have to unmask and just fuck him six ways to Sunday in a way that will be ten times more obvious than what they did to him in 2016.
This will kill any remaining credibility for the Democratic party (this time, among a significantly large populace), even without considering the slim pickings amongst the rest of the candidates. They’re all severely compromised as far as providing the challenge to the status quo needed to get the U.S. out of its oligarchic rut and into the coterie of countries that both cares for its citizens and also has any viability for addressing the oncoming/ongoing climate catastrophe.
I’ll leave the last word to Reid:
“These imbeciles appear to have every intention of repeating their 2016 tricks to put Biden or, god forbid, Bloomberg in the nomination, which will only accomplish another seemingly impossible catastrophe [4] that they’ll no doubt blame on god knows who. Putin? Assad? Tulsi? Santa? Anyone but the only people who can possibly make Trump a two-term president, themselves.”
]]>“I think it’s a typical... [More]”
Published by marco on 19. Jan 2020 22:32:02 (GMT-5)
The 1-hour podcast episode The politics of nativism by Daniel Denvir (This is Hell!) is well-worth a listen [1]. Both Chuck Mertz (the host) and Daniel express themselves well. Here’s one thought from Daniel about the pervasiveness of both overt and implicit racism, from about 50 minutes into the podcast:
“I think it’s a typical failing of liberal analyses to define racism as bad thoughts in people’s heads. This is why liberal elites in wealthy suburbs whose entire lives are organized around providing segregated, wealthy, white schools for their own children, can then look to a place like West Virginia as the actual font of racism in this country.
“Even though working-class people in places like that, regardless of the racist beliefs in their heads, have limited power to enact the racism. So, what liberals miss, is that racism at its core involves systems of power and domination. And those are systems and structures, of mass incarceration, mass deportation, border militarization, that liberals—from Bill Clinton on—have played a profound role in constructing.”
It also cites very specific numbers for war dead on the U.S. side in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.
]]>“VA data reveals that almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans die... [More]”
Published by marco on 19. Nov 2019 21:43:18 (GMT-5)
The article Risking Lives in Endless Wars is Morally Wrong and a Strategic Failure by Jesse Jackson (CounterPunch) makes good points that are summarized in the title.
It also cites very specific numbers for war dead on the U.S. side in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001.
“VA data reveals that almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans die by suicide each day on average. That adds to an estimated 7,300 veterans who have killed themselves since just 2009, after coming home from Afghanistan and Iraq, a number greater than the 7,012 service members killed in those wars since 2001.”
This bookkeeping will age very poorly.
The numbers pale in comparison to the suffering and death inflicted on Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001. [1] The precision is especially galling when one considers how vague and hand-wavy the number of war-dead in the invaded countries is ( “about a million” in Iraq with no accounting of the millions of lives ruined as IDPs [2]).
There are other things wrong with the numbers of U.S. war dead: they’re far too low, of course. The U.S. does its level best to lie about the impact of its imperial wars—on both sides. If a soldier can be transported alive out of Afghanistan or Iraq, but then succumbs in Rammstein, then they don’t count as having died in a war theater. If their lives are completely incapacitated by injury, then they don’t show up in any official statistics. The heart has to stop beating to be noted.
Jackson’s article is about hearts that stop beating by their own hand: veteran suicides. Veterans of just the Iraq and Afghanistan wars kill themselves 20 times per day, with the suicide-prevention hotline established in 2007 preventing an average of 30 more per day.
“Hoh, wisely in my view, offers a broader explanation: that veterans suffer from a moral injury — a shock to their own sense of themselves, their basic moral values from what they have done or have not done in combat: The killing of the enemy, the failure to save the life of a comrade, the mistaken shooting of the innocent.
“Thou shalt not kill is a basic precept of all religions.
“In war, the state gives soldiers the mandate to kill. The military has perfected ways of conditioning young men and women to be able to kill in combat.
“Yet, Hoh argues, the conditioning does not prevent some from seeing themselves in the enemy, from feeling deeply the violation that comes from violence.”
I suppose it’s somewhat reassuring that at least those directly involved in the combat—those that confronted the so-called “enemy” dead-on—are still capable of empathy, of feeling guilt at what they took part in. Those who sent them do not. Those who sit idly by, mouthing military and jingoistic platitudes, do not. Over 50% of discretionary [3] spending goes to these wars; the U.S. actively funds them with its taxes and never raises a stern word. Quite the opposite: raucous and nigh-unanimous support for every coup, every insurgency, every invasion, every belligerence is heard from the people, its politicians and the media.
I suppose if those people can’t be brought to care about the wholesale and utterly purposeless [4] slaughter of others, then perhaps Jackson can awake enough pity for U.S. veterans to get people to stop war? It seems quite roundabout, but might be the only thing that even has a prayer of working. Unfortunately, only a tiny percentage of people in the U.S. even know veterans, much less are veterans—and they have no power whatsoever. [5]
Of note as well is how Jackson is forced to express himself in order to be heard at all. [6] In the passage below, he fails to even mention that the fallen soldiers of the other side—or even the countless innocent civilians callously designated “collateral damage” by U.S. military statistics.
“War is hell. It is hell for those who fall in combat — and for their families and friends suffering their loss. It is hell for those who survive it — and for their families and friends dealing with their struggles on return.”
He only mentions U.S. soldiers, veterans and their friends and families. I don’t fault him for it: I’m sure an initial draft had a few extra lines. But he probably cut them in the hope that his essay would gain a bit of a wider reach in a hostile intellectual [7] landscape where any morality that appeals to sympathy for our murder victims is considered tantamount to sleeping with the enemy.
Published by marco on 19. Nov 2019 18:01:42 (GMT-5)
The article Thousands flock to Wikipedia founder’s ‘Facebook rival’ (BBC) briefly outlines Jimmy Wales’s new social network for sharing news, which “[…] will empower you to make your own choices about what content you are served, and to directly edit misleading headlines, or flag problem posts.” The article doesn’t contain nearly enough information to determine whether it has a hope of succeeding—or how it differs from RSS newsfeeds—though it mentions that it’s a subscription model.
At the end, they include an utterly fatuous and vacuous blurb from some twit who probably doesn’t even exist, but whose name was invented to make it seem like the pablum she expressed as an opinion came from a human being rather than having likely been generated by an algorithm to enforce the groupthink required to keep people in line. She is cited as saying,
“[…] people are so used to having news at their fingertips for free.”
They truly are used to that, yes. They are used to news being free. Just a few short decades ago, they were not. But now they are. People realized that they didn’t value news for its content, but for their ability to partake in discussions about it. If you didn’t read the news, you were caught flat-footed all the time. But if you were at least aware of the headlines, there was no opinion so stupid that you’d be caught out by other idiots who were also only reading headlines.
Even the articles, were you to read them, were fatuous, nearly fact-free and only promulgated the myths required by the powers-that-be to keep their iron-fisted control. Hell, most of it has been corporate, government and military press releases for decades if not half a century.
So the people were right in determining that, for the value they were getting—and for the value they themselves required of it—it didn’t really matter what was in it. So, the cheaper the better. Free was the best because you just got access to everything—everything that’s allowed—without having to really try at all and without having to pay anything. In fact, you didn’t even have to seek it out or really read it: a lot of it is now read to you via podcasts and news clips, all free. Perfect.
Naturally, in all of of this, the actual goal of becoming informed fell by the wayside long ago, in favor of being part of the conversation and, most importantly, being right.
It’s sort of as if people didn’t buy a car to actually go anywhere, but just to have a car in their driveway. With those requirements, who would pay $80,000 for a nice ride? Just get the cheapest piece of shit that looks like a car and be done with it. If it’s free, so much the better. But if the car actually needs to serve its real function, then, all of a sudden, you’re probably gonna wanna pay some money for it.
It’s the same thing with news. As long as you don’t care what you put in your head, the cheaper the better. If you actually care about being informed, then you are placing value on information, which, all of a sudden, costs money.
If you’re just going to read an advertising circular—which, if we’re being honest, is what Facebook and Google News are—and call it a newspaper, then you’re more than equipped for the water cooler the next day, but only to talk to all the other idiots with the same low standards. Lucky you for you, y’all are legion.
Published by marco on 23. Oct 2019 22:34:03 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 23. Oct 2019 22:43:25 (GMT-5)
They are killing him on purpose. They are killing him either actively or through neglect. They are not concerned that he be able to stand trial in compos mentis. They are not concerned that whatever the hell they are doing to him in prison is destroying his mind and body even faster than having been locked in the Ecuadoran embassy for over 7 years did.
From Assange in Court: What I Saw by Craig Murray (Antiwar.com):
“Everybody in that court yesterday saw that one of the greatest journalists and most important dissidents of our times is being tortured to death by the state, before our eyes. To see my friend, the most articulate man, the fastest thinker, I have ever known, reduced to that shambling and incoherent wreck, was unbearable. Yet the agents of the state, particularly the callous magistrate Vanessa Baraitser, were not just prepared but eager to be a part of this bloodsport. She actually told him that if he were incapable of following proceedings, then his lawyers could explain what had happened to him later. The question of why a man who, by the very charges against him, was acknowledged to be highly intelligent and competent, had been reduced by the state to somebody incapable of following court proceedings, gave her not a millisecond of concern. [1]”
We don’t even have to pretend that this is anything but the resurrection of the Star Chamber. [2]
Assange, a journalist, is being punished for having been a journalist. The mainstream media profited from years from his work. No-one is lining up to help him now—nor did they do so over the last seven years. He is an Australian citizen—it is not surprising to see his home country abandon him to the wolves of American and England, two allies of his home country.
Assange is being publicly punished to keep everyone else’s mouth shut. I only hope it doesn’t work. I only wish he could get away, escape like Edward Snowden did. It may be too late anyway, with his mind perhaps irreparably gone. [3] It’s a fucking tragedy. Do not forget that this is how the purportedly enlightened west runs things. It’s a valuable lesson, if nothing else.
They are a mafia. They have always been a mafia. The rule of the jungle is the only rule. The strongest wins. Everyone else toes the line and pays fealty. We are in a giant prison and the only way to win is to avoid being anyone’s bitch. You have no chance at real freedom in a system like this. Something fundamental has to change before we can be truly free. The system is broken.
With all the talk of nonviolent protest to change the power balance, to unseat the elites, it raises the question if it’s really possible to change anything without revolution. Physical violence will not win the day—the west has made sure to corner the market on that. But its stranglehold can only be broken with violence—perhaps of another kind, perhaps more like the kind they exert on us every day as they guide every second of our lives to ensure they generate maximum profits and don’t upset the apple cart. You can’t negotiate with terrorists like that.
“Assange’s defense team objected strenuously to the move to Belmarsh, in particular on the grounds that there are no conference rooms available there to consult their client and they have very inadequate access to him in the jail. Baraitser dismissed their objection offhand and with a very definite smirk.”
He was only allowed to make one statement and, other than some “confused and incoherent” statements, he was able to pull himself together to say:
“I do not understand how this process is equitable. This superpower had 10 years to prepare for this case and I can’t even access my writings. It is very difficult, where I am, to do anything. These people have unlimited resources.”
Murray went on to describe the courtroom:
“What we had was a naked demonstration of the power of the state, and a naked dictation of proceedings by the Americans. Julian was in a box behind bulletproof glass, and I and the thirty odd other members of the public who had squeezed in were in a different box behind more bulletproof glass. I do not know if he could see me or his other friends in the court, or if he was capable of recognizing anybody. He gave no indication that he did.”
]]>“We defend anyone accused of a crime. We do not refuse representation because the defendant is too wealthy, his crime too awful, his skin color too pale or his genitals too stiff. We couldn’t care less that the woke have deemed him too guilty to be worthy. We do... [More]”
Published by marco on 19. May 2019 17:18:20 (GMT-5)
From the article The Defense Crack by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“We defend anyone accused of a crime. We do not refuse representation because the defendant is too wealthy, his crime too awful, his skin color too pale or his genitals too stiff. We couldn’t care less that the woke have deemed him too guilty to be worthy. We do not judge. That’s for the jury to do. We defend.
“The notion that criminal defense lawyers should become the advanced guard of morality and justice is one that appeals to those for whom such vagaries protect their feelings from dispute. They can afford to take refuge in their preconceived outcomes, as it allows them to pretend their feelings are always justified. That’s fine, if that’s the way you want to live your life. Criminal defense lawyers, however, have chosen to live their lives in a way the puts the Constitution first, puts a duty to challenge the government and its complainants to prove their case first.”
A person is free to judge someone without a trial of evidence. It may not be morally tenable, but it’s neither illegal nor does it go against any oaths they’ve taken to upload the law.
A criminal-defense lawyer, on the other hand, has an obligation to provide a defense for a client. Their job is not to judge whether that person is guilty or innocent, but to make sure that their case is processed according to the law, that they get a fair trial during which it is determined whether they actually did what it is that they are accused of having done.
A lawyer is free to choose not to take a case because they feel the subject matter or the defendant is too odious. However, the system requires that someone take those cases. And it will not do to judge that person as “evil” for even trying to “defend” such a “criminal”. The accused’s criminality hasn’t even been established. How can it be bad to provide a defense for someone? Society cannot work this way, not in the long term.
I think the reason people feel that they can feel this way is that they no longer believe that the justice system is necessary to adjudicate cases. They already know who’s innocent and guilty and they already know the crimes. They are working with a fantasy world, a notion of society and law that runs parallel to the real-world one. Evidence is no longer a necessary component to conviction. Neither are trials. Media trial and hearsay from trusted sources—fellow travelers—are sufficient. “I believe survivors”.
Greenfield’s article was written in response to recent news that Harvard had capitulated to student demands that a professor of 30 years have his duties rescinded or drastically reduced because he was part of the legal-defense team for Harvey Weinstein. Given Weinstein’s obvious guilt and him being literally Hitler, such an association is inexcusable and does incalculable harm to psyches everywhere. These students are the next generation of lawyers, God help us.
Greenfield followed up with a little story about life on campus, called Seaton: Woke Teachers Wonder Where Things Went Wrong by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice). A sampling of a discussion between professors of the near future:
Another [professor] looked nervously out a window before adding, “It would’ve been nice if we didn’t have to write a statement each year affirming diversity and inclusion in our classrooms. What the hell does diversity and inclusion have to do with physics?”
“How in the world is teaching Plato racist?” a worried voice cried from another corner of the room. “I try teaching the Allegory of the Cave, and I get shouted down because it doesn’t adequately depict the lived experiences of people of color? What the hell does that even mean?”
“And the pronoun nonsense!” exclaimed another academic. “We try to be nice and call them what they want, but one of those little shits has me calling him ‘Your Highness’ when I call on him in class.”
I particularly like the last one: what is to prevent someone—a young, cynical whippersnapper—from choosing a word as his/her/its/zer/their personal pronoun that doesn’t come from the previously used set? If gender no longer limits pronouns, then are there any limits? Zer is a new word and that’s used. What about “schlong”? Or “Trump”? If all gloves are off, then all gloves are off, nö? If you can’t interfere with someone’s lived experience and interpretations of certain phonemes, then you can’t impose your own interpretation of those sounds, either. Sure, the entire rest of the English-speaking world thinks that “schlong” and “Trump” are not personal pronouns, but that isn’t allowed to matter, is it? Or is this not about equality of expression, after all?
Published by marco on 14. Apr 2019 22:32:44 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 16. Apr 2019 21:11:39 (GMT-5)
Julian Assange has had his Ecuadoran citizenship revoked and has been forcibly removed from the Ecuadoran embassy where he’d been imprisoned for the last seven years. Had he set foot outside, the British authorities would have swept him up and packed him off to America. It took years of pressure and a regime change in Ecuador, but they finally got permission to go in and get him.
Why did they bother to get permission? Why didn’t they just go in and get him whenever they wanted? The British police could have done it—just barged in, trampling on Ecuador’s sovereignty. What would Ecuador have done? Who the fuck cares what Ecuador thinks or says? Would they have sued for redress in the ICC? Who cares?
Britain does. It still cares, a little bit. But not for any moral reason. No, they care because they need you to think they care. They don’t just want to arrest Assange and send him off for torture in America. They need to you to believe that, in doing so, they are defending your freedoms, defending your families from the lies of Wikileaks and its ilk. They need to send the message that they can not only do what they want, but they can do it with the world’s support. They want to do it in a way where they not only do not fear reprisal, but are lauded for their upstanding commitment to moral rectitude.
The U.S. also still cares—death threats against Assange by U.S. politicians notwithstanding—which is why it took so bloody long.
I believe Edward Snowden can thank his lucky stars that he ended up in Moscow, where, oddly enough, he is probably more safe than anywhere in the western world (or anywhere subjugated by the west, like most of South America).
Poor Chelsea Manning made the mistake of sticking around in the U.S. and has been arrested yet again. Neither she nor Assange (once extradited) is likely to be heard from again, if the U.S. has its druthers. I hope fervently that this will not be the case, but I have no reason for doing so.
Julian Assange’s form of imprisonment has recently changed. Before 2012, he had to be careful where he went, but he was ostensibly free. Sometime after 2010, the powers-that-be began making noise about old sexual-misconduct charges from Sweden. Sweden duly issued an international arrest warrant, but Assange’s need to comply was muddied by the fact that there were murmurs of extradition from Britain to Sweden, and then to the U.S. for as-yet unspecified charges. [1]
It was plausible to think that the ostensible charges were a smokescreen to get Assange “into the system” and make him disappear. It reeked of railroading. It reeked of the authorities trying to put legal lipstick on their pig of persecution.
Assange had already heard enough death threats from American politicians at that point and fled to the Ecuadoran embassy, having been granted asylum by the left-leaning government of Rafael Correa. He would later grant Assange Ecuadoran citizenship. It was only a matter of time before Ecuador would swing back to the right, though, which they did with the election of Lenin Moreno. It took him just under two years, but he worked with the British to issue another arrest warrant—this time for jumping bail on a charge that had been dropped—and revoking his Ecuadoran citizenship. [2]
Assange’s life was a prison. He had some space to himself, but he was in all-but-solitary confinement, with spotty access to outside information. He was able to occasionally meet people. He could not go outside. His health declined catastrophically. He has aged 30 years in 7. A doctor who has examined him says that he will never recover completely, either physically or mentally. Not that it will matter once Gina Haspel’s CIA gets their hands on him.
For a more complete and detailed history, see the excellent summary in After 7 Years of Deceptions About Assange, the US Readies for its First Media Rendition by Jonathan Cook (Antiwar.com).
Or you can check out the video below for a purportedly satirical but actually totally accurate, 2-minute summary of the situation.
It’s a testament to western brainwashing that “killing Assange”, possibly “with drones” was chirpily bandied about in the press. Hillary as a candidate thought it was a grand idea. So did John McCain. No-one suffered any reprisal for making threats against a journalist/publisher’s life.
Australia’s lack of effort on behalf of its own citizen is not unexpected for a criminal, racist and kowtowing state. Britain’s role is the same as Australia’s, licking its own spittle from America’s shit-stained boots. It is utterly unsurprising that they both assist the U.S. in prosecuting a publisher for publishing.
Especially in the U.S., where the media is desperately searching for a way to keep up its completely parallel and fantastical narrative called “Russiagate”. Assange and Wikileaks are on the hook, of course, for helping Russia and Trump steal the presidency. Getting “justice” against Assange will go a long way in cementing this storyline as the main timeline in America, forever.
The rulers of the world are slavering to establish a precedent and cow other journalists and publishers. The freedom-of-the-press train left the station a long time ago in those major English-speaking countries. They are all a media and journalism wasteland. [3] It is utterly unsurprising that they want to help “disappear” someone who’s not only showing how criminal the major world governments are, but also how inept and gutless the major media are, as well.
The press has been telling the western world for years that Wikileaks is borderline, if not outright, criminal. They couldn’t care less about the truth. They just don’t like to be upstaged. It loses them money. They’ve put considerable effort into getting public opinion squarely against Assange and Wikileaks—just as their ruling class would have it. The media is composed not of journalists, but elites whose interests are just as threatened by a world made more open and equal by Wikileaks truth-telling.
Instead, the media celebrate their own immolation with stories trumpeting utter falsehoods—or they celebrate billionaires and giant corporations or anti-Russian propaganda, drumming up support for the next military action/war against a bunch of hapless people, or drumming up hatred against the refugees generated by the last umpteen such wars.
The article The Next Woodward and Bernstein Could Go to Jail by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin) comes to the same conclusion:
“The issue here is that, once he is extradited, the Trump administration may well end up achieving one of the national security state’s most cherished, long-held goals: restricting the publication of classified information by using a widely hated figure to set a precedent.”
The article After 7 Years of Deceptions About Assange, the US Readies for its First Media Rendition by Jonathan Cook (Antiwar.com) concurs,
“For seven years, we have had to listen to a chorus of journalists, politicians and “experts” telling us that Assange was nothing more than a fugitive from justice, and that the British and Swedish legal systems could be relied on to handle his case in full accordance with the law. Barely a “mainstream” voice was raised in his defense in all that time.
“From the moment he sought asylum, Assange was cast as an outlaw. His work as the founder of WikiLeaks– a digital platform that for the first time in history gave ordinary people a glimpse into the darkest recesses of the most secure vaults in the deepest of Deep States – was erased from the record.”
It’s not just my opinion, either. Luminaries who’ve never been on the wrong side of history, such as Edward Snowden, Yanis Varoufakis, Glenn Greenwald, Srecko Horvat (of DiEM25) and Noam Chomsky in the video below (22m).
John Pilger, a fellow Australian write poignantly in the article The Assange Arrest is a Warning from History by John Pilger (CounterPunch),
“The glimpse of Julian Assange being dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London is an emblem of the times. Might against right. Muscle against the law. Indecency against courage. Six policemen manhandled a sick journalist, his eyes wincing against his first natural light in almost seven years.
“That this outrage happened in the heart of London, in the land of Magna Carta, ought to shame and anger all who fear for “democratic” societies. Assange is a political refugee protected by international law, the recipient of asylum under a strict covenant to which Britain is a signatory. The United Nations made this clear in the legal ruling of its Working Party on Arbitrary Detention.”
Of what is Assange guilty? He spoke truth to power and he did it in a way that could not be stopped. He leveraged the power of the Internet to fight against the masters of the world. He did this secretly and diligently and cleanly and correctly. He and his organization don’t profit from the news—unlike the major news organizations who cross-publish their material and then stab Wikileaks in the back at every opportunity.
No-one is saying that what Wikileaks has published is untrue—just that they shouldn’t be allowed to publish it. The dirty secrets about how the world works should remain secret. States like the U.S. and Britain consider Wikileaks and its ilk to be their gravest threat, outshining Isis or even Russia, believe it or not. [4]
“These “things” are the truth about the homicidal way America conducts its colonial wars, the lies of the British Foreign Office in its denial of rights to vulnerable people, such as the Chagos Islanders, the expose of Hillary Clinton as a backer and beneficiary of jihadism in the Middle East, the detailed description of American ambassadors of how the governments in Syria and Venezuela might be overthrown, and much more. It all available on the WikiLeaks site.”
This why they are after him.
This is why he must pay.
This is why he must suffer.
This is why he must be stopped.
This is why of him must be made an example, a warning to others.
Keep your mouth shut if you know what’s good for you.
Do not tell the subjugated about their chains.
Do not pull back that curtain.
To hell with the lot of them.
We should rise up and tell them that this must end, now.
But they’ll probably get away with it. Again. Like they always do.
Poor Assange. He’d hoped to launch a revolution and ends as so many others, in a slow-motion immolation, crushed by the slow gears of the state.
His whitened, wizened head will be a fading memory within a few weeks.
And no-one will know where he is or what became of him.
And it will, somehow, all be legal.
And no-one will be made to stand trial.
And there will continue to be no justice.
I hope I’m proven wrong.
The article Cascading Cat Litter by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) muses that the U.S. may end up “disappearing” a Nobel-prize winner, ending with a lovely summary (emphasized below).
“The US supposedly reserves the authority to lob additional charges at Mr. Assange, though they may face a lengthy extradition battle with his attorneys to lever him out of the UK and into US custody. In the meantime, Mr. Assange may receive a Nobel Prize as a symbol of a lone conscience standing up against the despotic deceits of the world’s deep states. Wouldn’t that gum up the works nicely? I’d like to see The New York Times’s front page headline on that story: Russian Colluder Wins Nobel Prize, Put on Trial in Federal Court. By then, the United States of America will be so completely gaslighted that it will pulsate in the darkness like a death star about to explode.”
Pilger writes,
“ A decade ago, the Ministry of Defence in London produced a secret document which described the “principal threats” to public order as threefold: terrorists, Russian spies and investigative journalists. The latter was designated the major threat.
“The document was duly leaked to WikiLeaks, which published it. “We had no choice,” Assange told me. “It’s very simple. People have a right to know and a right to question and challenge power. That’s true democracy.” (Emphasis added.)”
Contrast this with how the rest of the media functions, in the main, as detailed in the article The Next Woodward and Bernstein Could Go to Jail by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin),
“Mother Jones‘s David Corn, who was earlier revealed to have given the now discredited Steele Dossier to the FBI in an effort to take down Trump, spent yesterday helpfully delineating between what is officially acceptable journalism and what isn’t. “Do not help sources break the law to obtain information,” he advised. “However, you can publish info that is brought to you.” Remember, journalism is simply publishing whatever secret information the government deems fit to reveal to you. (Emphasis added.)”
The first three minutes are largely uneventful. The... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. Apr 2019 23:09:08 (GMT-5)
The article Saving Willie McCoy by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) includes a link to a body-cam video of the shooting of Willie McCoy. McCoy was found asleep in the driver’s seat of his car in the drive-thru lane of a Taco Bell. The police could clearly see a gun in his lap.
The first three minutes are largely uneventful. The officer notes that the magazine is not in the pistol, so the driver has at most one shot.
When he moves, McCoy’s first scratches his left arm with his right hand, as he seems to be waking up. The officer notes that he’s not awake yet. Seconds later, McCoy begins to sit up, the officers yell and shoot dozens of times, nearly immediately.
The article by Greenfield is quite weak, as compared to other he’s written. He’s extremely defensive about the point that it’s unlikely to be a case that ends in criminal investigation of the officers involved. He’s almost certainly right. He’s a lawyer, and a well-informed and experienced one, at that. He probably knows. But he jumps down the throat of anyone in his comments section who mentions anything other than what he’d already posted. [1]
That aside, though, it’s probably true that these officers will not even get an official reprimand for their behavior. It was all above-board. They followed procedure.
It was an odd situation. There was the danger that the man would wake, grab his gun and shoot. The officers knew that he would be able to shoot at most once, should he choose to do so.
By shining a light into his car, and standing with guns drawn as close as they could get to the vehicle, they didn’t seem to try to avoid the confrontation. It’s unclear what they were thinking. The whole situation seems to have been handled incompetently. They seemed to have all the time in the world. McCoy only awoke because of their noise and the bright flashlights shining into his vehicle. If they were afraid that he was going to drive away, they could have immobilized his vehicle (a boot?), then awakened him from a distance—perhaps with a megaphone.
instead, the officers used their weapons recklessly, putting themselves into a dangerous situation of their own creation. They were obviously terrified of this rapacious creature in the form of a “sleeping black man”. The dude was clearly asleep. His head was all lolled back on the seat. He posed no danger to anyone.
Until, of course, he awakened, startled, disoriented, with lights pointing at his face, blinding him and several completely hidden men shouting at him at the top of their lungs. He had at most a couple of seconds to process the situation, coming directly from sleep and into an adrenalin spurt. Did he know that these men were police officers? How could he? Is it likely he thought his life was in danger? Of course. It was. He had no idea what was going on and was never given a chance to find out.
The officers performed their perfunctory duty of informing him of their presence. Whether he had a chance of understanding them isn’t salient. When he failed to sit stock-still—not that that would have helped, they were on a hair trigger and terrified—they shot him with what sounded like dozens of bullets.
The article and commentary treats this situation as a sad outcome of perfectly normal policing. But it’s not normal. It’s grossly incompetent. They provoked the killing with their utter lack of training for defusing a situation. Everything they did escalated the situation, funneling it to the inevitable death of the “suspect”. Greenfield says as much, as well. He just follows up with his well-informed opinion that what happened is not punishable in the States.
I don’t see a lot of difference between this shooting and the police kicking the door down in a 4AM, no-knock raid, only to shoot anyone in the domicile who responds in a perfectly normal manner when their home is invaded: to defend it, possibly with a weapon they have every right to use to defend their home.
It didn’t have to go down that way. It’s not premeditated and I’m not a lawyer, so I don’t know which charge would stick. As I was reading the description and watching the video, I thought to myself that, while pretty much accepted as an “it happens” kind of thing in the States, this isn’t an acceptable outcome in most other civilized countries that are not currently war zones.
In Switzerland, this would never have happened. It’s inconceivable. It would never have gotten this far. The police are far better-trained and don’t provoke violence so blatantly. It it were to happen, it would be a national scandal and these officers would be fired for gross negligence and incompetence, at the very least. It’s unlikely that most people would think that nothing could be done to punish the cops (from desk duty to leave of absence to dismissal to prosecution).
Greenfield writes “but stupid isn’t (or at least shouldn’t be) a capital offense”, which is exactly the right point.
I mean, falling asleep in a Taco Bell Drive-in with a gun in your lap while black in America is stupid. Who the hell knows though? Maybe the guy was narcoleptic? Maybe someone drugged his drink? Or his food? Maybe someone set him up and then called the cops in a new take on swatting? It’s a bit roundabout, but kind-of reliable way of taking care of a rival, no? And maybe this wasn’t even the intention—maybe someone was just fucking with McCoy and playing a prank on him. Maybe he took an antihistamine that didn’t agree with him. Maybe he was super-high or drunk when he got a craving for Taco Bell.
In another comment, though, Greenfield writes very belligerently and impatiently,
“There are two “real life” issues coming out of this. First, should the cops be criminally charged for the killing? Second, should the cops (or, in real life, the municipality that employs or insures them) be liable in damages for the wrongful death? Sad feelz aside, if neither of these fits the bill, then what is the point?”
There are no sad feelz, you dumbass. It’s just that this seems quite flagrant and people are trying to think of ways of preventing it from happening again. Flagrant seems kind of tame to describe “the police shot someone in his sleep”. Maybe the answer is “make Americans stop being so fucking hateful and stressed and hair-trigger and innately afraid of people who don’t look like them and also stop making the worst people in society cops and then not training them barely at all”. Maybe America is too broken to fix, because police can do this kind of thing and have their own conscience to deal with, but no desk duty or restriction in pay or loss of job or jail time.
I have no reason to think that the cops killed McCoy on purpose. It’s definitely not murder, and almost certainly not premeditated. Rather, a combination of terror, indoctrination, incompetence, self-preservation at all costs (as if that was the point of the job, as if it were a war zone), lack of empathy and just plain low intelligence and meanness made McCoy’s death a foregone conclusion.
This is not an isolated incident, but yet another example of how policing works in America. Yet another example of how America works.
There are a million reasons this happened and none of them is individually insurmountable—but taken together? Maybe America just needs a giant fucking mulligan. That country is a menace not only to the whole world, but increasingly to its citizens.
Knowing how America works, the search for a solution would escalate dramatically, were McCoy to belong to a cohort that anyone gives a damn about.
The article On Our Knees by Missy Comley Beattie (CounterPunch) poses the same question as she considers the 2020 candidates.
]]>“Dear God, I shake my head with... [More]”
Published by marco on 16. Mar 2019 13:38:35 (GMT-5)
Each new indignity reported from the States leads to this question. When are U.S. Americans going to shake off their parasitic elite? When will they wake up from their Soma coma?
The article On Our Knees by Missy Comley Beattie (CounterPunch) poses the same question as she considers the 2020 candidates.
“Dear God, I shake my head with no, no, no, no, and at the risk of being accused of ageism, I say, “Biden is too old.” So is Sanders, so is Trump, and so is Hillary Clinton—and yes, she has threatened to enter the field if the Democrats move too far to the left.
“Too far to the left? Following even a few of Jesus Christ’s tenets is Leftist anarchy according to Republican Congressmen and women and most Dem Congressmen and women. (Emphasis added.)”
In the video below, Madigan makes a similar point: that older people have different concerns and different ideas about how the world should work—mostly rooted in decades-old indoctrination. Some of it is helpful; some is outdated; some is horrific; some is counterproductive. It’s a mixed bag.
I like the expression “No, Paw-paw”. It’s very appropriate to many of the lunatic ideas running our society that we’re encouraged to consider normal and, more importantly, eternal and unchanging.
With age, most people’s already-limited ability to express themselves wanes. So, too, does their ability to evaluate and integrate change. This inability is not limited to older people—most people think they know everything they’re ever going to need to know by the time they’re thirty years old, at the latest.
Being able to honestly consider new concepts and either reject them, incorporate them or modify them based on rational reasoning without bias is a skill that needs daily—or, at least, weekly—honing to stay sharp. Once it dulls, it may never take an edge again.
Just under 20 months out from the next presidential election—that’s over a year and a half, by the way—and the field is getting crowded by buffoons and buffoonettes. We’re supposed to be pleased that just as many female fools are pretenders to the throne this year. This is called progress. The most progressive and interesting, Tulsi Gabbard, will be mercilessly bullied and smeared until she’ll soon quit, until only the malleable milquetoasts remain.
That the field is crowded just over halfway through the current 4-year term is the best indicator that the U.S. and its first-through-fourth columns haven’t learned a good, god-damned thing from the last election. They’ve been unable to talk about anything but all of the lessons that they learned, though.
The trick is that they talk about lessons that they didn’t learn whereas the lesson they did learn is that they have complete control of our minds and will guide our somnambulism toward their candidate of choice, as they’ve been doing for decades. And their candidate of choice will be chosen by those already in power.
They are not wrong.
We have never tried to prove them wrong.
Not really.
Every movement we have loses power in the face of attack. Or it is co-opted by the corporate powers-that-be. Movements are rarely squashed anymore. Although direct confrontation—shooting Fred Hampton in bed, for example—doesn’t bring down the reprobation one would expect, it still engenders far more blowback than it’s worth, especially when other methods have proven far more effective.
Why use force when you can brainwash more effectively instead? Converting or subverting ardent would-be revolutionaries to ardent foot soldiers is much more effective. There ain’t no proponent like a born-again proponent. It’s dry alcoholics, new vegans, the nouveau riche and born-again Christians who are the most convinced and most evangelical about their newly chosen lifestyles.
Comley Beattie continues:
“If Clinton were Madam President, we wouldn’t see nearly as much outrage—the necessary degree required to move us from the immorality of capitalism to the morality of socialism. It’s shameful though that Trump’s naked racism and oozing disdain for anyone but the ultra-privileged are the requisites for an authentic resistance to inequality.
“You go with what you have, not with what you might wish you have or want. Go with the knowledge that often you have to be brought to your knees before you are motivated to stand. At this moment in our history, we are on our knees.”
It’s becoming increasingly obvious—with each new indignity—that America is ripe for a new revolution. For that, we need new leaders, revolutionary and inspiring leaders. That’s what’s always worked in the past. We need a Lenin.
Lee Camp’s probably not Lenin, but he’s damned good at what he does on his show, Redacted Tonight (YouTube). Every week, he has a thoughtful and insightful and often dryly funny diatribe on the state of the world. But he’s probably not a Lenin.
When I read the article Let’s Change Europe From the Ground Up by Yanis Varoufakis (CounterPunch), I was wondering whether I’d found him.
Varoufakis is the former finance minister of Greece and he’s brilliant. He’s heading up a new party in Europe called DiEM25—Democracy in Europe Movement 2015—for the next elections. Their platform is interesting and bold and … revolutionary. This party proposes not to dismantle Europe, but to seize the reins of power from the elites through elections and to use the powerful existing European institutions to benefit the many instead.
“If I am right, it does not matter whether the EU is or isn’t reformable, but it does matter that we put forward concrete proposals on what we would do with EU institutions. Not utopian proposals but complete descriptions of what we would do this week, next month, in the next year, under the existing rules and with the existing instruments — how we would reassign the role of the awful European Stability Mechanism, reorient the ECB’s quantitative easing, and finance immediately, and without new taxes, a green transition and campaign against poverty.
“[…]
“Everyone talks about the importance of the green transition. What they do not say is where the money will come from and who will plan it. Our answer is clear: Europe needs to invest €2 trillion between 2019 and 2023 in green technologies, energy etc. We propose that the EIB issues an additional volume of its bonds, €500bn annually for four years, and that the ECB announces that, if their value drops, it will purchase these on the secondary bond market. With that announcement, and the glut of savings around the world, the ECB will not have to spend a single euro, as the EIB bonds will sell out. […]
“This proposal requires no new taxes, builds on an existing European bond and is fully legal under existing rules.”
I may have missed them, but I’m not hearing such comprehensive proposals for sweeping change from anyone in the U.S. There are proposals, but they’re already channeled into well-worn and establishes courses—health-care, green new deal, etc. We have to distinguish between something like the Green New Deal—which is not policy or any law that can actually be enacted, but aspirational—and concrete plans for reallocation of resources, as outlined by diEM25 above.
Varoufakis concludes:
“Our message to Europe’s authoritarian establishment: we will resist you through a radical programme that is technically more sophisticated than yours. Our message to the fascistic xenophobes: we will fight you everywhere. Our message to our comrades of the European left: you can expect unlimited solidarity from us, and one day our paths will converge in the service of a radical, transnational humanism.”
If America is to get out of the hole it’s in—or even to survive in any meaningful form that makes the majority of lives worth living—it needs to find its own Lenin. We’ve had them in the past, but they’ve had a nasty habit of getting assassinated—MLK and Malcolm X come to mind.
Bernie Sanders isn’t bad—he’s pretty good. He’s quite sharp right now. He’s just a touch old and I’m wondering how long he’s going to be able to keep it up.
There are two gentlemen who give me hope: Noam Chomsky (90) and Ralph Nader (85). Nader still hosts his own radio show, Ralph Nader’s Radio Hour that is interesting nearly every week. In particular, his recent interview with Noam Chomsky was a very good conversation about global and U.S. politics, strategy and morality. [1]
In the chatter after the interview, Nader and his co-hosts discussed a recent Trump speech. Nader said (and I’m quoting from memory, but this was the gist of it):
“Did you hear [Trump’s] speech the other day? Off the rails. He even mentioned during it that he was going off the rails. 2 hours long! He spent an inordinate amount of time talking about the crowd size at his own inauguration two years ago. He’s an absolute lunatic! [2]”
This is the right way to bash Trump—for ridiculous things he’s done, not for things we’d like to have done so that we can hate him more.
People think we missed the boat when we didn’t elect Bernie. At that point, we’d already missed the boat on Ralph 3 times. I voted for him twice.
I’d fervently like to see that timeline. I bet it’s not the darkest one. I bet it’s brighter than this one.
Nader gives props to the young people that are coming out of the woodwork to fight for their planet. This is a fantastic development, but they can’t be the leaders. Ten-year–olds being led by 16-year–olds is a good start, but they don’t know anything. They’re too easy to ignore. They are fervent, they are passionate, but they don’t know anything yet. You don’t have to be much older—you just need more experience and to be a bit better-read so that you don’t get wrong-footed in every single debate you’re in. You need a bit of gravitas, a bit of worldliness. You need charisma. Yelling over other people isn’t charisma. The world is not going to change because of fervency—at least not for the better.
There are good examples of young revolutionaries who were well-educated, well-read and very capable in debate. Stokley Carmichael and Che Guevara in the 20th century come to mind. A lisping 10-year–old yelling that we’re “destwoying the pwanet” might be endearing, but it’s not the start of a movement.
A Swedish 16-year–old invited to speak at WEF is already well on her way to being co-opted. She doesn’t know enough to refuse their invitation, probably convinced by others that she can defeat them from within. That has almost never worked and is highly unlikely to work in the well-oiled machine (not pun intended) of western capitalism and media today.
The recent, much-publicized “confrontation” between Dianne Feinstein and the schoolchildren is a manufactured moment. It was designed to make her look bad, but did so only for certain groups. It was a moment designed not to win anyone over but to get exposure and to harden the two fronts. At least as many people thought Feinstein gave the class a good talking-to as thought that she looked like an ancient talking-box spouting senseless catechisms.
Was there a chance that she would see the error of her ways? Absolutely not. Either you get the confrontation you had hoped for—and Feinstein would “look bad”—or she would have lied and accepted their gifts with a cadaverous grimace and all would have been quickly forgotten.
The woman was just re-elected to a six-year term last year and she’s 85 years old. Where the actual fuck was any candidate between 25 and 60? What the actual hell? Of course she’s confident in her opinions and her position; there’s obviously absolutely nothing threatening them.
You can’t engage someone that powerful face-to-face because they will almost certainly be able to play the moment at least as much to their favor as to yours. They’re not in that position because they’re a doddering fool. They may not have the planet’s best interests at heart, but they’re a fucking ninth-level, black-belt grand-master at promoting and defending their own. Do not underestimate them.
If people are too young, we always suspect manipulation. If people are too old, we suspect senility. We need the interim generations to do something. We need inspirational people from the middle who will not be turned away.
We need a revolution that doesn’t take no for an answer. It should be non-violent.
We need our Lenins. We need our Trotskys.
When we get them, we need to stay awake and pay attention.
Nader’s next interview was The End of Ice, with Dahr Jamail, in which he and Dahr discussed the climate crisis. This was another very good interview, in which Jamail said:
“I quote Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident writer and statesman. And he reminds us that as he said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” And that’s where I get into this moral obligation that no matter how dire things look, that we are absolutely morally obliged to do everything we can in our power to try to make this better.”
When you’re as old as I am, have paid attention long enough and have read enough history, you’re morally... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 9. Feb 2019 14:52:26 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 9. Feb 2019 17:26:24 (GMT-5)
I wrote the above several days ago, but held off on publication to avoid jumping the gun. A few days later, I still agree with my my initial reaction. I’ve added a few footnotes here and there.
When you’re as old as I am, have paid attention long enough and have read enough history, you’re morally required to be skeptical about the stories we hear about Venezuela.
But people are suffering! We have to do something to help them! Their government is killing them—whether through ineptitude or evil is neither here nor there. [1]
It’s not even their government! Those elections were a fraud! [2]
We must do something!
Almost nothing good ever came from that argument.
Why so skeptical?
Because how do you know they’re suffering to the degree that you think they are? From which media are you getting this news? From your beloved CNN? From the Swiss News, which also outsources its news-gathering to organizations like Reuters and the Washington Post (i.e. Amazon/Bezos) and then translates it?
Or perhaps from the horse’s mouth—the Venezuelan press? Can they be trusted? Who finances them? The CIA? Quite possibly and not unrealistically. But even if not, the media belong to the elite in Venezuela who have always hated Maduro and his predecessor, Chavez.
Maduro is not the monster they say he is. He’s not Pol Pot deliberately eliminating people. At worst, he’s mismanaged an economic downturn that none of us can even imagine—export volume has dropped by 50% inside of a decade.
This is economic devastation, but Maduro is considered “inept” because people in his country are suffering. In fairness, nearly no government would be capable of dealing with this kind of event without suffering—especially with the U.S. deliberately making things worse to increase pressure without concern for Venezuelans. U.S. sanctions and oil-price speculation has a lot more to do with the suffering in Venezuela.
But we can ignore that, too.
We can just think back to other situations where the world was going to end and we just had to do something.
Iran was about to get the nuclear bomb. Iraq was about to destroy the U.S. with its WMD. Libya almost invaded Spain. Russia is almost in Paris. The people in Syria are suffering. Ukraine needs our help. Vietnam is a domino falling to communism. As is Laos, and Cambodia. Thailand needs a little bombing, too. Korea already knows not to open its mouth. Japan and Germany are still occupied. As are 100 other countries that “host” American bases.
Nearly every country in South and Central America has already had to be saved from its foolish love affair with social programs with incursions: Ecuador, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the list goes on—all had to be saved from their own stupid meddling with socialism or communism. Cuba! The lone survivor, with a Bay of Pigs, a failed invasion and innumerable assassination attempts on its history books.
Assassinating or ousting democratically elected, socialist leaders is a specialty of the U.S. There was Mossadegh in Iran, Allende in Chile, Lumumba in Congo and many, many more (WikiSpooks). Others were ousted without being killed, like Ortega from Nicaragua or Maduro’s own predecessor, Hugo Chavez. The list of Foreign interventions by the United States (Wikipedia) is long. For a more comprehensive list, read Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II by William Blum. [3]
But, sure, I bet it’s different this time. I bet the story in Venezuela is exactly as it’s made to seem by the world media. Socialism and corruption working hand-in-hand to starve the poor. Chavez’s advancements never happened. The agitation on the streets is not the middle and upper classes, but the poor demanding…illiteracy? Less food?
We hear the same thing again and again about official enemies. We hear again and again about a paucity of democracy. But then we support, again and again, coups in those countries when a more pliable candidate rears his head. The West does not care about democracy, other than as a talking point.
Strangely enough, we don’t hear that we must do something in countries like Saudi Arabia, Yemen or Israel/Palestine. Those countries are allowed to continue ruling themselves—the logic that we must step in to help their people somehow doesn’t apply there. Is it perhaps because their leaders are already in our iron grip?
But the U.S. is largely responsible for the suffering of those people. It applies devastating sanctions on a country, then blame its leaders for not being able to feed their people.
The U.S. does this with regularity. It fills Iraq with depleted uranium, blocks all medical devices from that country, then shakes its head at how those poor, backward people can’t even help themselves.
But back to Venezuela. I hear: why are the Chinese there or the Russians? Is it possible that they’re trying to help, within the confines of international law? Is it possible that they are actually on the right side of history? You know, allowing a country to be sovereign, with its own elected leaders being allowed to work on their country’s problems?
Why are we asked to believe that a coup is the only way forward? It’s said that the U.N. thinks that the Venezuelan elections were not above-board—but the solution to an undemocratic election is … a putsch? And the only guy who can be trusted is an unelected guy, trained at the IMF and in U.S. universities, who didn’t get a single vote? He declared himself president and we’re all just OK with that?
Whereas some nations immediately threw their support behind the U.S.—Canada, Britain among the usual suspects—others, like France and Germany, demanded elections within 8 days. 8 days! So Europe thinks the elections were unfair, but also thinks that the way to have fair elections is to unconstitutionally demand new ones, all planned in just over a week.
What spectacular bullshit. Repeat after me: the West doesn’t care about democracy at all, especially as compared to promoting its own interests.
Those interests? They are, in a nutshell: colonialism. resource-domination and empire. Let’s call it economic colonialism, defined by a desire to steal things rather than pay for them in order to enrich one’s own elites. [4]
The U.S. loves to exert influence to create or exacerbate a situation that only it can solve. It engenders fear in Europeans nations in order to increase its military influence—witness the dozen new members of NATO.
Watching how quickly key European allies have fallen in line with the U.S. by recognizing the new “president” of Venezuela, I wouldn’t be surprised to see the first official NATO incursion into South America.
We’re still listening to these criminals—Netanyahu has the world’s ear and suffers little to no official recrimination, to say nothing of action against him. Why don’t we replace the leader of Israel for causing such suffering among his citizens in Palestine?
And the U.S.: it doesn’t seem to matter which criminal heads that nation, the behavior is consistently evil. [5] Far from listening to anything any one of them has to say, we should we working to end them—consign their evildoing to the pages of history.
It’s a farce. It always is. There is only naked greed and national interest at work. To even engage their arguments is to concede that the playing field is at-all even. It’s like arguing whether the charges of “Jewiness” against a Jewish family in 1939 Germany were “legitimate”.
This is not to say that the Venezuelans are not responsible for themselves—but we cannot ignore the outside influences. Communism in Vietnam didn’t fail “on its own”.
I’d be delighted to discover that the current and forthcoming, intensified international interventions will bring a better world for all Venezuelans. It would be a first, though. Venezuela is likely to join Libya, Iraq and others as quasi-states with most of its citizens much worse off than they were before.
Meanwhile, Stephen Pinker and Bill Gates will continue to entertain us with tales of how, on average, we’re all much better and much better off than we used to be. They even have charts to prove it, so you know it must be true.
I spent years believing that, if so many parties seem to agree on something, then there must be some truth to it. I’ve been disappointed enough. I mistrust because I’ve been taught to do so by history.
The U.S. is almost never to be trusted. Do you know how you can tell when the U.S. is lying? It’s lips are moving.
Nowadays, I’d rather be wrong than complicit. [6]
The article Avoiding Regime Change in Venezuela: Palast on The Scott Horton Show by Greg Palast includes a 30-minute interview, with Palast concluding with the question:
“Are we liberating Venezuela? Or are we liberating Venezuela’s Oil?”
The following 10-minute video is an excellent overview of the situation in Venezuela.
Of particular interest is the quote by National Security Advisor John Bolton,
“Venezuela is one of the three countries I call the “Troika of Tyranny”. It’ll make a big difference to the United States economically if we could have American oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities of Venezuela.”
Published by marco on 9. Feb 2019 14:16:48 (GMT-5)
As noted in SOTU 2019: President Camacho holds forth, one of Trump’s giant applause points was when he said, “Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.” The best parts of America are the socialist bits. Even the worst parts are socialist: members of the military live in a socialist paradise, with every part of their lives—room, board, insurance, etc.—paid for by the government.
The strongest opponents of socialism are the ones who live the most socialist of lives. The Congress is another example: they have lifelong insurance and pensions once elected to office.
That sounds like the government is making sure that soldiers and senators have less existential angst since they never need to worry about anything ever again. For the rest of us, though, it’s back to the coal mines. Their system isn’t going to pay for itself.
One way to predispose people against socialism is to create examples where it doesn’t work. Since it does tend to work, opponents are forced to cripple it first, then point out that it failed to provide the required services. This is a common tactic. As pointed out in the post Stop Socialism Act aims to reduce local government competition with private businesses (Reddit),
“Ironically, many of the things people love to bitch about with government are caused by trying to be too efficient. Take the DMV − if each worker costs $60,000 a year, then adding 2 people per location would vastly speed up their operations, and your taxes would go up maybe a penny a year. But because we’re terrified of BIG GUBERMINT we make a lot of programs operate on a shoe-string budget and then get frustrated because they aren’t convenient.”
We spend a tremendous amount of money on the military, don’t acknowledge its generally socialist nature and absolve it from “breaking even”. That is, the value provided by the military is presumed to be beyond the profit motive. You can’t put a price on security.
You can, apparently, put a price on education, health and well-being. Any of the bureaus charged with those tasks must show how they not only provide a social good, but also how they can turn a profit. If they don’t, then there is talk of privatization and outsourcing.
Granted, the U.S. military is also heavily outsourced and privatized now, but the budget is still 100% public. The private companies suckle at the teat of government largesse. Involvement of private industry in the military has—in no way—led to more efficiency and reduced cost.
In fact, unlike schools or hospitals, the military is completely free from accounting for what it does with its money at all. It is currently undergoing an audit of sorts—it’s clear that the outcome won’t affect future budgeting, in any way—during which it’s been discovered that the Pentagon can’t account for 21 billion dollars over the last decade or so.
America’s problem isn’t socialism—it’s imperialism. Its problem is that the imperialist arm is heavily socialist, while everything else is veering ever harder toward libertarianism. The military is crumbling at a slower rate than the rest of the infrastructure and society—thanks to its inherently socialist and non-accountable nature.
Published by marco on 9. Feb 2019 14:15:01 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 9. Feb 2019 14:15:30 (GMT-5)
So, the State of the Union 2019 finally happened. If you just read the transcript, it’s a speech which any other President could have given. Go ahead: read the first few paragraphs of it in Obama’s voice—it will seem perfectly natural. This isn’t a “Trump” speech, it’s an “American president” speech—given by the imperator of the world. The speech and its implications exist independent of the figurehead—it is an expression of the State, of the Empire.
My notes below are taken from the 2019 State of the Union Address (C-SPAN) (video and transcript). I read the transcript and did not watch the speech.
President Camacho’s [1] speech sparked Olympics-style jingoistic and enthusiastic chanting from the august, legislative body of the U.S. at three points. The 30-second video below points them out; I include full quotes below.
First up was women:
“[…] we also have more women serving in the Congress than ever before.” At this point, all of the women, dressed in white, many of them Democrats, stood up and cheered, then started chanting U.S.A. repeatedly. You can even see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez kind-of dancing in the front.
Next up was socialism:
“We stand with the Venezuelan people in their noble quest for freedom—and we condemn the brutality of the Maduro regime, whose socialist policies have turned that nation from being the wealthiest in South America into a state of abject poverty and despair. [2] Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.”
Chants of U.S.A filled the chamber.
Trump’s broadside against Venezuela is based nearly in its entirety on a pile of fabrication. Of course, it has broad bipartisan support in America, which has never seen a regime-change it couldn’t wholeheartedly get behind. Regardless of party affiliation—including, unfortunately, Bernie Sanders—they will almost all support economic warfare and empire.
“We have unleashed a revolution in American energy—the United States is now the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world. And now, for the first time in 65 years, we are a net exporter of energy. After 24 months of rapid progress, our economy is the envy of the world, our military is the most powerful on earth, and America is winning each and every day.”
Chants of U.S.A. filled the chamber.
As with empire, the legislature knows that fossil fuels power the American economy. An increase in those means short-term gains at the expense of future generations. America’s politicians are stupid and mean, but they understand that the votes of future generations don’t mean anything to them today. When re-election is paramount, the opinions of large and financially gargantuan industrial lobbies override everything.
Trump spent plenty of time—about half of the speech—talking about immigration. Unfortunately, he was clever (devious?)—he couched his “concern” in non-racist, security-conscious language that is going to speak clearly to over half of the country. An overwhelming hatred of Trump would lead most detractors to miss this point, but Trump used a “classist” justification, not a racist one.
“We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens.
“This includes our obligation to the millions of immigrants living here today, who followed the rules and respected our laws. Legal immigrants enrich our Nation and strengthen our society in countless ways. I want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally.
“Tonight, I am asking you to defend our very dangerous southern border out of love and devotion to our fellow citizens and to our country. No issue better illustrates the divide between America’s working class and America’s political class than illegal immigration. Wealthy politicians and donors push for open borders while living their lives behind walls and gates and guards.Meanwhile, working class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration − reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools and hospitals, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net. (Emphasis added.)”
It’s incredible the swipes that Trump is allowed to take against the rich—his donors understand that this is the way to get him back into office. This is pure lip service, but it’s almost certainly going to work again. Because “Baaaaa”—we’re sheep, made all the more ignorant and manipulable by our increasingly soporific media landscape.
He went on,
“Meanwhile, working class Americans are left to pay the price for mass illegal migration − reduced jobs, lower wages, overburdened schools and hospitals, increased crime, and a depleted social safety net.”
How is it that the police are heroes and get more and more budget, but crime keeps getting worse? Answer: crime is going down every year—but we have to keep fear high in order to justify pumping more money in that direction anyway.
Why is the social-safety net depleted? It’s not because of immigrants or moochers—it’s because we pour money without concern into empire, but starve social programs. The same goes for why school and hospitals are overburdened—these programs are in shambles because that’s how they are designed. Their inability to provide proper services is a logical outcome of how they are funded. There is no mystery; it’s deliberate policy. It is only mysterious if you believe the espoused guiding principles of America rather than those inferred from its actions.
Many of Trump’s facts and figures are technically true but are used in a way to suggest things that are not true. For example, mentioning that “More people are working now than at any time in our history – 157 million” makes no sense outside the context of how many people are in the country. There are economic indicators for this—but they’re probably not favorable for Trump.
The unemployment numbers in most Western countries—the U.S. included—are heavily manipulated to deliver the desired message. A single number—be it unemployment percentage nationwide or minimum wage nationwide—doesn’t indicate the number of hours worked, percentage of living wage earned, local cost of living, or any of myriad other factors that are actually relevant in determining how people actually live or how secure they feel financially.
That a large majority of American households can’t handle an unexpected $500 cost without immediately going into debt is a far stronger indication that things suck for most people.
These two proposals came in between the long tirade against immigration and a broadside against abortion rights.
“To help support working parents, the time has come to pass school choice for America’s children. I am also proud to be the first President to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave − so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child.”
As usual, Trump’s all over the place. With “school choice”, he means “put more money into charter schools, starving the public-school system in favor of privatized schools that only benefit the rich”. I don’t know what he actually means by “paid family leave”, but I suspect it’s probably not as good as it sounds.
The foreign-policy part of Trump’s speech was an unhinged ball of misrepresentation—it sounded like Alex Jones wrote it for him. His characterization of events had little to do with reality. It’s hard to accuse him of prevarication because he probably believes every word wholeheartedly—and probably no major media source in the U.S. would fact-check him on it because they’re “all aboard” for the American mythos train, as well. This is a heedless, reckless vehicle for the most powerful nation to be on.
U.S. behavior can be likened to that of an insanely jealous husband who goes on the warpath basely purely on his own paranoid ravings and fantasies. Trump is channeling a nationwide mental illness directly through a ludicrously overpowered military. In this, he is no different than any other president, in my lifetime…since WWII…ever.
Every few paragraphs, he says something that’s at least somewhat true. Obama used to do this, too. As stated at the top, the techniques employed by Trump in this speech are not unique to him—they come with the office.
“If I had not been elected President of the United States, we would right now, in my opinion, be in a major war with North Korea with potentially millions of people killed. Much work remains to be done, but my relationship with Kim Jong Un is a good one.”
That’s kind of true. I would give far more credit to President Moon of South Korea, but it is true that the threat of war with North Korea has diminished. The threat of war in Venezuela and with Russia and Iran has escalated, but that doesn’t belie the statement above—it just makes it nearly meaningless. In real life, nobody’s going to pat you on the back for washing one car while totaling several others. [3]
“Above all, friend and foe alike must never doubt this Nation’s power and will to defend our people.”
Spoken like a true madman (Wikipedia).
“Eighteen years ago, terrorists attacked the USS Cole − and last month American forces killed one of the leaders of the attack.”
This statement is officially accepted as true, but is actually false: see How to Survive America’s Kill List by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone). [4]
The more unhinged Trump got, the less likely he was to be called out by the “liberal” media—they heartily believe in the same talking points, as doled out by the thought leaders at AIPAC, Brookings and so on.
“My Administration has acted decisively to confront the world’s leading state sponsor of terror: the radical regime in Iran. To ensure this corrupt dictatorship never acquires nuclear weapons, I withdrew the United States from the disastrous Iran nuclear deal. And last fall, we put in place the toughest sanctions ever imposed on a country.”
This paragraph is a work of art: nearly every non-filler word is mendacious. Iran is not the leading terror state—the U.S. is. Iran is not “radical”—it’s quite restrained. Iran is not a dictatorship (it has elections). Iran has never had a nuclear-weapons program. Iran has never broken any of its deals. It has submitted and conformed to the most draconian inspection regimes.
The U.S. has been crippling that country with sanctions for decades, relieved only partially and temporarily for a year or so during the Obama years.
Sanctions are war, clear and simple. They are a weapon of war directed at civilians, more devastating than most military weapons. In any sane world, levying such draconian sanctions on a country would be tantamount to contravening the Geneva Convention. [5]
“We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants death to America and threatens genocide against the Jewish people.”
Trump is throwing meat to the lions here: Democrats and Republicans alike eat this up with a spoon. This is the kind of stuff that will get Trump elected again, in a heartbeat. It’s wildly counterfactual—i.e. deeply disingenuous and out of context—but it fits squarely into the U.S. mythos.
The segue here is masterful, though: Trump moves on to denouncing Antisemitism—going out on quite a limb—and then to lauding the “greatest generation” with a stemwinder about concentration camps, liberation and general WWII fluff.
Trump—or his speechwriters—certainly knows how to take advantage of American myths and which buttons to press. He lays it on with a trowel: [6]
“Everything that has come since − our triumph over communism, our giant leaps of science and discovery, our unrivaled progress toward equality and justice − all of it is possible thanks to the blood and tears and courage and vision of the Americans who came before.”
What person in their right mind would denounce him for supporting any of those things? It’s complete bullshit and I personally can call him on it, but my ability to support myself isn’t contingent on monetizing this blog.
However, the American left—and much of the media—are so anti-Trump that they will denounce him, no matter what he says. When he says things that they actual agree with, their knee-jerk response is to fly off the handle and tweet and twit about his madness.
They will disagree with him rather than just denounce him. When they’re forced to walk back their words, chastened by their handlers at organizations that butter their bread for them [7], they look stupid and untrustworthy.
Read the last few paragraphs in Obama’s, or Clinton’s voice; would it have sounded any different? No. It’s pure pablum, but it’s America’s favorite food—intellectually empty, mendacious and inspiring to the zombified.
According to the article, the guy to whom Trump is referring had already been killed at least twice—once in 2010 and once in 2012:
“For instance, in October 2010, news leaked that Fahd al Quso, a top Al Qaeda leader and suspect in the U.S.S. Cole bombing, had been killed by a drone strike in Waziristan. Two years later, he was reported killed again in a strike in Yemen.”
I’m not kidding, either. He continues in this vein for long minutes:
“we will proudly declare that we are Americans. We do the incredible. We defy the impossible. We conquer the unknown.This is the time to re-ignite the American imagination. This is the time to search for the tallest summit, and set our sights on the brightest star. This is the time to rekindle the bonds of love and loyalty and memory that link us together as citizens, as neighbors, as patriots.”
.
Literally any President of the U.S. would happily have read those parts of the speech. Meat to the lions.
Published by marco on 3. Feb 2019 22:22:33 (GMT-5)
I’d originally earmarked the article It’s Bernie Bitch! by Amber A’Lee Frost (The Baffler), but discovered that it’s been unpublished by the Baffler. They got cold feet that this level of endorsement was contrary to their charter as a certain type of organization—a type that is prohibited from expressing a political opinion.
Leave aside that it was clearly Lee’s opinion being expressed and not the magazine’s. It looks pretty gutless, on the surface. If you’re interested in the back-and-forth, Here’s the Pro-Bernie Sanders 2020 Op-Ed The Baffler Decided Its Readers Should No Longer See by Jake Johnson (Common Dreams) has a lot more detail. In the meantime, you can find the article at It’s Still Bernie by Amber A’Lee Frost (Jacobin).
Though I’m sure that there’s some substance to this whole affair, it’s indicative of a deeper sickness on the left: it can’t get out of it’s sanctimonious, virtue-signaling way to get anything done. Leftists used to be hardcore (think Che); now they’re a bunch of pussies who’ll offend themselves right out of the running for anything beyond PTA-board secretary.
Frost is one of the good ones, not afraid to speak her mind and put some damn skin in the game and some hard facts on the table. I’d noted the following quotations from her excellent cri de coeur.
On the continuation of an older awfulness that differs mildly from ® to (D) and back again, she wrote,
“Despite all the #Resistance hysteria, for the time being, the majority of the electorate hasn’t seen the sort of plummet in quality of life that inspires droves of voters to cast a ballot for Anyone But Trump. The Donald hasn’t actually deviated that much from the neoliberal trajectory of his predecessors (remember, Obama shot tear gas at the border too), and you can’t expect people who don’t spend all day on Twitter to feel that motivated to combat what is essentially the gradual continuation of previous administrations’ policies. (Hell, he’s already more anti-war than Obama was.) (Emphasis added.)”
This is already too much of broadside against too many pussyfooting allies to survive for long. It’s possible that it was less the wholehearted endorsement of Sanders and more the unflattering comparison of darling Obama to Trump, policy-wise, that earned Frost opprobrium and banishment from published pages.
She went on,
“And even if we could get a President Gillibrand in 2020, another lukewarm Democratic presidency will not only further impoverish and destabilize the working class and its suffering institutions, it will also all but guarantee that 2024 brings us POTUS Hamburglar in an SS uniform. No, it’s Bernie or bust. I don’t care if we have to roll him out on a hand truck and sprinkle cocaine into his coleslaw before every speech. If he dies mid-run, we’ll stuff him full of sawdust, shove a hand up his ass, and operate him like a goddamn muppet. (Again, emphasis added.)”
Frost is doing her best to electrify the “resistance” with a wake-up call that they might be able to hear. Watching the parade of hopefuls trundled out so far (Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, … ), it’s clear that the lesson of Hillary in 2016 either has been forgotten or was never learned.
Frost finished up with,
“If you have strayed, all is forgiven, but you better come to Jesus right now because memory is long, and history judges the cowardly squish far more harshly than the honest enemy. And you can’t say that no one was there at the time to tell you that this was it—this was the pivotal moment where you had to make the right choice. (Emphasis added.)”
Given the content of the article—it’s a rallying cry—it’s disheartening but all-too predictable that it was published then banned by one left-leaning magazine and then republished by a slight-more-left-wing-but-with-worrying-holes-on-South-American-foreign-policy [1] magazine.
It’s indicative that the left has painted itself into a corner guarded by rabid ideologues who don’t care who gets hurt—only that their virtue is signaled, that they feel justified, that they feel right, no matter the actual repercussions for anyone, including those that they purport to be defending.
Just off the top of my head, there’s a very easy way to torpedo Sanders.
The Democrats or Republicans can start now. They both have an interest in a kill switch for Bernie. The Democrats used it last time, but expended considerable goodwill and political capital in the process. It’s very possible that they not only lost the 2016 election because of those acts, but have ruined their chances at 2020.
Bernie should run as an independent, but that’s beside the point.
I got distracted. Back to the plan.
Get an agent into Bernie’s inner circle. Choose an attractive girl. Relatively well-spoken. Rabidly right-wing, but capable of hiding it.
In December of 2019, have her reveal relatively mild things that will sound horrific to the right ears. They talked down to her. Made unsafe spaces. Complimented her. Held the door for her. Touched her hair, however inadvertently. Maybe Bernie did them. Maybe someone who works for him. Maybe a mix. Either way, he’s culpable.
Bye, bye, Bernie.
We have set up a world in which this could happen all too easily. No-one will ask or care whether it’s true until much later, after which Sanders will have missed his chance again. By 2024, he’ll be a shambolic old man, capable of muttering only conspiracy theories that are entirely true, as he wanders the ruins of an America that has endured not only 8 years of Trump rule but the 40 years of institutional neglect that preceded it.
Only a true monster like Trump can survive a system that works like this. And it was those that hate him the most who built it.
Jaconbin’s reporting on the right-wing takeover in Brazil was uneven to scandalous. They said nothing while one left-wing government after another was unfairly smeared (Lula) and unconstitutionally dumped (Dilma). In that case, they tripped over their uncertainty until they were more or less on the same line as the U.S. government, which provoked the slow-motion/soft coup in the first place. Because what else do you call destabilizing one government after another until you get to heartily approve of a right-wing ideologue getting elected?
They’re doing a bit better on Venezuela, but not much.
I’m honestly not sure how anyone with an ounce of journalistic self-respect can write an article like this non-ironically.
I wrote in the title, “because of course... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 8. Jan 2019 22:42:41 (GMT-5)
I’m not even going to do more than cite the article US Intelligence thinks Russia may have microwaved US embassies in Cuba, China by Sean Gallagher (Ars Technica).
I’m honestly not sure how anyone with an ounce of journalistic self-respect can write an article like this non-ironically.
I wrote in the title, “because of course they do”. I’m referring to the “analysts” who—after nearly a year—have decided that the Russians are to blame.
It is here that we should all become more adept at both thought experiments and analogies.
Try to put yourself in the shoes of the analysts, after one year of investigation.
The clock is ticking.
Shit is starting to roll downhill.
Your boss, at first sympathetic to the difficulty of the chore, can no longer run interference for you and your team.
He needs an answer.
Historically, just “an answer” was sufficient for everyone to keep their jobs, the pressure to go way down, and for perhaps promotions to be handed out.
You see, once there’s an answer that everyone can get behind, it becomes the truth. It doesn’t matter whether it’s easily deniable. The important thing is that the entire circle manages to avoid taking the blame for it and can smoothly promote themselves upwards in whatever hierarchies they’re interested in scaling.
All they need is a scapegoat.
And there’s Russia, in the corner.
In its Adidas shoes and jogging pants, smoking in a cupped palm, squatting and mumbling something incomprehensible into a knock-off Chinese iPhone.
He smells a bit of cologne and cabbage and no-one in the office likes him.
He’s taken the fall for so many other things.
You’d think people would no longer believe the lies we tell about him, but it’s just the opposite. The more we blame on him, the more we can blame on him. He’s like a breeder reactor for taking blame. It’s a chain reaction of sorts.
At the very end of the article is the expected “Update” that basically reverses everything else said in the article,
“The Washington Post reports skepticism about microwaves being the source of the symptoms among doctors and scientists, including some doctors who were critical of the initial JAMA report. University of Cincinnati neurologist Alberto J. Espay told the Post, “Microwave weapons is the closest equivalent in science to fake news.””
I’ve listened to some coverage of the Kavanaugh hearings on The Intercept. This includes an unusually giddy and convinced Jeremy Scahill and a typically partisan Amy Goodman.
What shines through is this notion that being blackout drunk (i.e. not... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 8. Jan 2019 22:40:36 (GMT-5)
I’ve listened to some coverage of the Kavanaugh hearings on The Intercept. This includes an unusually giddy and convinced Jeremy Scahill and a typically partisan Amy Goodman.
What shines through is this notion that being blackout drunk (i.e. not remembering parts of an evening) is an indication of alcoholism, or having a drinking problem. It’s also the sign of a really good party.
These people all sound like shrill churchgoers who can’t even bear to hear of a drinking game or bear to hear of the terminology used at parties. Poor Amy Goodman has to attend a Harvard College that allowed a group like “The Rapists” to exist on its hallowed grounds. It’s not a particularly funny joke, but it’s pretty clearly a joke.
Amy and Jeremy happily burble about how “old white guys” are likely to act and how believable it is that young guys at such a school would act that way. It sounds suspiciously like saying that someone is guilty of something because it sounds like “something a black guy would do”.
They even discuss how the hearing should be psychological torture (e.g. don’t let him take breaks, don’t let him gather his thoughts).
There is the question of Kavanaugh’s comportment, characterized as “white male rage”. As pointed out in the article You Mad, Bro? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) As with any other epithet, it’s a,
“[…] deliberate effort to create a stereotypical characteristic to be used as a tool to undermine any reaction by white males to attacks against them. It’s the same false shorthand that its users complain are wrongfully used, except flipped on its head for use against white guys.”
It saddens me to see Jeremy fall into this trap. I would have thought the open-minded could allow a bit of anger when responding to a rape accusation. Or an attempted-rape accusation. Or an attempted-harassment accusation.
On the same subject, Bloomberg published an article about Chinese spy chips. I read it. It consists of several claims by unnamed officials along with a heap of denials by everybody involved. The technical explanation of the hack and its potential effects was laughable.
This article is being taken as truth—despite Apple and Amazon having denied it emphatically several times. The article is unsourced and by a single, unknown journalist—this isn’t Seymour Hersh we’re talking about.
This is just another example of a fake-ass shitstorm raging over America, sure to disappear without a trace as soon as it slumps in a news cycle. The Kavanaugh hearings will also fade once he’s a justice, just as Clarence Thomas’s did. This, despite Jeremy and Amy’s fervent hopes that Thomas’s seat on the bench would be in danger should Kavanaugh be denied the post—as if that would establish some sort of retroactive precedent. I don’t like Clarence Thomas or his opinions, but that’s madness.
Greenwald makes some good points here, but he also points out the difference between Ford’s credible testimony vs. Kavanaugh’s explosion, saying no sane person could have come away not believing her testimony. I believe she believes it, but that’s neither here nor there. All else aside, is it not reasonable for someone to lose their composure when they are many times accused of rape? Especially if you accept that it’s possible that he didn’t do it? Or imagine that he didn’t do it, wouldn’t it be reasonable to lose your cool when your entire nomination starts to hinge on exactly that accusation instead of any of your other qualifications? Is this condemnation of Kavanaugh’s behavior not akin to chastising women for not being able to critique society without sounding “shrill”?
In the article Roaming Charges: Give Me Condos or Give Me Death! by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch), the author seems so certain as well.
I didn’t pay that much attention to the trial, but I can’t help but notice that the strongest believers keep coming back to the believability of Ford’s testimony, saying that,
“For most of the people who watched her, her story didn’t need any more corroboration.”
And that Kavanaugh had torpedoed himself,
“Kavanaugh’s petulant demeanor, lies and own writing from the time offered all the confirmation that was needed.”
The standard of evidence, though, is pretty low,
“Here’s a partial list of the more than 40 people with corroborating evidence that the FBI failed to interview, including a former Yale seminary student named Kenneth Appold, who told the New Yorker he is “one-hundred-per-cent certain” that he was told a drunken Kavanaugh shoved his penis in Deborah Ramirez’s face during a party in a Yale dorm room.”
Jesus, that’s rock-solid. I can’t believe that the guy’s not already in jail.
I’m not sure how many of us from the eighties would hold up to the argus-like scrutiny of the present day. The gaze is pitiless. It understands no nuance, no mistakes. It is like the church in the days of the Inquisition. I just spent some time reading through some of my papers from grade school, high school and college. I doodled a lot, I wrote a lot of notes in the margins. I wrote a lot of letters. I received a lot of letters. Many unenlightened things were written that have nothing to do with who I am today. Of that I am certain. It wouldn’t matter one bit, though, to the ravening masses.
Did you use the word “gay” as a slur, no matter how slight? You are homophobic. There is no way you could have changed your attitude in 30 further years of life. You must still answer for this thought-crime from days past.
I don’t defend Kavanaugh. From the little I’ve read, I admire nothing about him. I condemn the way he is being attacked. It is an attack of certainty with no requirement for evidence. It will backfire. It always does. First they came for Kavanaugh, and I said nothing…
The article Brett Kavanaugh and the Politics of Emotion-Shaming by Ted Rall addresses the hypocritical reaction to Kavanaugh’s 45-minute–long crying jag at his nomination hearings. Rall points out, quite rightly, that,
“Senator Elizabeth Warren, a progressive considering a 2020 presidential run, mirrored Trump’s description of Kavanaugh but for Dr. Ford: “brave, compelling, and credible.” Calling Kavanaugh “unhinged,” she said he “whined, ranted, raved, and spun conspiracy theories.” Praise versus contempt: the personal has never been more political. Had the roles been reversed, had Dr. Ford been the angry/weepy one, there is no world in which Warren would have described her as unhinged.”
Bereft of anything other than he-said/she-said (though many will imbue one or the other statement with more veracity based on “impressions” and “believability”), we’re left with an unsatisfying analysis of Kavanaugh’s behavior.
“Were Kavanaugh’s tears the frustrated, desperate expression of an innocent man falsely accused before his friends, family and an entire nation? Or, as one of detractors alleged, did he w[h]imper “because his past finally caught up with him and deep down, he knows it”? Could it be something in between, a blend of anger because some of the accusations are false and self-pity because others are true? We’ll probably never know what really happened at those high school and college parties.”
With political leanings reversed, Kavanaugh’s teary testimony would be lauded as the courage of a modern man trying to deal with the unfounded allegations of a steely harpy intent on taking him down, no matter what.
Crashing The Court: Kavanaugh and Consequences by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“Even if Kavanaugh was the perfect model of probity, he wouldn’t be my flavor of justice. Then again, neither would anyone else Trump might appoint, so I’ve long since come to grips with the fact that the newest member of the Nine wasn’t going to win my heart.
“[…]
“The question now is whether the Supreme Court, with Justice Kavanaugh and the “conservative” wing, can fulfill its constitutional function or has lost the trust of a nation.
“[…]
“You can spend your time hating Kavanaugh for being horrible. I prefer to spend my time fighting for good law. And as long as Justice Kavanaugh is on the Court, I will spend my time trying to persuade him to see the law my way rather than scream about how awful he is.”
On a final note, I know a lot of slang. I grew up at about the same time as Kavanaugh, went to college in America at about the same time. I have heard and spoken almost every slur and rude thing there is to say. I am nearly a human Urban Dictionary. I had never heard of a menage a trois referred to as “devil’s triangle” until this hearing. And yet, I keep reading that “everyone knows” that’s what it really means. Today I learned I’m not so hip, I guess.
This is the first time I’ve heard and read journalists that I admire getting bent out of shape about what I think are all the wrong things, losing their composure, as it were. Their demeanor is one of barely suppressed outrage that this ‘frat boy” could be nominated despite them knowing what a horrible person he is.
He seems to hold appalling positions, but we hardly heard about those. This felt like the witch hunt of Clinton all over again—focusing on his sexual predation rather than his systematic dismantling of the poor. Kavanaugh is a trained corporate stooge who will almost certainly smoothly fill Scalia’s shoes on the court. That’s the reason you don’t want him,
Unfortunately, you have to find reasons not to nominate him that are salient. The process doesn’t really allow for anything but this ludicrous circus that ended up proving nothing, other than that the U.S. is a ludicrous and dangerous country full of utter buffoons. It is a syphilitic captain lashed to the tiller and is careening toward our shores.
The discussion petered out quickly when someone posted a refutation from Meme Policeman. In fairness, it didn’t exactly refute the meme, but questioned its... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 8. Jan 2019 22:31:12 (GMT-5)
There was a meme posted to Reddit at How are we supposed to live? that discusses the costs of various features of life now vs. 40 years ago.
The discussion petered out quickly when someone posted a refutation from Meme Policeman. In fairness, it didn’t exactly refute the meme, but questioned its numbers and tried to put them into a better context.
I responded with the following comment,
It’s not just the cost of these things, but also the value obtained for the money.
While offering more information, the memepoliceman also does not state its facts clearly enough. For college costs, it includes inflation, but uses averages (as does the original meme). Is that the average cost charged? Or average cost paid? Also interesting would be to see the average amount of debt incurred or the cost of college relative to income or net worth. Breaking up into percentiles would also be illustrative of the meme’s point, I think [citation needed]. Obviously not useful for a meme.
It’s a complicated topic, made more so by asking what the paid-for value is for most people. 40 years ago, a bachelor’s degree was arguably worth more than it is today, as you were more likely able to support a family on a job obtained with such a degree [citation needed, I know]. What percentage do you use to indicate a degree that costs 2.5 times as much but gets you far less advantage than it used to?
The same rigor can be applied to all of the other topics (health care, housing, etc.):
]]>“[…] the history of US involvement in the Middle East has been one of consistent failure at least for the last 40 years. […] Reagan in Lebanon, 40 years... [More]”
Published by marco on 8. Jan 2019 20:50:14 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Jan 2019 21:47:04 (GMT-5)
The article Trump gets it (half) right by John Quiggin (Crooked Timber) is about Trump’s recent decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria. In it, he makes the following point:
“[…] the history of US involvement in the Middle East has been one of consistent failure at least for the last 40 years. […] Reagan in Lebanon, 40 years of failure on Israel-Palestine, failed confrontation on Iran, incoherent attempts to influence oil supplies, and, of course, the second Iraq War including the rise of ISIS).”
Pulling out of Syria doesn’t fix all of U.S. foreign policy: the U.S. is still criminally aggressive toward Iran, still funding Saudi Arabia and Israel in their colonial endeavors and still incoherent vis à vis Turkey.
That the U.S. foreign-policy establishment is angry about this is clear. That the purported left is lining up with them against Trump is a sign of the times. That pretty much everyone—the U.S. and European media, European governments, Republicans and Democrats—is against Trump is obvious: he’s endangering all of their best-laid, elite plans. He doesn’t know he’s doing this, but they do.
U.S. military involvement in Syria was always illegal. The U.S. is free to be involved non-militarily and should do so, e.g. to protect the Kurds. That even luminaries like Chomsky want the U.S. to stay in Syria is understandable, but not with its military. No good has ever come of it; I’m mystified how Chomsky could have said something like that. [1]
I agree that we should aid our Kurdish allies—especially if we’re serious about helping them carve out a much-deserved homeland from Iraq, Syria and Turkey, but not with the military. How would that even work? Has something like that ever worked medium- or long-term?
The article Will Trump Hold Firm on Syrian Pullout? by Patrick Buchanan (Antiwar.com) agrees that “the real losers” are
“[c]ertainly the Kurds, who lose their American ally. Any dream they had of greater autonomy inside Syria, or an independent state, is not going to be realized. But then, that was never really in the cards. (Emphasis added.)”
Buchanan may have a lot of bad opinions, but he’s 100% right about U.S. aims. The U.S. has been using the Kurds for decades. Buchanan’s just being honest—sure, he’s a jerk, but he’s less of a jerk than all of the others who pretend that the U.S. was ever going to do anything to help them.
He goes on to explain the realpolitik that led to America’s choosing Turkey over the Kurds. Interestingly, Bolton’s aims of being militarily aggressive toward Iran and Hezbollah has been undercut by Trump’s move. This is a good thing, as well. That Israel’s empirical aims in Syria are undercut is also a good thing.
It sounds obvious, but: How else are we going to get out of the Middle East if we never leave?
The Black Agenda Radio, Week of December 24, 2018 (Black Agenda Report) includes a segment “BAP Welcomes Trump Exit from Syria”, which is an interview of Ajamu Baraka by Glen Ford. They discuss not only the Syrian withdrawal but also U.S. military involvement in Africa (AFRICOM).
The article Trump’s Abrupt Withdrawal From Syria Might Provide Exactly the Anarchic Conditions in Which ISIS has Always Flourished by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch) provides some more background on the exact worries people have.
“The Syrian Kurdish leadership will be hoping that the US will not totally abandon them. They know that much of the US political, military and media establishment, along with allies like the UK and France, want the US to stay in Syria. They know that Mr Trump’s policies have been diluted or reversed before when facing such wide-ranging opposition.”
Why is Turkey slaughtering Kurds a foregone conclusion? No sanctions? They’re talking about attacking in Syria, just like Israel does, contravening international law.
“So long as Turkey, Russia and Iran are working in coordination, it will be difficult for Mr Trump to pursue his principle policy in the Middle East, which is to isolate and confront Iran.”
Jesus isn’t that a good thing?
“Its fighters have suffered devastating casualties. Isis no longer rules a state with a powerful army controlling, at its height, some 6 or 7 million people.”
Why do we care so much about Isis? Is the war on terror an accepted fact now? This sounds like Vietnam to me—there’s always a reason to stay or to go back.
“Isis has always wished that its great array of enemies, called into being by its cruelty and violence, would one day turn on each other and once again create the conditions for an Isis resurgence. This may now be happening. A Turkish invasion of northern Iraq would lead to chaos, mass flight by millions, and conflict between the local Kurdish and Arab populations: it is in such anarchic conditions that Isis was born and has always flourished.”
I’m surprised to read Cockburn describing Isis like a host of locusts interested only in destruction—like the bugs in Starship Troopers. He speaks as if they are a special kind of evil—somehow more evil than the myriad carpet and “surgical” bombings from Western planes.
The following two articles also contribute to the conversation meaningfully, I think.
How the War Party Lost the Middle East by Patrick J. Buchanan (Antiwar.com)
“We are told ISIS is not dead but alive in the hearts of tens of thousands of Muslims, that if we leave Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over and our friends will be massacred, and that if we stop helping Saudis and Emiratis kill Houthis in Yemen, Iran will notch a victory. In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, Trump enraged our foreign policy elites, though millions of Americans cannot get out of there soon enough.”
Trump’s Syrian Withdrawal: an Act of Political Realism by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch)
“The resignation of Mattis has elicited predictable lamentations from commentators who treat his departure as if it was the equivalent of the Kaiser getting rid of Bismarck. The over-used description of Mattis as “the last of the adults in the room” is once again trotted out, though few examples of his adult behaviour are given aside from his wish – along with other supposed “adults” – to stay in Syria until various unobtainable objectives were achieved: the extinction of Iranian influence; the displacement of Bashar al-Assad; and the categorical defeat of Isis”
“Keep in mind that Trump needs – though he may not get as much as he wants – Turkey as an ally in the Middle East more than ever before. His bet on Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Saudi Arabia as the leader of a pro-American and anti-Iranian Sunni coalition in the Middle has visibly and embarrassingly failed. The bizarre killing of Jamal Khashoggi by a Saudi team in Istanbul was only the latest in a series of Saudi pratfalls showing comical ineptitude as well as excessive and mindless violence.”
But Turkey slaughtering Kurds is OK.
“[…] but as the Syrian state becomes more powerful it will have less need for foreign allies.”
Isn’t it pretty much a war-torn hellhole? How powerful can it get in the near-term, realistically?
Risen circumlocutes into a summation that says that the Russians almost certainly didn’t do anything worthwhile, but that they... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 6. Jan 2019 23:02:25 (GMT-5)
Is RussiaGate a giant pile of smoke? Just listen to two defenders of it, James Risen and Jane Bradley [1] in this video CIJ Logan 2018: Collusion or the New McCarthyism? by CIJ (Vimeo).
Risen circumlocutes into a summation that says that the Russians almost certainly didn’t do anything worthwhile, but that they tried real hard to do something, even if that something can’t be proved. He backs off considerably on the main RussiaGate accusations, although he is a stickler for terminology. It’s just that this attention to detail is kind of the noose on which he swings: he says that collusion isn’t a legal term. That’s true, but it’s a cudgel he uses to get attack people he finds unsavory. [2]
Jane Bradley is even worse. She ends up saying that the reason Russia got away with meddling in Brexit was that Great Britain was too afraid to say anything because they didn’t want to jeopardize their economic relationship with Russia. As we say in German, “bin ich im falschen Film?” This would be the same Great Britain that positively blew up the Skripal case? The same Great Britain that has participated in crippling sanctions on Russia with the U.S. since 2014? But in the case of election-meddling for the Brexit vote, Great Britain was suddenly afraid of offending Russia?
She cites that Teresa May even said that she wasn’t investigating because she “didn’t want to jeopardize GB/Russian international relations”. For Jane, “it doesn’t get more black and white than that.”
Let’s accept that May said this. Let’s also ignore that Jane probably slashes May to bits for nearly everything else she says and does (as do most other British reporters), but that this one nugget is the truffle snuffled out by May.
However, don’t politicians sometimes say things they don’t mean? What if May thought the whole case was a load of bollocks and her security staff agreed, but the public was dead-set on following it to the end (probably due to goading from journalists like Bradley)? What would she say then? Her ratings are already in the toilet; is she going to come right out and erase the last few remaining percent by insulting the British public’s opinion outright? What can she say instead? Ah, she could say that she’s trying to keep the peace with an economic partner that will continue to trade with them after Brexit is implemented. That should keep them quiet.
I’m not saying that this is necessarily the case. I have as little proof as Bradley for her viewpoint. But Bradley uses May’s statement to prove her allegations when the statement can’t possibly be trusted that far.
Jane, you should probably remove that plank from your platform. It makes no sense at all.
Mary Dejevsky [3], of the Independent, does a much more sane job of refuting Bradley’s case. She discusses how the intelligence services in Britain are hip-deep in the whole affair. She mentions that the Skripal case was taken from local police within hours.
Glenn Greenwald’s defense after all of this is to point out—Chomsky-like—that we allow ourselves to be massively distracted by what we think the Russians might be up to, when (A) we’re having a devil of a time proving Russian efficacy and (B) we have our hand in the same cookie jar.
“We’re American and British, so there’s a tendency to view things from an American or British perspective. So when we hear that Russia’s doing something bad to our countries, we clap and cheer. And we’re much less interested in the things that we’ve actually been doing to the rest of the world, including the Russians.”
“I say that, again, not to say that we do it and, therefore, it’s OK that the Russians do it. But the question of ‘how can we stop this?’ necessarily requires us to examine our own conduct that contributes to it. Even though it’s not as fun and doesn’t lead to as much patriotic cheering. Because we helped create a framework in which the Internet is now a weapon to intrude into the affairs of other countries. And the US and UK use it very aggressively against Russia and other countries.”
And we’re doing it much more and have been meddling in elections much longer and much more effectively than Russia has. For fuck’s safe, we practically single-handedly got Yeltsin elected in 1996. This is documented, not just alleged. We were proud of it. We trumpeted it on major magazine covers, like Time. We helped topple Ukraine, right on Russia’s doorstep. But Russia’s the bad guy and we should stop them, right? This is not to say that Russia’s not doing anything, but they’re ineffective and they are pikers compared to us.
Glenn points out that the RussiaGate scandal has moved from saying that
“[…] Trump participated in the hacking. And the reason I mention it is that we’ve now shifted away from that to what Jim described—I think more-or-less accurately—which is that the Trump campaign was interested in receiving information that they thought would be harmful to their political opponent, Hillary Clinton.”
Jim completely ends up mischaracterizing all of Glenn’s arguments—literally seconds after he just made them. He just reiterates his beliefs that he just cares more about it, as an American. Risen answers a question later, saying “the evidence is growing that it did happen”. This belies his previous statements where he showed that the original charges have been considerably weakened.
A guy at the end asked a very good question about how Risen is absolutely hounding on the RussiaGate thing, but there are several mechanisms contributing to election-tampering, chief among them being gerrymandering. That, in fact, within a few decades a large majority of Americans will be represented by only 40 Senators in 20 states.
Risen responds that things used to suck even worse democratically and that America has always been unequal. Thanks for playing, Jim. You’re exactly right, but that’s not answering the guy’s question. He wants to know why we should give a shit about the potential .02% swing of Russian meddling [4] when gerrymandering is changing the shape of our government by several orders of magnitude more.
But why do we all need jobs? To stay busy?
Jobs are a means whereby the needs of a society are provided by its members. People have certain needs in order to... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 2. Jan 2019 20:43:17 (GMT-5)
You’ll very often hear politicians, pundits and pretty much everyone talk about “jobs” as the be-all, end-all of the economy.
But why do we all need jobs? To stay busy?
Jobs are a means whereby the needs of a society are provided by its members. People have certain needs in order to survive—food and shelter being two of them. We’ll get to others later. A society is filled with people, each of whom need food and shelter.
Let’s imagine the beginning: each member fending for itself. There is no need for an economy, no need for trade in this world. Each member has the exact same jobs as every other member: to find food and shelter.
If you don’t, you die—either from starvation or from the elements.
But already we see that each individual won’t be fending for itself. Parents will fend for their children until those children can fend for themselves.
Already, we see groups forming. Some members are willing to do jobs for other members because of an emotional bond.
This group grows larger than just the nuclear family. It encompasses not only children but parents (the grandparents of one’s children). Perhaps the group grows more—but at some point, the ability of one or more individuals to provide the needs for all other members is stretched to the limit.
At that point, the extended clan will likely group up with other extended clans who are feeling the pinch, as well. They form a tribe. Together, they are able to use means of obtaining food and shelter that exceeds what they were each able to do individually. [1] This partnership improves things for everyone.
In such a society, what is a job? Everyone does what they can so that the tribe survives. Older people tell stories and warn about stuff they’ve seen that no-one else has (e.g. rattlesnakes); children learn to be able to take their parents’ place; some hunt; some gather; some farm. This is simplified, but such a society doesn’t really need money or trade or jobs.
The story is also still only about survival That’s the goal of this society, so far.
Other goals will follow, presumably—though it’s not really clear what those goals are, is it? Does our society really have bigger goals than survival and propagating itself? Sometimes, it seems that “jobs” is a goal, but that doesn’t sound right, does it?
Upon reaching a certain size—and having increasingly lower emotional bonds between members—the issue of fairness arises. Fairness is hardly a problem in smaller groups: a parent will take care of a child, a sibling will care for a weaker sibling.
Maybe some members are perceived as “not pulling their weight”. A tribe with any morals will want to measure this feeling rather than just go with its gut. How can this be measured?
Also, there are certain things that people would like to have, but that the tribe is not willing to grant (e.g. a certain spouse, a larger house, a nicer weapon, etc.) Other members are pulling their weight and more—and want to be recognized for it.
In other words, how does the tribe confer status? When can a member stop contributing during a day? When is enough enough? If everyone decides for themselves, then there is a risk—nay, a likelihood—that things go to hell quite quickly. The amount contributed by each has to be coordinated so that the society’s goals continue to be satisfied.
There is also the notion of resiliency: to what degree should the tribe plan for the future? How much work should it invest now in order to be able to handle possible, extraordinary situations, like a drought or a storm or a flood?
Who decides all of these things? Who decides how much of each person’s skill should be exercised per day? How much of the fruits of that person’s labor should be stored? How can the tribe compare the different labor and outputs? What about trading with other tribes? How does that even work?
At some point, there has to be a quantification of contributions. That’s what we call money. What you do in order to obtain money is called a job.
Do you see how money comes up as a way of being able to compare the labor of teaching children vs. hunting for food vs. maintaining lore that will protect the future of the tribe? It’s a means to an end, not the end itself. It’s the same with jobs: the labors must be performed regardless, or the tribe—society—collapses.
With more and more—and more—people, there always have to be more jobs for them all. Why? Well, because the fairness question comes up more and more. Why would some people have to work for their money whereas others don’t? Just because their labor isn’t required means they get to cruise along without working?
Well, why not? Why would we create labor where there is no need for it? Psychologically, there is a danger of a split between those who work for the tribe and those who do not. This is dangerous and must be managed. Giving everybody a job is one way of managing that. But it’s a crude mechanism.
When the tribe gets really big, you have to get fancy in order to create more jobs. That’s when you start to create needs and desires in people so that they want to pay for labor that wouldn’t otherwise be necessary. That’s the core of our consumerist society.
To make any sense, each job must be associated with a different amount of money in a way that the tribe thinks is fair. You can see that our societies do a terrible job of associating money with usefulness to the tribe. It’s almost perfectly inverted. The most dispensable labors like acting in films, playing sports and managing finances are remunerated the most. The most indispensable labors like nursing, farming and teaching are remunerated the worst.
There are those even lower on the totem pole: criminals and malcontents, for whom the tribe finds positions that don’t pay at all—slave labor.
This is also assuming that jobs are the only way to allocate resources. The concept seems sound—it’s considered a law of nature by most—but maybe it could be mixed with other concepts, like acknowledging that when a tribe has more than enough to go around, it can afford to let some members be idle, either because they’re incapable of contributing or because there’s nothing to do.
That is, a society as advanced as ours has a tremendous amount of resources—more than enough to provide everyone’s basic needs. But the allocation strategy envisioned by money and jobs doesn’t anticipate what to do in this situation. It just drives mindlessly forward on the path dictated by its
simplistic programming. A more enlightened society would consider discarding its simplistic model for a more sophisticated one that matches the more-evolved and wealthy situation.
The problem, of course, is that the “jobs” model put not only all of the money, but all of the power with it, into the hands of a small elite. The tribe is split, quite literally, between the haves (more than enough to survive without a job) and have-nots (barely able to survive, even with a job).
What most politicians really mean when they say we need jobs, is that if people think they need to have jobs and there are actually jobs available, then people can be convinced to blame themselves when they’re still poor relative to the elites.
Unwilling to embrace a new paradigm, most politicians—even people, in general—make little to no distinction between what kind of jobs society needs. These jobs are there not to provide actual value for either the laborer or the tribe, but to fool everyone into not pulling back the curtain on the inverted remuneration strategy outlined above. In essence, it’s a way of guilting those who’ve contributed a large percentage of what they have (the have-nots) into thinking that they’ve still not done enough.
A job is a means to an end: providing the basic needs for all of its members. While jobs were a good way to do this for a long time, it’s no longer clear that they are even a good way, anymore. At least, not in the manner that the concept has been manipulated by the elites.
Maybe there’s another way to provide the necessary services for all members. In a society as large as ours, those services have expanded from food and shelter—survival—to include medical care (also survival) but also education. Why education? Why, so you can get a better job, of course! We need to be informed. Why? So that we are good citizens and can elect “good” leaders and move society forward…toward what? We still haven’t seen any goal beyond mere survival.
But even without examining what the actual goals of our society are, we can still see that “jobs” is a primitive concept that should be re-examined in light of current conditions (tremendous wealth and resources). Once we’ve got everyone sorted again—as we had in the beginning—we can think more clearly about what the hell we’re actually trying to accomplish with all of this activity. If we’re trying to accomplish anything at all, beyond mere survival.
This video poses a few interesting questions about the state of the world. The two presenters argue that we should be less pessimistic about certain features of global society. For example, extreme poverty and deaths by natural disaster have all gone down significantly. There is almost global... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 25. Dec 2018 10:29:48 (GMT-5)
This video poses a few interesting questions about the state of the world. The two presenters argue that we should be less pessimistic about certain features of global society. For example, extreme poverty and deaths by natural disaster have all gone down significantly. There is almost global parity between men and women on number of years of schooling. These are all good things.
However, they seem to play fast and loose with some statistics. They use the statistics about people in extreme poverty to argue that inequality is going down, but that’s a pretty narrow view of it. It’s not just about whether more people have enough money to survive, but what kind of influence do those people have over their own condition. Perhaps we just have a society where the labor class/zoo animals are being slightly better-fed to keep them from starving to death or from banging on the bars too loudly. If they would have shown global wealth or income distribution, it would have told a far less upbeat story.
Similarly, they happily burble on about how we can use these advancements and improvements to extrapolate forward into a rosy future—completely ignoring the ongoing and accelerating climate crisis. How is it even possible for purportedly intelligent people like this to present simplistic linear-progression models that ignore gigantic influencing factors like climate change or another financial collapse due to extreme inequality? The younger guy extrapolated twenty years into the future without blinking an eye.
On rape and the conversation about rape by Sohaila Abdulali (This is Hell)
]]>“I never forgot what happened to me. I wouldn’t... [More]”
Published by marco on 24. Dec 2018 11:51:59 (GMT-5)
I just listened to this interview with Sohaila Abdulali, the author of the book What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape. This is an incredibly lucid, pragmatic, sensitive and occasionally funny interview.
On rape and the conversation about rape by Sohaila Abdulali (This is Hell)
“I never forgot what happened to me. I wouldn’t say I ‘got over’ it, in the same sense I wouldn’t say I ‘got over’ the fact that my father died. Both of those things are awful, but here I am. I figured it out. I feel bad sometimes, and often I don’t. I’m not quite sure why we put rape in this entirely separate category − and then even as I say that, I realize it IS in a separate category, because it’s this complicated issue.”
It’s 47 minutes long and well-worth your time.
Published by marco on 21. Sep 2018 15:24:39 (GMT-5)
At first, YouTube stopped bringing certain subscribed content into newsfeeds – unless you explicitly marked that subscription as “show all content”. Shows like Redacted Tonight weren’t exactly being suppressed, but they weren’t being promoted in the same way that much-more mainstream content was being promoted. However, if people simply browse the next item suggested by Google, slack-jawed and dull-eyed, then it amounts to suppression, in the end.
Now, YouTube/Google is plastering warnings on certain videos, as shown below.
There’s a feedback button, so I wrote the following:
Constructive criticism: please allow me to dispatch the warning (i.e. “don’t show again”).
Actual criticism: don’t show the warning at all. It is is not your place to police people’s sources.
You’ve got to be kidding me with this “warning”.
Why don’t you just go whole hog and write that Lee Camp is a paid mouthpiece for the FSB and is seeking to destroy everything that is good and noble about the grand American dream that has allowed a glorious entity like Google to govern what people can and can’t watch on the Internet? Maybe add that Lee won’t stop until Russia’s jackboot is across the trachea of every American, choking off the drawn breath of a nobler, kinder race, leaving us with only the steel-grey vision of Communist homogeneity and conformity and vague memories of how glorious things once were?
I think that’s got a better ring to it.
It’s completely untrue, though, to be clear.
It is, in fact, the exact opposite of what Lee’s doing, but go ahead and mark his videos as propaganda anyway. It’s not like any of us can stop you. Lee is on RT because no-one in America will hire him. This is for the same reason that you’re marking his videos with little “might be Russian propaganda” labels: American media is a strictly controlled ideological landscape that brooks no dissent, especially in directions that might even tangentially affect the business model of our corporate masters.
This is not allowed because he copped to sexual-harassment allegations less than a year ago. He is a pariah and has been ostracized for it. That is his punishment. It’s unclear... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. Sep 2018 22:58:40 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 18. Sep 2018 14:24:24 (GMT-5)
Louis C.K. did 15 minutes at a stand-up club last week. The audience seemed to like it. They gave him a standing ovation.
This is not allowed because he copped to sexual-harassment allegations less than a year ago. He is a pariah and has been ostracized for it. That is his punishment. It’s unclear how long this is to last, but one year is definitely not enough.
There was never a ruling and his exile was more-or-less self-imposed, but it’s been made very clear that he should never be allowed to work or be heard again.
Anyone who laughed at his jokes is a misogynist.
John McCain finally succumbed to brain cancer a couple of weeks back. The media have supplied one encomium after another for this grand old man’s great career. Barack Obama attended his funeral. He did not attend Aretha Franklins’ (it’s unclear whether he was invited, though).
Anyone who points out that McCain was a war-mongering, raving madman is a traitor. Instead, you’re only allowed to endlessly quote McCain’s daughter’s speech at his funeral like it means anything that his daughter thinks he was a great guy. According to WTF? Why Adulate this Warmonger? by Gary Leupp (CounterPunch), that’s what everybody who’s anybody thinks, too.
“However moving this spectacle is, it is fundamentally sick. That this particular man, with his particular history, gets suddenly thrust into the public face and promoted as national icon even by the likes of Sanders and Ocasio-Chavez is a virtual declaration of national moral bankruptcy. [1]
“[…]
“McCain never saw a war he didn’t like. He regretted not winning the war in Vietnam—like some Nazi pilots no doubt regretted their failure to destroy Stalingrad in their 30,000 (heroic?) sorties over the city in 1942. He advocated U.S. intervention in any number of conflicts as a matter of imperialist entitlement; he shameless articulated American Exceptionalism—but then so did Obama and all this unified cohort rallying to glorify this thug.”
The article The McCain Death Tour Reaches Its Imperial Apotheosis by Paul Street (CounterPunch) continues,
“Has there ever been a public high-imperial church-and-state ritual more nauseating than the nationally televised (on CBS, FBC, ABC, WGN, FOX, CSPAN, CNN, HLN, MSNBC, FNC, FBN) funeral of the mad dog killer and longtime Roman-, I mean US-Senatorial warmonger John McCain? I suppose there has, but I am hard-pressed to remember it.”
Yes. When Nixon and Reagan died, there was just as ludicrous a hagiography of those criminal’s careers. It’s just something that the empire does.
We focus on manageable outrage, on localized crimes and the criminals who perpetrate them. We feel good when we exact justice on them.
The real criminals smirk as we expend our energy on issues that are meaningless in the face of the real problems we have.
Eight (or is it five now? Four?) people/families own more than half the world.
Much of what matters in people’s lives is in the hands of corporations larger and richer than most countries (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Apple. Apple and Amazon have both, at least briefly, achieved trillion-dollar market capitalization. They sit on cash reserves that could solve world hunger multiple times over. They took their tax cut and made their money pile bigger.
Wolfgang Shäuble still more or less runs Europe. He’s caused more misery and suffering with his financial policies than Louis C.K.
Dick Cheney’s got yet another new heart (or something like that) and he’s going to live forever. Healthier than ever. He’s been wreaking havoc for decades.
George Bush has a best-selling book, is a terrible painter, an overpaid speaker and is besties with Michelle Obama.
Henry Kissinger is still alive and on the loose.
Obama has exorbitant speaking fees and a venture-capital fund to keep him busy. Also, polishing his Nobel Peace Prize.
Nearly everyone in charge of anything ignores impending climate collapse in favor of promulgating a growth economy for short-term gain—even though to do so nearly ensure that there will be no viable medium- or long-term.
The list goes on and on.
We have run out of ideas and energy and have long since lost our moral compass and capacity for useful outrage.
But let’s all pile on the people who laughed at Louis C.K.‘s jokes.
Once we’ve taken care of them, everything will be all right.
“[…] the “Democratic Socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Chavez tweets “represents an unparalleled example of human decency and American service.””
]]>“We’re talking about revolution, by the way – we’re talking about the overthrow [2] of the corporate state. Because these people are going to kill us, and they’re... [More]”
Published by marco on 7. Sep 2018 22:32:20 (GMT-5)
This is taken from Chris Hedges, “America: The Farewell Tour” (1h 12m) by Chris Hedges (YouTube), a truly excellent talk Hedges gave at a bookstore in New York. [1]
“We’re talking about revolution, by the way – we’re talking about the overthrow [2] of the corporate state. Because these people are going to kill us, and they’re going to kill my children.
“And, in the end, these corporate forces have us, they have us by the throat – and they have my kids by the throat. And I don’t know if we’re going to win – I don’t even know if we’re going to survive as a species.
“But in the end, I don’t fight fascism because I’ll win. I fight fascists because they are fascists.
“And that moral—almost religious—quality is one that we have to embrace, what Niebuhr calls “sublime madness”. That understanding that radical evil must be opposed, even if everything around us says that we will fail.
“And, when we find that [radical evil], and we have the courage to stand up and defy it, we may not win in an ultimate sense, but we will be free.”
Amen, Chris, amen.
(1h 12m)
]]>“This isn’t how the law works, how courts work, how the process works. It’s really... [More]”
Published by marco on 7. Sep 2018 22:27:43 (GMT-5)
From the article, The Constitution Will Survive, If We Deserve It by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice), which attempts to address the absolutely hyperbolic and absurd hysteria surrounding Kavanaugh’s inevitable nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“This isn’t how the law works, how courts work, how the process works. It’s really quite absurd. Worse than absurd, it feeds the craziness and ignorance that makes people hysterical about the future, that there is no hope. The solution to Trump isn’t to rewrite the Constitution, to attack another sitting circuit judge who doesn’t reflect your, or my, jurisprudential views. The solution is to win elections by having a platform and belief system that doesn’t exclude the majority of this nation from being allowed to have a voice, to thrive, to feed their kids and to hope for a better future. (Emphasis added.)”
Think of your own culture, of the many idioms, historical events and nuances of language that influence your quotidian actions. Think of how... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 1. Sep 2018 12:12:48 (GMT-5)
“How can those people not know how things work here? How can they abandon and/or endanger their children?How can they not know they’re going to get caught?”
Think of your own culture, of the many idioms, historical events and nuances of language that influence your quotidian actions. Think of how much work it is to know implicitly what is possible and what isn’t, what is acceptable, how things are done. Many of our cultural idiosyncrasies blossom from large or small events in the past, spreading like kudzu over everything we do, until no-one can even remember how a particular custom got started—only that it’s a super-important that we continue doing it.
Comedian Demetri Martin pointed out in a recent special that’s it’s not appropriate to walk around with poop in a plastic bag—unless you have a dog. Another example: Our bathroom rituals are sacrosanct and everyone else is crazy—even though we’re the ones eliminating into multiple liters of perfectly good drinking water and then cleaning up with dry sheets of paper instead of soap and water. We’re the ones who’ve built an enormously expensive sewer system that can accommodate our idiosyncratic approach to waste.
These kinds of social habits can be learned relatively quickly, though. You can pick them up within a year or so. But there are so many things that can’t be learned so easily, features of the cultural landscape that are rooted in cataclysmic events that may or may not have even happened in the way that a culture remembers it. These are the deep myths of a culture that suffuse everything. The truth of such events—the actual details or the reasons behind them—doesn’t matter. What matters is that the culture has taken these details to heart, wrapping the sand grain of the initial event in the many-layered, ennobling nacre of cultural indoctrination.
What chance does an immigrant have of understanding these things in the same way that a native does? Perhaps they can grasp it eventually, but the form of understanding will still be different—and will likely be mimicked rather than felt in the same way. At a certain point, the difference won’t matter anymore, but the process takes decades.
Consider an immigrant to the U.S: how can this arrogant alien have never heard of 9/11? That event is the Yucatán meteor that annihilated and transformed American culture, didn’t it? How can anyone not have heard about it, much less not respect it as the most important thing that’s ever happened to any tribe, ever? What about the Holocaust? WWII? All of these events shape the American in the 21st century.
But it’s extremely possible for other people in other countries to have never heard of them. Why should they care? We certainly don’t care about the giant events that impacted their cultures. We don’t even think that anything significant has really happened to any culture other than America—even when we’re the perpetrators.
For example, though most Americans would say that the U.S. retaliated against Afghanistan for 9/11, most of the people living in that country have no idea what that even is. They don’t know anything about American history or myths—just like Americans don’t know (or care) anything about Afghan history or myths. Afghans are forced to learn American myths in order to try to make sense of what is happening to them.
Most of Southeast Asia has been severely impacted and bent by the warping effects of relatively recent US wars. Hell, the Middle East, too. That continues to this day. Immigrants from these countries are shaped by completely different world-views.
Russians are terrified of being invaded—because it’s happened so many times. They’re terrified of sweeping cultural change, as well. Again, because it’s happened two times—for many, in their lifetimes—something that we can’t even imagine having happened once. The first time everything went to hell fo the ruling class and got better for most people briefly, before the pendulum swung the other way again. Then, in the 90s, the pendulum fell right off the clock and a new ruling class seized an iron grip like it’s never had before.
Syrians, Iragis, Libyans, Eritreans, Somalis—the list goes on—they all have far bigger fish to fry than to lend reverence to an isolated attack on a US city that killed fewer than 3000 people. For Americans, it’s on every second T-shirt sold at Wal-Mart—for everyone else, it’s a Wikipedia entry (and no-one knows what Wal-Mart is).
Well, then, how dare they try to immigrate to the U.S. if they can’t even respect American culture? If they can’t even be bothered to learn how things work in the country they want to live in?
Again, a bit of imagination helps. Imagine that your life in your home country is so intolerable that your best bet is to leave. [1] You can’t support your family, you have no food, no water, no shelter, no prospects. Imagine your life is like standing in the window of a burning building, on an upper floor, say the fifth. You’d have to jump, wouldn’t you? Or just die right there. [2]
Remember those people on the World Trade Center in 2001, who were much, much higher up? Even Americans will jump when things get bad enough.
No, don’t veer off into believing that 9/11 was different. It’s different to you, but has no significance for everyone else.
It’s like when a family member dies: it’s devastating for you, but you can’t even expect the people who live down the street to care so much that they do more than send a card. They’re still going to binge-watch something on Netflix that evening. People don’t sit shiva for every single person in the world. Mourning and pity don’t scale.
Which brings us back to those ignorant immigrants at the airport, trying to get into your country without even knowing how things work.
Imagine you’re so desperate that you’ve jumped. You’re going to land somewhere—somewhere you don’t know the customs, the language—where you don’t know anything at all. A five-year–old is more at home than you are.
Imagine you’re walking in a foreign city with no cultural touchstones at all—they don’t have sidewalks, no traffic signs, you can’t read a damned thing, you can’t ask anyone for help, you don’t even know what food and drink looks like or how to obtain them. Maybe money works differently and you don’t have any, anyway.
Think of this the next time you see asylum-seeking refugees walking the streets of some small town or even a large city. We just assume that they’re grateful to be able to share our paradise with us. Instead they spend their entire day assaulted by alienness. Their home country—the one they had learned and knew—is gone, replaced with a living nightmare. This alien country is the best choice they have and it still feels wrong, every day. And they have to fight tooth and nail to be able to stay where they feel vaguely or distinctly uncomfortable because going back “where they came from” is far, far worse.
Can you understand now why they might just “hang out with their own kind”?
That’s pretty extreme, so maybe there are some cultural touch-points. They’ve been in an airport before; they know what a restaurant is. But everything—literally—works differently anyway. Take a number? Order a value meal? Stand in this line to order, this line to pay and this line to get your food? All with people around you, impatient and frustrated because you’re such a moron.
Imagine now that this is happening to you despite your having been in the middle class of your country. You actually were pretty good at living in your country until a few years ago. [3] Now everything’s gone to such shit and you’re so desperate that you have to jump.
But you can still remember what it was like to be in control of your fate and you still have your pride. You’re making a move that is significantly shifting your place in the world, but it hasn’t hit home yet. You still think you matter and that other people will acknowledge this. Beating this out of a human being takes time and effort. It hasn’t happened yet for those at the borders—they still think they’re people. [4]
These people are forced by circumstance to jump out of the burning building of their own countries—often set on fire by us—to jump into the unknown of another country, without knowing the language or the culture or anything. They have nothing stable beneath their feet.
They only have a toy parachute put together by someone in their own country, a bundle of documents and instructions that’s supposed to help them land safely.
The person who prepared them may even have had their heart in the right place. But they’re still probably only marginally better at building a parachute than the immigrant. And they’re often criminals, intent on taking what little the immigrant has left, selling false hope.
What good is a postal address if you can’t read a map in the destination country? If you can’t even find a map? If your phone doesn’t work? If you don’t even have a phone?
So these people are standing in line at our airports, knowing nothing about the language or the culture, clutching a pile of entry papers possibly prepared by a criminal, knowing that their best prospect is that they end up working 16 hours per day in a basement somewhere, without family or friends or any cultural touchstones. In the worst case, they’re arrested and thrown in jail. And that’s still better than what they had at home.
And we’re expecting these people to know that they have to take off their shoes before boarding a domestic flight?
Of course, you could reasonably expect some people to be better-prepared, to be more respectful of the customs of their target country.
I’ve described one end of the scale—the other end is the extremely rich who treat their destination with just as little respect. They see everywhere as a playground built for them.
Think of how you feel when you have to go out to eat in an unfamiliar city in your own country. You have a phone that works, you can “Yelp”. And, still, you’re out of your comfort zone. There are myriad people who don’t even feel at home in their own culture, because it’s left them behind. They can’t even travel at home because their culture is doing its best to egest them.
It’s a scale, but many of the people on that scale deserve empathy, not disdain, scorn or anger.
Published by marco on 1. Apr 2018 15:39:29 (GMT-5)
If nothing else, Julian Assange’s continued imprisonment lays bare the West’s hypocrisy about rule of law and about human dignity. Whatever you may feel about Assange’s journalism or views or connections, the man has not been charged with a crime but is a de-facto political prisoner in the heart of London. His jailers would almost certainly prefer to drone-bomb him but they certainly seem satisfied with the stalemate that results in him rotting in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
They are even happier, now that the Ecuadorian government that harbored Assange has been replaced by one more pliant to its true rulers and masters. The article In Defense of Julian Assange and Free Speech by John Pilger (TruthDig) describes the most recent developments, in which the Ecuadorian government—which has housed Assange in its embassy for almost 6 years—has now cut him off from the Internet and from all visitors.
This action forces Assange’s supporters to waste their time and efforts getting back to the prior status quo—where Assange was effectively jailed without charge as a political prisoner in England, but at least could exercise his freedom of speech in public forums.
The list of signatories is relatively short, but chock-full of eminences that I recognize and wholeheartedly count among my most valuable and reliable sources. In addition to John Pilger, there are Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, Ray McGovern, Oliver Stone, Yanis Varoufakis, Ai Weiwei and Slavoj Žižek. More surprising was to see Pamela Anderson’s name on the same list, but good for her.
It’s nice to see them all leaning out the window to try to force the powers-that-be to own their actions. The worst these powers fear is to be stripped of their plausible deniability, to be shown as hypocrites, paying only lip service to human rights when it suits them.
They should all be ashamed of themselves—if it hadn’t already been amply demonstrated that their capacity for shame is nil.
And the media won’t help. They’ve already amply demonstrated that they know which side their bread is buttered on. I imagine that they will either ignore this latest development or spin it as justice against a state terrorist and his supporters. The supporters will, as usual, be branded as deluded—if not foolish—leftists at best, and anti-Western communist terrorists, at worst.
When I heard this, I wondered what the uproar was about, since I was sure it wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this. I... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 11. Dec 2017 20:02:14 (GMT-5)
President Trump did something supposedly unprecedented recently: he acknowledged Jerusalem as the de-facto capital of Israel and vowed to move the U.S. embassy there.
When I heard this, I wondered what the uproar was about, since I was sure it wasn’t the first time I’d heard something like this. I couldn’t quite place my finger on it, though. I couldn’t remember whether it was Bush or Obama who’d said something similar, or whether they’d said it during their campaign or as President.
Granted, the media flies off the handle at everything that Trump does, pretending that each new injustice is uniquely terrible. I generally agree with the “terrible” part, but not with the “uniquely terrible” part.
It turns out it was not just Obama and Bush, but also Clinton (for good measure).
According to the article What past US presidents have said about recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital (ABC (Australian Broadcast Corporation)/Reuters), it turns out that the timeline of talking about Jerusalem as the capital of Israel looks more like this:
]]>“Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts.
“Middle class kids can afford one throw.... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Dec 2017 15:59:58 (GMT-5)
This HackerNews comment by notacoward (Hacker News) on the article Entrepreneurs Aren’t a Special Breed – They’re Mostly Rich Kids by Nimmala (Asia Times) offers a lovely analogy for what it takes to succeed as an entrepeneur.
“Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts.
“Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.
“Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about “meritocracy” and the salutary effects of hard work.
“Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.”
h/t to Jason Kottke.
Published by marco on 10. Dec 2017 15:41:55 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Dec 2017 15:43:33 (GMT-5)
The article John Oliver, Dustin Hoffman have heated exchange over sexual harassment claims illustrates exactly why we should be very careful of whom we let carry our flag for us. Many people like John Oliver because he generally punches upward and he’s quite funny. His schtick is wearing a little thin, but he’s still pretty funny.
He took some time off of obsessing over every detail of Donald Trump’s life recently to interview Dustin Hoffman about sexual allegations. [1] When Hoffman said that “it didn’t happen the way she reported”, Oliver responded,
“It’s that part of the response to this stuff that pisses me off. It is reflective of who you were. You’ve given no evidence to show that it didn’t happen. (Emphasis added.)”
Does Oliver even understand that he’s switched the burden of proof? That Hoffman is, in Oliver’s eyes, guilty until he can prove himself innocent?
When Hoffman asked Oliver, “Do you believe this stuff you’re reading?”, Oliver replied in the affirmative “because she would have no reason to lie.”
Oliver got his heart’s cockles warmed when someone yelled from the crowd “Thank you for believing women.”
Ah, a faith-based justice system. What could possibly go wrong? [2]
From the article Moral Market Suasion And Made-Up Law by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice)
“For the moment, we’re under mob rule, and the mob has gone nuts. Seventy-five-year-old Garrison Keillor* will be disappeared by Minnesota Public Radio? Taub attempts to bring proportionality into the mix, while being an apologist for culpability based on anything that offends a woman, and thus flagrantly distorting law while pretending to apply it, But the mob doesn’t care. The mob doesn’t think. The mob has no conscience. Just blind, irrational fury and outrage.”
]]>“I’ve never been comfortable with Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson. Much as I agree with his position that people can’t make up their own gender... [More]”
Published by marco on 28. Nov 2017 20:12:09 (GMT-5)
The article The Non-Apology To Lindsay Shepard, Eh? by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) sums up my opinion of Jordan Peterson better (more succinctly, at least) than I could:
“I’ve never been comfortable with Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson. Much as I agree with his position that people can’t make up their own gender pronouns and demand others use them, under force of law, there’s something unseemly about him. Too self-promotional. Too one-note. Too . . . obvious.”
The article itself is about a professor in Canada who was reprimanded for showing a video of Peterson arguing against a law that would require people to use the pronoun of their addressee’s choice. She dared show the video without properly introducing it. She should have softened the blow on her obviously unprepared and fragile students. Instead, she inflicted Peterson’s poisonous opinion on them without telling them how they were supposed to feel about it in advance.
Since the professor thought to record her disciplinary hearing and released it to the Internet for their perusal, her interlocutor and supervisor quickly backpedaled with a giant open letter that served as an “apology”. Apology is in quotes because, as Greenfield notes, “The purpose of an open letter is to tell the world of one’s apology rather than to actually apologize.”
]]>“When you have an area that just isn’t working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you’ll have another area... [More]”
Published by marco on 29. Jul 2017 23:42:06 (GMT-5)
The article Katko, Tenney to Donald Trump: Don’t tell people to leave Upstate NY discusses President Trump’s recent statement about Upstate New York:
“When you have an area that just isn’t working like upper New York state, where people are getting very badly hurt, and then you’ll have another area 500 miles away where you can’t get people, I’m going to explain, you can leave. It’s OK. Don’t worry about your house.”
Trump is only one of many people who think that the answer to an utterly failed economy is to move. He’s also not the only one who thinks it’s super-easy to do. Pretty much all elites, right and left, are heavily invested in the idea of not just capital mobility, but also a corresponding human mobility. This is just a vastly simplified economic theory that doesn’t map well to reality. Real people have families, roots, houses (which form a large part of their equity and which need to be sold, which is nearly impossible in many markets). A move from home is an act of utter desperation for most.
Don’t be distracted by the fact that this statement comes from Trump and is so callously formulated. This is mainstream, elite economic thinking and has been for several decades. Right and left both buy into this notion. The NYT, for example, is 100% in agreement with Trump’s statement, even if they pretend to be temporarily incensed. They will dress it up with prettier words, but the essence is the same.
Where is the logical end to this? When Wisconsin collapses, should people move to Foxconn in China then? Or perhaps they should all follow fearless leader Elon Musk, whose obsession with Mars can be ascribed to more-or-less the same philosophy: if things suck where you are, instead of trying to fix it (or, God forbid, take those who are to blame for your miserable situation to task and make _them_ fix it), just pull up stakes and leave.
Isn’t that what all of those hated immigrants do, though? Does that mean that Upstate New Yorkers who flee their economic wasteland will be greeted as dirty, job-stealing rapists on whichever shore they wash up?
With advice like this, Trump et. al. (which includes pretty much all of America’s ruling class, sundry elites and media) are just trying to shuffle the blame for the predicament that they caused. It convinces people that they have problems only because they’re too stubborn to move—not because they’ve been screwed six ways to Sunday by exactly the people who are blaming them for being too lazy to move.
People should ignore this advice and, instead, hold their rulers’ feet to the fire and hold them to account for the problems and suffering they cause. Don’t let them guilt you into accepting blame for something that they did to you.
For example, legislators in the US are legally allowed to take money from lobbyists and corporations. There are some restrictions, but,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 19. Jul 2017 22:51:58 (GMT-5)
We’re told that democracy is the mechanism whereby we can effect change in our society. While true, it is irrelevant in all but the most trivial of applications.
For example, legislators in the US are legally allowed to take money from lobbyists and corporations. There are some restrictions, but, for the most part, bribery is legal. And it seems to work quite well. How does democracy help us combat this? We can elect other people, people that don’t take bribes. What if none are running for office? We can run for office ourselves, I suppose. All of the democratic mechanisms we have to address the perceived ills of society effect change very slowly. This change is also quite fleeting, as the next election cycle could literally sweep away all progress and replace hard-won gains with a smooth-talking, well-funded, lobbyist-loving legislator.
The mechanisms by which the rich affect society, on the other hand, act quickly and have much more long-lasting effects. Injections of campaign cash and bribes for specific legislation have proven, time and time again, to have a very large ROI (return on investment). Legislation worth millions or billions can be had for a few paltry thousands or hundreds of thousands—at most—spent on a few key legislators. This type of relentless effort yields immediate and concrete gains, whether in new contracts or tax savings or reduced costs due to relaxed or retracted regulations.
Instead of being fleeting, the legislative changes and contracts last much longer than the term over which the people wield democratic power. Once a law has been bought and enacted, there is an inertia to it. While not set in stone, there is resistance to re-hashing a decision that was just made. Its very existence lends it a legitimacy independent of fact. People unfamiliar with the topic will simply assume that whoever made the decision to create the law must have known what they were doing. Even those who want to change it are forced to acknowledge that change is futile where political will is absent.
And so, we the people wield absolute power over an ineffective weapon incapable of permanent change while the elite make one quasi-permanent gain after another via capital—gains that yield them ever more capital and power.
In a recent mail, he referenced two of my articles Once... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 26. Apr 2017 21:24:52 (GMT-5)
I received a response to some recent articles from a friend. He reads English fluently, but is much more comfortable writing in Italian, while my strengths are reversed. We agreed long ago to communicate bilingually to maximize expressiveness.
In a recent mail, he referenced two of my articles Once more unto the breach and Avoiding Distraction.
His comments are quoted below—I have translated them from the Italian—followed by my responses.
“You exalt the initiative of Trump versus the inertia of Obama. Indeed, Trump has thrown himself into the melee with the same passion as in Trump Tower; however, he has now realized that commanding a nation governed by a secular democratic constitution isn’t so simple. His two anti-Islamic decrees were blocked by the judiciary. The law with which he wanted to redefine Obama Care was rejected by his own Republican-party majority.”
I may not have been clear. What I wanted to emphasize is that the media represents the office of president differently, depending on their agenda. When Obama wasn’t the progressive president many hoped he would be, the media said that wasn’t his fault—that just because he was president didn’t mean he could change anything. When he wasn’t able to even close Guantánamo in eight years, Obama was quickly forgiven because presidents “can’t do anything anyway”.
However, now that Trump is promising to change everything, all of a sudden the media portrays the office of president as all-powerful, with change happening in days and weeks instead of years.
As you rightly point out, most of what Trump has attempted so far has failed as well.
I don’t approve of either man as president. Trump is willing to publicly try and fail to enact policies that I consider to be evil. Obama talked about policies that I considered to be good, but he failed to do anything about it.
Neither one is particularly useful, if you’re looking for actual results that will help actual people.
“In order to facilitate the passage of his faithful minion in the Supreme Court he had to change the minimum number of required votes from that established in the Constitution to a simple majority, because there weren’t enough Republican votes to reach the super-majority.”
You’re referring to what the American press, in their exalted wisdom, referred to as “the nuclear option”. You’re mistaken when you say that they changed something in the constitution: The only thing that changed was parliamentary procedure in the Senate concerning filibusters. It is not a new option and has nothing to do with the Constitution of the U.S. The Senate and its presiding officer are free to override “rules” because they are not legally binding. In fact, it was the Democrats who first invoked it against the Republicans in 2013 when the Republicans were blocking judicial nominations.
See Nuclear Option (Wikipedia) for more information.
“The only blow of Trump’s that landed was to withdraw the America’s approval (granted by Obama) to the Paris accords that were to protect the environment (just as the notorious Bush did with Clinton’s approval of the treaty of Kyoto), thus giving free reign to the gas and oil lobbies.”
I agree that it’s terrible to take steps away from acknowledging and addressing climate change. But the Trump administration didn’t change the reality, did they? The U.S. is now officially more honest about its attitude toward climate change than it was under Obama: the U.S. does not care about climate change. Obama didn’t care enough about climate change to actually stand up and fight for it.
His administration worked side-by-side with Canada to torpedo the climate convention in Copenhagen (COP15, the last big conference we heard about before COP21 in Paris). Canada wanted to keep producing oil from its tar sands and the US was only too happy to help them block and agreement because the Obama administration was still 100% behind the Keystone pipeline at the time.
When COP21 in Paris rolled around, the Obama administration, along with the rest of the Western world, approved an utterly useless agreement. It was an agreement, yes. The Trump administration did withdraw from it. But it was a non-binding agreement to limit to global average temperature rise to 2ºC. We’re already well over 1ºC. They did not agree to any enforcement mechanisms or punishment for non-compliance … or anything. So, while the nations all sagely agreed to limit to 2ºC, they all went home to their mansions without any agreement about how to achieve this goal. Nothing was done.
What real-world impact does America’s withdrawal have? It’s just like everything else Trump has done. It sounds good to his supporters, but it actually means nothing. In a way, it’s just like Obama: What real-world impact did signing the treaty have? None. It sounded good to his supporters, but it actually meant nothing.
That is an example of what I mean when I write that Obama and Trump are similar. They’re selling a different fantasy, but existing policy continues unchanged.
See 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (Wikipedia) (COP21/Paris) and 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (Wikipedia) (COP15/Copenhagen) for more information on the actual “outcomes” of COP21 and COP15, respectively.
“Again, in this case, there have been reactions from some state (California, I think) that have also passed pro-environmental measures.”
The COP21 agreement was better than nothing, but it wasn’t that far from nothing. More important are the voluntary efforts, like those you mention in California or those of Denmark or Germany in recent years. Similar to Switzerland, the U.S. is federalist: the states still have a lot of control over policy. States like California can commit to climate targets independently of the federal government.
However, California isn’t a shining example of environmental policy, either. They follow the Obama model: talk pretty but do something else. Their reputation for environmentalism is more of a marketing strategy than a reality. For example, much of Southern California is a dessert. They don’t have the natural water to support the dozens of millions of people living there. Decades ago, entire rivers were bent around to provide water to Los Angeles. Even that is failing now, with a persistent drought stretching over years. Lake Mead — the primary reservoir for Los Angeles — is at historic lows and there is no plan for how to replenish it.
The book “Cadillac Desert” provides a very interesting history of these times.
However, California is the nation’s #1 source of fresh vegetables, of fresh salad, a very water-intensive crop. How can this be? Industry and farms in California do not have to pay for water. Neither are they limited by the State in how much water they can use. Flood-filling fields is still a common practice — this in regions that are climatically considered deserts. That doesn’t sound very ecological, does it?
This easy access to water is also very lucrative for companies that bottle water. California is also the primary source of bottled water in America. Our friends at Coca Cola and Nestlé (hello, Switzerland!) have turned this free water into a booming business. The supposedly environmentally friendly State of California does nothing to stop it, though it’s a completely shortsighted use of precious resources.
More information: Bottled Water Comes From the Most Drought-Ridden Places in the Country by Julia Lurie (Mother Jones)
“Since he was the first (and only) head of state who congratulated Erdoğan for his (not very clear) electoral victory, it seems to me that it would be unpleasant to live in such a dictatorial environment.”
I agree that I wish the U.S. president would stop supporting dictators (as in Saudi Arabia) and would stop supporting would-be dictators (as in Turkey, where Erdoğan was elected democratically, but is behaving very autocratically). But this has been national policy for decades.
Obama and Hillary brokered the single-biggest arms deal of all time ($29 billion) with Saudi Arabia, a dynastic dictatorship no different from North Korea.
More information at Hillary Clinton Oversaw US Arms Deals to Clinton Foundation Donors by Bryan Schatz (Mother Jones).
How is Trump’s congratulations of Erdoğan significantly different? Obama would have done the same. But had Obama done it, we would have accepted it as the cost of “doing business”, right? Turkey is one of the more important NATO powers to the US. Their armies are working with the US to bomb Syria and Iraq. The US has military bases in Turkey. They allow the US to fly over their airspace. Turkey is an important partner for the US empire. It was under Obama and it remains so under Trump.
There is no difference there.
“In your article from 11.04, you also condemn the missile attack in Syria, a nation that—like Iraq and Afghanistan—are not at war with the US. You could add the super-bomb (MOAB), which cost $300M (a sum with which you could feed thousands of poor people) and that, experts say, caused fewer [more?] deaths than the suicide attacks in Nice.”
Agreed 100%. We focus on the evil of our supposed enemies while ignoring our own far greater destruction. The hypocrisy would be breathtaking if it wasn’t so quotidian.
“And now Trump is rattling his saber at North Korea, which threatens to react with an atomic weapon. Not to mention that Syria is allied with Russia and North Korea with China. If things continue this way, we won’t have seen anything yet.”
The U.S. is clearly not going to be the reasonable party in any of these negotiations. We can only hope that China and Russia continue to be level-headed. We can only hope that Kim Jong-Un isn’t as unstable as they say. Most likely he is not. None of them really are, are they? Anytime a nation is elevated to the state of “official enemy”, we are immediately bombarded with propaganda that its leader is “crazy”. Putin is crazy. Assad is crazy. Jong-un is crazy.
We use the epithet crazy to convince ourselves that the only way to deal with that country is through violence. That we must eliminate them before they eliminate us. This argument is wearying. It’s a lie. It almost always has been.
Instead, it is our side (my side, as a 50% American — you’re 100% Swiss, with a non-existent history of attacking other countries) that is crazy, attacking other countries all the time.
The US has 2/3 of its naval fleet docked in the South China Sea right now, threatening China and North Korea. The U.S. is antagonizing Russia in Syria, poking the Russian bear until it reacts. Pakistan has a free-fire policy for its general with regard to nuclear weapons. India is constantly poking Pakistan in the hotly contested Kashmir region.
I grew up in the U.S. during the cold war, but after the last real crisis — the Cuban Missile Crisis — when the war was really “cold”. Now things seem more unstable than then — and very few in the mass media are talking about the increased danger of nuclear war.
I too wonder where it will all end.
“After all, I say: better the Nobel Peace Prize for Obama’s peace!”
I grant you that: I had hoped that a Trump administration would be less belligerent. But he lied about that, as well. The Obama administration, though it was also very belligerent, expanded it’s empire in a less … offensive manner. The threat of nuclear war didn’t seem as great with Obama’s softer touch.
On the other hand, Obama did approve a trillion-dollar, 30-year plan to expand the U.S. nuclear arsenal in 2016, so … why is that less provocative than Trump? A matter of marketing, I guess.
See Obama’s Russian Rationale for $1 Trillion Nuke Plan Signals New Arms Race by Alex Emmons (The Intercept)
Yesterday’s show was about the complicity of mainstream... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Apr 2017 19:50:42 (GMT-5)
I’ve written several times about Redacted Tonight this year already, but I’m damned if that show doesn’t keep topping itself. The shows from the last two weeks have again been well-worth watching, providing unvarnished international news.
Yesterday’s show was about the complicity of mainstream media in the glorification of U.S. violence around the world. Lee shows examples from CNN, MSNBC and FOX where the reporting on America’s weapons of mass destruction is pornographic. A correspondent segment by John F. O’Donnell provides examples of how CNN has actual Raytheon lobbyists/representatives on-staff as reporters—and don’t say anything about it. You’re watching commercials for weapons’ manufacturers masquerading as news.
The show from the week before was in the same vein and is also well-worth watching.
I don’t receive anything for advertising for this show—I only hope that others can benefit from a wickedly funny presentation that doesn’t pull any punches content-wise. John Oliver is pretty funny, but he pulls punches and loses focus on the target. Lee Camp and his merry crew are 100% laser-like focused on the issues that matter. They are hands-down the best news show on television.
Sure, it’s RT—Russia Today—but who the hell else is going to host such a subversive show in America? It’s available for free on YouTube. Subscribe to it. You won’t regret it.
Published by marco on 22. Apr 2017 13:16:00 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 23. Apr 2017 08:36:34 (GMT-5)
I’ve been trying to get a grasp on the candidates before the election tomorrow. The following article comprises those notes and impressions. Maybe it will help someone else, but be aware that my primary sources are not French (though I did read through a few Wikipedia pages on candidates in French). As always, grain of salt, YMMV etc. etc.
I’ve read more widely, but the citations below come from three articles, Big Stakes in the French Presidential Election: Governance Versus the People by Diana Johnstone (CounterPunch) and The Main Issue in the French Presidential Election: National Sovereignty by Diana Johnstone (CounterPunch) and France: Another Ghastly Presidential Election Campaign; the Deep State Rises to the Surface by Diana Johnstone (CounterPunch).
Diana Johnstone (Wikipedia) “is an American political writer based in Paris, France”. She has been writing about the French elections since Marine Le Pen’s initial rise in 2012 and also wrote Queen of Chaos: The Misadventures of Hillary Clinton during the most recent elections.
Tomorrow is the first round of a possible two-round election. If a candidate receives over 50% of the vote, that candidate wins. Otherwise, the top two candidates will have a run-off election.
The electoral dynamics are naturally different for the two votes. Winning the first round in no way guarantees winning the second round. The talking heads of the French, European and American political analysis are promising that, though the right-wing candidate Marine Le Pen is a shoe-in to get to the second run, she will neither win outright nor win the second round. They consider her politics extreme enough that the French will retreat to the safety of whichever candidate gets through to oppose her.
As of a few days ago, this looked to be Emmanuel Macron, the otherwise unknown establishment darling who is saying all of the things that the elite want to hear.
One is leery of imparting American labels on a French process, but the nativist, right-wing candidate who is considered unelectable against the inevitable neoliberal neocon masking as a quasi-leftist is a bit too on-the-nose. The French confidence in Macron’s inevitability is not necessarily warranted.
A recent surge by the center-left candidate (for the French he’s center-left; in the States, he’d have long suffered a political death as a communist) Mélenchon, is looking like he might take away Macron’s slot in the final count tomorrow. This, too, might be a fairy tale told by a press that has been so fabulously wrong about pretty much everything in every recent western election of import.
I summarize the major issues and approximate stances below. The next section has more detailed notes and citations on each candidate.
Long active in the right wing of French politics, she is the current front-runner, acknowledged by all sides as the only candidate guaranteed to make it to the second round. She is a French right-winger, so her platform is more sovereignist than American right-wing, e.g. she “insists that all French citizens deserve equal treatment regardless of their origins, race or religion.”
She doesn’t want to leave the EU, but wants to leave the euro (as Mélenchon, the center-left candidate) and wants to re-“negotiate with the EU to get better treaty terms for France.” She advocates “social policies to benefit workers and low income people” as well as “normalizing relations with Russia” and getting out of NATO. Trump said the same things; it’s unclear whether Le Pen means them more than he did.
While her policies sound like a Democrat to American ears, her rhetoric is a good deal more Republican, with more than a hint of racism. She’s definitely got a “France for France” vibe, coming out against headscarves, etc. Even given that, she doesn’t seem to be nearly as racist as Trump, to be clear. She gains by not having as horrific, atavistic politics as her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
The “Bernie Sanders” of the French race (if a fraught analogy helps). He is a “fiery orator” who’s been around for a while. “Mélenchon calls for outright disobedience by violating EU treaties that are harmful to France. That is his Plan A. His Plan B is to leave the EU, in case Plan A fails to convince Germany (the current boss) and the others to agree to change the treaties.” He definitely wants to leave the euro.
This is better than nothing, but it’s clear that—like Sanders—Mélenchon is using Plan B as a cudgel to get plan A, but it’s highly doubtful that he means to have France leave the EU (unlike François Asselineau, who has pledged to sign article 50 immediately upon election). It’s unclear whether France could defy the EU rules in order to stay more “French” (Plan A) without immediately being forced to either give up on any plans of its own or to move to Plan B.
Mélenchon’s rhetoric is very good but— as with Hamon, the other leftist candidate—he is torn on the horns of the dilemma of having traditionally socialist policies within the confines of the EU’s technocratic, neoliberal and highly capitalist system. Changing that “would […] require a unanimity among the EU’s 28 member States that is simply impossible.”
One must always be suspicious of one-issue candidates. In this case, though, that one issue is: leave the EU. This one issue is arguably the single most important decision for France in order to save its traditional national identity, which is far more social than is possible under EU rule/restrictions.
In essence, this one issue for Asselineau is also a sovereignist one and defines his positions on economic, social and military policies. In other words, if you’re going to run on one issue, this is the one to run on. He pledges to “invoke Article 50 to leave the EU and immediately apply to Washington to withdraw from NATO” upon election. Asselineau is pure in his principles, akin to Ralph Nader in American politics.
Floundering heavily under the frankly incompatible goals of “traditional social democracy, and the European Union (EU).” His foreign policy is in line with Europe: mostly “made-in-Washingon […] demanding that “Assad must go” and ranting against Putin and Russia.”
It is unclear why the socialists are so pro-NATO other than to cynically try to siphon votes from Macron. With this election, the PS is—like the Democrats in the U.S.—clearly dead in the water, with its hypocrisy driving members to other parties and candidates in droves.
Former economic advisor to Hollande and architect of the most recent rounds of the “unpopular, neo-liberal, anti-labor laws”. Darling of the French mainstream media and preferred candidate of other EU members, he has pledged to stay with the EU and not to rock the boat. Essentially, no change for France under him: the French military will remain subordinate to the U.S. via NATO command, and French economic and social policy will continue to be hamstrung and neoconned.
He claims to be neither left nor right. He has no electoral experience (having been assigned to his post in the Hollande government), so his popularity among traditionally elite opinion is suspect. Politically, he’s like Obama: not much experience but buoyed as a marketable candidate who will do what he’s told.
Socially conservative, economically liberal and also a strong proponent of the EU. In favor of more austerity to reduce the debt. Against foreign investment—he wants to “save the country’s economy from being completely taken over by foreign corporations, American retirement funds and Qatar.” This goal is just as unreachable as Hamon’s, as “there is nothing under EU rules to encourage French investors to invest in France”.
As in the United States, calls to “invest at home” have no effect where it matters—on the giant multinationals that employ most of the citizens. Fillon is pro-EU, but not 100% pro-NATO, as Macron is. He wants to end sanctions against Russia, for which he is naturally pilloried in the French and European press.
However, he is too overt in his policies, so the establishment prefers Macron, who sells essentially the same policies —sans being soft on Russia, which is a plus for the mainstream—who is willing to dress up his brutal economics in more flowery language (read: lie about it, in the best tradition of Bill Clinton when he finally killed the Democratic Party or Tony Blair when he did the same to Labour, allowing the neoliberal “New” Labour to rise from its ashes).
“Fifty years ago, it was “the left” whose most ardent cause was passionate support for Third World national liberation struggles. The left’s heroes were Ahmed Ben Bella, Sukarno, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, and above all Ho Chi Minh. What were these leaders fighting for? They were fighting to liberate their countries from Western imperialism. They were fighting for independence, for the right to determine their own way of life, preserve their own customs, decide their own future. They were fighting for national sovereignty, and the left supported that struggle.”
Voting in your own country’s interests is not nationalist—it’s “sovereignist”. It’s rational. Casting people who vote in their own interests rather than in the interests of unknown others as racists is intellectually dishonest. People intuitively understand that their country is no longer run by them and, in the face of a democratic deficit, they choose from the candidates available—sometimes poorly, if the choice is poor.
As Johnstone writes, the word “populist” in France is being used as a curse, much as it was used in the same manner against Sanders and Trump.
“Since both [Mélenchon and Le Pen] deviate from the establishment line, both are denounced as “populists” – a term that is coming to mean anyone who pays more attention to what ordinary people want that to what the Establishment dictates. (Emphasis added.)”
As in the States, the parties traditionally considered left-wing have capitulated to economic policies that are utterly incompatible with social goals.
“The confusion is due to the fact that most of what calls itself “the left” in the West has been totally won over to the current form of imperialism – aka “globalization”. It is an imperialism of a new type, centered on the use of military force and “soft” power to enable transnational finance to penetrate every corner of the earth and thus to reshape all societies in the endless quest for profitable return on capital investment. The left has been won over to this new imperialism because it advances under the banner of “human rights” and “antiracism” – abstractions which a whole generation has been indoctrinated to consider the central, if not the only, political issues of our times.”
“Meanwhile, it has become more and more obvious that EU monetarist policy based on the common currency, the euro, creates neither growth nor jobs as promised but destroys both. Unable to control its own currency, obliged to borrow from private banks, and to pay them interest, France is more and more in debt, its industry is disappearing and its farmers are committing suicide, on the average of one every other day. The left has ended up in an impossible position: unswervingly loyal to the EU while calling for policies that are impossible under EU rules governing competition, free movement, deregulation, budgetary restraints, and countless other regulations produced by an opaque bureaucracy and ratified by a virtually powerless European Parliament, all under the influence of an army of lobbyists.”
Some of the candidates are paying lip service to the Universal Basic Income. Hamon has used it make his policies look more left and less liberally economic. As Johnstone eloquently explains, though, this idea is espoused across the political spectrum. In the United States, the billionaires of Silicon Valley—nearly all libertarians—are espousing it as a way of keeping people that their evisceration of the economy has “disrupted” alive so that they can drive for Uber.
“The idea of giving every citizen an equal handout can sound appealing to young people having trouble finding a job. But this idea, which originated with Milton Friedman and other apostles of unleashed financial capitalism, is actually a trap. The project assumes that unemployment is permanent, in contrast to projects to create jobs or share work. It would be financed by replacing a whole range of existing social allocations, in the name of “getting rid of bureaucracy” and “freedom of consumption”. The project would complete the disempowerment of the working class as a political force, destroying the shared social capital represented by public services, and splitting the dependent classes between paid workers and idle consumers.”
Seeing the success that the Democrats have had in distracting the populace from unworkable and incompatible economic and social policies, the French too are screaming and pointing at the Russian bogeyman.
With this tool in hand, the establishment media tries to “prove” Macron’s bona fides vis à vis candidates in favor of normalization of relations with Russia.
“As an example of this shocking interference, which allegedly threatens to undermine the French Republic and Western values, the Russian news agency Sputnik interviewed a Republican member of the French parliament, Nicolas Dhuicq, who dared say that Macron might be “an agent of the American financial system”. That is pretty obvious.”
“The denunciation of Russian media and alleged Russian “interference in our elections” is a major invention of the Clinton campaign, which has gone on to infect public discourse in Western Europe. This accusation is a very obvious example of double standards, or projection, since U.S. spying on everybody, including it allies, and interference in foreign elections are notorious.”
“The campaign denouncing “fake news” originating in Moscow is in full swing in both France and Germany as elections approach. It is this accusation that is the functional interference in the campaign, not Russian media. The accusation that Marine Le Pen is “the candidate of Moscow” is not only meant to work against her, but is also preparation for the efforts to instigate some variety of “color revolution” should she happen to win the May 7 election. CIA interference in foreign elections is far from limited to contentious news reports.”
“In the absence of any genuine Russian threat to Europe, claims that Russian media are “interfering in our democracy” serve to brand Russia as an aggressive enemy and thereby justify the huge NATO military buildup in Northeastern Europe, which is reviving German militarism and directing national wealth into the arms industry.”
“The amazing adoption in France of the American anti-Russian campaign is indicative of a titanic struggle for control of the narrative – the version of international reality consumed by the masses of people who have no means to undertake their own investigations. Control of the narrative is the critical core of what Washington describes as its “soft power”. The hard power can wage wars and overthrow governments. The soft power explains to bystanders why that was the right thing to do. The United States can get away with literally everything so long as it can tell the story to its own advantage, without the risk of being credibly contradicted. Concerning sensitive points in the world, whether Iraq, or Libya, or Ukraine, control of the narrative is basically exercised by the partnership between intelligence agencies and the media. Intelligence services write the story, and the mass corporate media tell it.”
“That is one reason for the extraordinary campaign going on to denounce Russian and other alternative media as sources of “false news”, in order to discredit rival sources. The very existence of the Russian international television news channel RT aroused immediate hostility: how dare the Russians intrude on our version of reality! How dare they have their own point of view! Hillary Clinton warned against RT when she was Secretary of State and her successor John Kerry denounced it as a “propaganda bullhorn”. What we say is truth, what they say can only be propaganda.”
Published by marco on 10. Apr 2017 22:36:32 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 11. Apr 2017 12:53:33 (GMT-5)
We have more information then ever, but know less. The world is almost bereft of journalists. Almost every single person who you think is a journalist is instead a media personality. They are readers, not thinkers, not analysts. They know almost no history. What they do know is wrong, or viewed through such a strong partisan lens as to make no difference.
Most of what you read in articles is actually partially transcribed press releases. Or partisan think pieces based on them. There is little in the way of hard facts because those take (A) time to procure and (B) a non-partisan view to report, neither of which are conducive to news as she is reported. It hasn’t been good for a long time: there are no real halcyon days of informed readers and honest news to which we can turn a teary eye—but it used to be better. The bastions of actual information didn’t used to be so far removed from the filthy trough from which the hoi polloi drink.
If you read about something important-sounding soon after it happened, you are dealing with information, not facts. Most likely, you are dealing with deliberately false information—or hype—promulgated for page views or social-media cachet. Advertisement dollars come first; your accurate viewpoint isn’t even a close second.
The initial stream of data is filled with partisan hacks pushing their agendas or the agendas of their paymasters. [1] Close on their heels follow the chorus of people who want to be stridently right about the constricted worldview they already held—and they’ll present information to shoehorn whatever just happened into one of their few pigeonholes.
But we’ve taken little notice of the changed situation. We still treat each nugget of data like a goldfish—as if we’d never been fooled before. Most likely because we’d rather be titillated than right. Hell, none of this affects anyone reading it in any way, so we can at least be thoroughly entertained dilettantes, right? [2]
But why would they lie?
Any of a million reasons. But always for the same reason.
President Trump launched a bunch of cruise missiles against a Syrian airbase in retaliation for a gas attack that killed over 70 people. Trump’s attack was considered by all observers in the U.S. a measured and appropriate response for which the international community will not condemn him in any way. [3]
We have all probably read that it was exactly 59 Tomahawk missiles. Is there any reason to question this fact? Of course there is: it came from the Pentagon, an organization so legendarily bad at numbers that they can’t even calculate their budget anymore. Does it matter if it was 20 or 100 missiles? Not really. That’s where we are today: it doesn’t matter to us how many missiles we fired at a nation at which we are not at war: just that we did it.
The only unacceptable number for most Americans was 0 missiles—because those babies had to be avenged. How many babies was it? More than zero. Who did it? With what? How is it worse than a dozen other things that happened that day? It doesn’t matter. The gas-attack story was the sparkly bit that engrossed the American public that week.
And why is this bit of news so sparkly? Because gas is a weapon of mass destruction? By what grotesque legal contortion are 59 missiles—each with half a ton of explosives in it—not weapons of mass destruction? How is it that the weapons used by the U.S.—pardon me, NATO, or U.S.-led coalition forces—are always OK when literally anything the so-called enemy brings to bear is beyond the pale?
This unquestioning consumption of a completely evidence- and fact-free story is all the more sad considering the previous several months of media blitz were about “fake news”. [5] But this isn’t our first failure, The evidence-free Russian takeover of American politics is taken at face value as well. We’re told that that’s not fake news, despite the giant ratio of hyperbole to facts.
Doesn’t anyone remember or want to remember the last time we did this dance? Babies in incubators in Iraq the first time around? [6] WMDs in Iraq the second time around? Definitely Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan? Qaddafi was going to kill his own people in Libya? Iran’s giant nuclear stockpile that never was? The gas attack in Syria just four years ago which was the exact same baseless provocation to incite and escalate American involvement? [7] And what about the conventional attacks in Syria, where the purported number of victims dropped from 250,000 to 90,000 over a week? [8]
Do you remember how Osama bin Laden died? They found him and he was gone and dumped in the ocean before the sun rose again. Just gone. No proof. No trial. No pictures. A dozen meandering and changing storylines over the next few weeks until the media settled on an account they could accept. There is little to believe there. But we do. It is now fact—every bit of how it happened. Cemented in Wikipedia for all to read.
Do you remember how the U.S. government denied spying on anyone and then it turned out they spy on everyone? And life went on and we all know that now and their lie has been forgotten and they still get to win at everything?
And didn’t Assad, under pressure from Russia, get rid of all his chemical weapons years ago, after the last incident? [9] And isn’t Assad much closer to winning the civil war now than at any point in the last half-decade? Why would he provoke an escalated U.S. involvement when he’s on the cusp of victory? Is he batshit crazy too? Like literally every other enemy America has every faced? [10]
We swallow numbers and facts, regardless of sources because that’s how we’re designed. It takes an active effort to discount information, especially when repeated endlessly. 59 Tomahawk missiles, revenge for 70 innocent victims, mostly children, of a Sarin attack.
Was it Sarin? The symptoms in the videos match a more conventional gas, like mustard. And if it was Sarin—which is a topical nerve agent—why were rescuers able to work unharmed soon after? And why did victims have burn wounds? Ok, maybe it wasn’t Sarin, but the 59 missiles definitely hit their supplies. You can’t store Sarin for very long, so that base probably didn’t have any. Well, then we took out their precursors for Sarin. One of the precursors is isopropyl alcohol, of which you need prodigious amounts, so where was the giant fireball? Was the video even of the attack from a few days ago? Or was it stock footage? They would never do that, would they? [11]
Maybe these questions have answers. Maybe they never will. Maybe we could achieve a modicum of certainty from which we could make informed decisions. But the government and the media are not going to help. Instead, they will whip up a storm of support based on nothing. No facts, no evidence, probably a ton of lies or hand-wavy state-secrets bullshit.
That’s the last recourse for the state: when they are finally pressed to provide justification, they claim that the information is too sensitive and that releasing it would be harmful to the troops and very important people and that we will just have to trust them.
Of course we will. Because we have Stockholm Syndrome.
Paying attention to it, lapping it up, believing any of it makes you dumber. You may feel better about the world afterward, you may feel like you’re more informed, but you’re going backwards.
It’s better not to try at all than to let CNN (or the Pentagon or the State Department, etc.) and its ilk guide the way.
Your entire castle of information is built on air, on nothing.
The 70 people—another number delivered by only somewhat-reliable sources (who’s even on the ground there?)—killed in Syria are just a handful of the dozens of thousands killed in the last 6 years of civil war, but somehow these 70 have more significance for Westerners. This is most likely because someone wants it that way: they are focusing attention on the attack in order to further a political agenda.
And that agenda loves, loves, loves war. Read the many loving tributes to the Tomahawk missile at CNN (I read two of them) that might as well be Raytheon press releases, citing statistics about their awesome destructive power. Brian Williams, a major news anchor in the States who retains employment despite having lied through his teeth about his involvement in Iraq, said,
“They are beautiful pictures of fearsome armaments making what is for them a brief flight over to this air field.”
Fareed Zakaria, a sellout sans pareil was so emotionally struck that he said,
“Donald Trump became President of the United States last night.”
Trump had already drawn blood with a truly mind-boggling number of drone attacks in his first couple of months, but, apparently, you’re only a real ‘Merkin President when you unbridle the power of the mightiest arsenal on the planet—heedlessly, extrajudicially and without understanding or caring about consequences or victims.
That pretty much sums up—albeit more eloquently—the sentiment expressed by my Facebook feed about the attack.
No political agendas are served by focusing attention on the many airstrikes and attacks by the U.S. on civilians every day. For example, there was an airstrike on April 5th [12] that, at last count, killed 278, most of them civilians. Let’s be serious: they were all civilians. The U.S. constantly claims that it is bombing “militants” but we have long since learned that the U.S. considers every male above 16 to be a militant. So if 13 militants were killed (as in the report), then 265 women and children joined them.
This isn’t a “special” attack of cruise missiles on Assad’s base. This is just everyday bombing of “signature” targets. No trial, no evidence, no legal right to be there. Just naked aggression against other states.
The cruise-missile attack on Assad is also not sanctioned by any international body: it’s just the U.S. unilaterally blowing shit up, perhaps hiding a touch behind the cowl of NATO. But the attack is most likely against the Geneva conventions, in that it is just an out-of-the-blue attack by one nation on another.
We have just been trained to believe that these types of attacks are somehow justified. But think about it: is there another nation that can just launch missiles against countries that haven’t attacked it? Without invitation? Is there another country that can meddle in civil wars?
You may think that Russia is doing the same, but Assad—the legally elected representative of Syria—invited them to help his regime. You may not agree that he should be helped, but you can’t deny that Russia at least has a legal right to be in Syria. What is the U.S. doing? Other than helping the Islamic State turn the tide on Assad? And does the U.S. not need any evidence at all of who actually carried out the attack for which it is purportedly exacting revenge?
And why does the world buy the story that the U.S. can use yet more missiles to exact revenge on behalf of ISIS for an attack for which evidence is very shaky—and for an attack that pales in comparison to the destruction that the U.S. itself exacts every single day? How fucking brain-dead are we?
Pretty goddamned brain-dead. You may now return to your nip-slips, side-boobs, top-10 lists, pirated movies and creepy Japanese Pornography (YouTube). [13]
From the article Airstrikes Without Justice by John Wight (CounterPunch),
“No, this US attack, reportedly involving 59 Tomahawk missiles being launched from ships in the eastern Mediterranean, was carried out with regime change in mind, setting a precedent that can only have serious ramifications for the entire region.”
“[…] the lack of short-term memory in Washington is staggering to behold. Fourteen years after the disastrous US invasion of Iraq, which only succeeded in opening the gates of hell out of which ISIS and other Salfi-jihadi groups emerged, and six years after turning Libya into a failed state, in the process sparking a refugees crisis of biblical proportions, here we have yet another act of aggression against a sovereign state in the Middle East by the US. (Emphasis added.)”
Also, this article The Impending Clash Between the U.S. and Russia by Mike Whitney (CounterPunch)
“The missile attack has ended all talk of “normalizing” relations with Russia. For whatever the reason, Trump has decided that identifying himself and the United States as an enemy of Moscow and Damascus is the way he wants to conduct business.”
“The Russians are concerned about Trump’s sudden escalation, but they’re not surprised. They have spotted a pattern in US war-making and they’re able to comment on it quite calmly despite its terrible implications. Here’ more from the Russian Minister of Defense:”“The US administrations have changed but the methods for unleashing wars have remained the same since bombardments of Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya. Allegations, falsifications, grandstand playing with photos and test-tubes with pseudo results in international organizations became the reason for initiating aggression instead of an objective investigation.”
From Chris Hedges Criticizes Mainstream Media’s ‘Cheerleading’ for Syria Strike (Video) by Chris Hedges (TruthDig),
“President Trump’s decision to strike a Syrian air base late Thursday was met with resounding praise in the mainstream media. Truthdig columnist Chris Hedges addresses this “knee-jerk cheerleading,” … “They’ve fallen right into line and refuse to ask any substantial questions at all,” Hedges says of the media’s reaction to the U.S. attack.”
From the article Trumpenstein’s Tomahawk Dog-Wag: on Real and Fake News by Paul Street (CounterPunch)
“Trump’s missile spasm was completely illegal under national and international law. He responded without authorization from Congress, with no call for any sober investigation into who and/or what caused the chemical release in Khan Sheikhoun, and with no effort to garner sanction from the United Nations. (There’s nothing surprising about this, of course. Whoever sits in the White House, the U.S. “imperial presidency” has long and routinely trashed national and global law whenever that law doesn’t suit White House purpose.)”
From the article Trump’s Terrifying War Agenda by Eric Sommer (CounterPunch) writes,
“The missile attack on a Syrian government airfield is an act of war and a violation of international law, using a fabricated pretext.”
From the article Yet Another President Commits the Ultimate War Crime of Launching a War of Aggression by Dave Lindorff (CounterPunch),
“[…] the reality is that international law, as codified in the UN Charter, a treaty which the US has signed, declares the supreme war crime to be for a country to attack another when it poses no imminent threat to the attacker.”
“[…], the appalling hypocrisy of the US here also needs to be called out. It was only a few weeks ago that US aircraft bombed two locations, one on a school in the town of Mansoura, in Raqqa Province, and one on a Mosque in the town of Al Jina in western Alleppo Province, killing over 79 civilians, including children.”
From the article Bombs Bursting in Air: the Media’s Love Story in Syria by David Griscom (CounterPunch),
“There was an eerie unity of opinion to the attack revealing that none of the pundits on CNN took seriously the consequences of unilateral action. Instead, former generals sat together and praised the effectiveness of the strikes unchallenged by the hosts, even though the strikes were ongoing, premature conclusions at best. Leader of the resistance, Chuck Schumer, said the strikes were the right thing to do.” Nancy Pelosi joined the chorus adding, “Tonight’s strike in Syria appears to be a proportional response to the regime’s use of chemical weapons.””
The Iraqi Elite Republican Guard throwing babies out of incubators for having the wrong parents? You’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in your life? People were believing this bullshit long before Twitter, long before the Web. From the article, Before We Go to War With Syria, Inconvenient Truths Must be Confronted by Tareq Haddad (CounterPunch),
“When public opinion was split about America’s involvement in the war, a 15-year-old girl who gave her name simply as Nayirah tugged the heartstrings of every right-thinking person and sold the case for war.
“Appearing in front of US Congress, she testified that Iraqi soldiers took babies out of incubators in a Kuwaiti hospital and left the on the floor to die.
“Her testimony was corroborated by Amnesty International and was broadcast all over the world, but in 1992, it emerged that Nayirah was the daughter of the Kuwaiti Ambassador to the US and that her story was completely false.”
Oops. Too late. Bush the first had already committed half a million troops to Iraq.
From the article Resisting the Bombing by Greg Shupak (Jacobin),
“That a deepened US attack on Syria risks engulfing millions of people in horrific violence gives lie to the notion that bombing can be understood as a humanitarian effort, a narrative peddled at the New York Times, which ran an article claiming that Trump bombed the Syrian government because his heart swelled over the victims at Khan Sheikhun.
“[…]
“Arguments in favor of the US bombing the Syrian government take one to ludicrous places. If the US should bomb the Syrian government as punishment for killing Syrian civilians, it follows that another state should bomb the US to punish it for killing Syrian civilians.”
The article US Airstrikes: What Did the Russians Know and When Did They Know It? by Robert Fisk (CounterPunch) writes,
“The Syrian war has become the most poorly reported conflict in the world. How many dead has it caused? 400,000? 450,000? Or 500,000, the latest figure. How do we complete the figures for death by gas? To believe the Syrian government? When the last gas attack in Damascus took place, the UN, in a brief paragraph in the middle of their subsequent report, said that the chemical shells had been “compromised” by being moved between different locations.”
The article Roaming Charges: Metaphysical Graffiti by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) writes
“The timing is certainly suspicious. The Assad regime had nothing to gain and everything to lose from dropping chemical bombs on civilian targets. The Syrian government is winning the war. The rebel forces are in retreat. ISIS is a splintered force. Europe is desperate for a resolution to the Syrian war and an end to the tide of refugees. And the Trump administration had announced only a few days earlier that the future of Assad was up to the Syrian people. Of course, all of this assumes that Assad is still a rational actor, which may prove an assumption too far.”
Of course they would. Just like they would tell you they’re reporting live when it’s recorded or that the reporter is on-the-ground when that anchor is actually in a studio in front of a green screen.
The article Militants attack Tikrit; 281 Killed in Iraq by Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) writes that,
“In Mosul, the number of people killed in a controversial March 17 airstrike was officially raised by 142 dead to 278 dead and counting. Eight people were killed in an airstrike on Refaei. Shelling on Shefaa killed one person and wounded three more. Sixty militants were killed in security operations. Airstrikes killed two militant leaders and 13 more. Three militant leaders were executed.”
Deaths due to airstrikes are due to U.S. planes, on missions flown every single day in Iraq—as they have been since 1990. Every.
Single. Day.
And every single day people die, sometimes in large numbers. And no-one cares about those because it’s U.S. planes killing them, for good and moral and democratic reasons.
The article Dozens killed, buried in rubble after Mosul air raid − Iraqi officials, residents (Reuters) has more on the raid, which was carried out by, as always, “the US-led coalition.”. But the U.S. is the only one there with planes.
This is all fine. This is OK. There is nothing to see here.
]]>This... [More]
Published by marco on 2. Apr 2017 21:07:28 (GMT-5)
Once you become aware of the self-indulgence of first-world media like the New York Times, you can see it everywhere. Their reporting, such as it is, is almost irony-free. It’s fake, a balsam designed to keep you calm and happy in your comfortable first-world cocoon.
This is literally the worst thing to happen to anyone, ever.
For example, the article You May Want to Marry My Husband by Amy Krouse Rosenthal (New York Times) is about as manipulative as they come—and privileged. The author writes about having been diagnosed with cancer. Something like that is literally the worst thing that has ever happened to them, by definition. However, does the Times have to participate in her catharsis? Cancer is, for that person and her family, probably one of the worst things that has ever happened to them, but she doesn’t even attempt to put it in context. And neither does the Times.
And people—like those at Reddit Books—lap it up, congratulating her bravery. Lines like “[n]o wonder the word cancer and cancel look so similar.” are celebrated instead of denigrated as manipulative. This may sound harsh, but read below for what was “canceled”:
“No trip with my husband and parents to South Africa. No reason, now, to apply for the Harvard Loeb Fellowship. No dream tour of Asia with my mother. No writers’ residencies at those wonderful schools in India, Vancouver, Jakarta.”
Their daughter’s name is “Paris”, for fuck’s sake.
The Times publishes this pap instead of real news and gets its readership to identify and sympathize with the plight of a woman whose wonderful (and, compared to almost everyone else, very privileged) family is losing her to cancer. But why should 99% of the country waste its sympathy on a woman who quite clearly has a more-than-adequate support system already? Is that the intent?
What is the intent of articles like this? Why are they in newspapers, right next to news? Is that intent for people on food stamps to read this article and feel so bad for her that they send money to the Amy Krouse Rosenthal fund before they come to their senses?
She continues,
“Cancer cancelled our relationship in the worst way possible.”
I don’t blame her for writing that. I blame the Times for publishing it without context. Is there really no-one around to gently ask her to tone it down a bit? That there are, perhaps, worse ways to lose your loved one? For example, suddenly, because a cop shoots him in your passenger seat? Or because he made a sudden motion while black? Are we supposed to have forgotten about Philando Castile?
Or what about the horrific ways that one can die in the rest of the world? By the hand of a president that Amy Krouse Rosenthal probably voted for twice and continues to adore? Is a drone attack out the blue more merciful than cancer?
I would argue that picking your loved one’s scattered remains out of a pile of rubble that was your ancestral home after a Predator drone fired hellfire missiles into it for no reason whatsoever is worse than losing your loved one to cancer, especially when it’s a first-world couple that enjoyed a long ride together and had ample time to say goodbye. Hell, the wife has enough time to pimp out her husband in the New York Times.
The Patriarchy is a bigger problem than Inequality and Crony Capitalism.
Then there’s this article A New Kind of Male Birth Control Is Coming (Ari Altstedter). It includes the following gem,
““The fact that the big companies are run by white, middle-aged males who have the same feeling—that they would never do it—plays a major role,” said Herjan Coelingh Bennink, a gynecology professor who helped develop the contraceptives Implanon and Cerazette as head of research and development in women’s health for Organon International from 1987 to 2000. “If those companies were run by women, it would be totally different.” (Emphasis added.)”
This is specious speculation. It doesn’t belong in any news source, much less one that purports to report from a financial angle. Two paragraphs earlier, they’d noted that “India’s reversible procedure could cost as little as $10 in poor countries”. Isn’t the clear fact that there’s no money in it the reason why the leaders of our free market are utterly uninterested in it?
Hell, it could be a cure for cancer and if it grew in your backyard like dandelions, they wouldn’t lift a finger to help package and distribute it. But Bloomberg can’t ever show that they know that this is how the world works. No-one in power cares about anything but making more money for themselves. If some good can come of their getting richer—as a side-effect—then they will of course use that angle to sell their personal money-making scheme to the suckers who will fund it.
But get population growth under control for $10 per person? Forget about it.
This is a real invention. It’s been in human clinical trials for 13 years. It has the real potential to change the world. Our society and economy are built such that no-one in power cares. Why do you think it’s taking so long to stop harming the climate? Because there’s no money in it. Until the big players can figure out how to collect the same massive rents they do while killing the planet, they won’t lift a finger to save it.
If you think fluid genders might not be such a simple concept, you’re a hateful Nazi.
The video report Transgender Rights: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) by John Oliver (YouTube) included John Oliver describing some of the new laws being thrown out there, like “allowing high-school students to use the restrooms and locker-room facilities of the gender with which they identify”, as if there was absolutely no issue there whatsoever, as if anyone who thought that a rule/law like that might be a minefield was just a small-minded hater. Of course there are knee-jerk haters,
Does anyone else even remember being a teenager? How stupid they are? How stubborn? How deliberately obtuse and rebellious? How terrified and shy? How utterly broken? Now imagine a roomful of guys who can’t even get naked in front of each other and a girl-who-is-a-guy-inside walks in. That should be possible, in an ideal world, I guess. But it’s (A) not a number-one priority and (B) not that fucking simple.
Now reverse the genders (since it’s that easy, ammirite?). A guy-who-is-a-girl-inside walks into a locker-room full of girls. Now, is there any way to tell the difference between someone who’s seriously transgender, someone who, like all teenagers, is an utter incompetent and has convinced themselves that they are transgender and a student who is taking advantage of the law to get a look at some titties in training bras? Really, John Oliver? Everyone who thinks this isn’t as a simple as dotting a legislative I is a bigot?
Framing such obviously fraught issues as if there was nothing to be worried about is condescending to people who have reservations. While some have reservations based on prejudice, others have legitimate questions about how this is all going to work. This is the kind of attitude that makes a divide: refusing to see how anyone could have a legitimate problem with something you feel strongly about, and then judging them publicly for it. Shame is not an effective political cudgel. Or is, at best, a temporary one.
Published by marco on 13. Mar 2017 22:21:30 (GMT-5)
Since the last election, America has become obsessed with synonyms for propaganda—fake news, alternative news—a focus that is, ironically, propaganda. Anything that doesn’t fit a particular worldview is fake news. The sources that trumpet the most about this are the ones I would trust the least: when did CNN or the CIA become purveyors of truth? This newly popular obsession is a distraction.
After a week of tweets and executive orders, we see that Trump thinks he really did mean a bunch of things that said during his campaign. He signed an executive order for a moratorium on visas from several countries, focused on banning Muslims. He did not “sign it into law” because it’s patently illegal and conflicts with several existing laws. Also that’s not how executive orders work. Congress makes laws, not the executive.
But it signals his intent. And he signaled his intent in so many other ways, he’s messing with the EPA, started the KeyStone and Dakota Access pipelines back up [1], he’s building the wall, he wants to rebuild the military and stop China in the sea named after itself, use the Feds to “clean up” cities, and so on and so forth.
But don’t you remember how Democrats and the mainstream media whined about how powerless Obama was? That the office of the president can’t really make anything happen? That that’s why Obama couldn’t get us all rainbows and ponies? Although he so dearly wanted to? Well, if that’s true, why will Trump be able to get everything done in his first week? And, if it’s not true, why didn’t Obama do all of those wonderful things he told us he would? Is it because Trump is a much more powerful and effective person than Obama? Or is it because Obama didn’t really want anything other than what he ended up giving us during his presidency?
The article The Uncomfortable Truth: Are We Hating Donald Trump for the Wrong Reasons? by Ramzy Baroud (CounterPunch) discusses the actual effects of the Obama presidency.
“Obama has spent eight years reversing George W. Bush’s bad brand. Yet, Obama has done so without reversing any of Bush’s disreputable deeds. On the contrary, he has redefined and expanded war, advanced the nuclear arms race and destabilized more countries.
“Trump is also a brand, an unpromising one. The product – whether military aggressions, racism, islamophobia, anti-immigration policies, economic inequality, etc. – remains unchanged.”
Is Trump probably a worse human being than Obama? Yes, I think so. But I wouldn’t trust either one of them any farther than I could throw them.
Will the effects of Trump presidency be worse than that of Obama? He’s really going to have to try.
But how are we supposed to know what will happen based on what presidents say? The interview with Obama ‘Better Is Good’: Obama on Reparations, Civil Rights, and the Art of the Possible by Ta Nehisi Coates includes long sections from Obama like this one [2]:
“But as a general matter, my view would be that if you want to get at African American poverty, the income gap, wealth gap, achievement gap, that the most important thing is to make sure that the society as a whole does right by people who are poor, are working class, are aspiring to a better life for their kids. Higher minimum wages, full-employment programs, early-childhood education: Those kinds of programs are, by design, universal, but by definition, because they are helping folks who are in the worst economic situations, are most likely to disproportionately impact and benefit African Americans”
Would you have guessed that, during his eight years, African American wealth was wiped out? That his administration espoused unequivocal support for all police during worsening police killing of blacks? That black unemployment is higher than ever? That education is worse than ever? That 98% of the increased income/productivity/economic recovery went to the 1%? He sure talks a good game. It doesn’t matter on the ground, though, does it?
I named this article weeks ago and now the following video just landed in my inbox. He just went over a lot of the points I outlined above.
Bernie says that the $83 billion extra that Trump wants for the... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 5. Mar 2017 21:12:34 (GMT-5)
In 12 minute, Bernie provides some very good context and puts some budget numbers in perspective. He takes Trump to task about how he lies about supporting the environment and what his budget increase for the military could pay for.
Bernie says that the $83 billion extra that Trump wants for the military for next year could also pay for all qualified public-university students as well as make a good start on helping other students with their loans. That 83 billion could pay for single-payer Medicare for everyone who doesn’t have health care in the US. Hell, it could solve world hunger almost three times over.
But Trump follows all of his predecessors in having no compunction about increasing the military budget. The Council on Foreign Relations would disagree with that blanket statement—and they seem to have the data to back it up. However, the official military budget has always been manipulated to the same degree as the employment numbers. For example, the cost of running foreign wars generally run under their own budgets. Black budgets for the 17 (known) intelligence agencies is never included. [1]
At any rate, even if we stick to official numbers, what Bernie says is true: the U.S. military budget is bigger than the next 12 largest budgets combined.
This is a book of Mr. Bush’s paintings. His subjects are American soldiers. Just... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 4. Mar 2017 12:18:56 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 5. Mar 2017 00:18:16 (GMT-5)
It could have been better-timed—April 1st is still almost a month away—but George W. Bush has published yet another book, this one called Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chief’s Tribute to America’s Warriors. [1]
This is a book of Mr. Bush’s paintings. His subjects are American soldiers. Just their faces, if the cover is any indication. To be honest, I think he’s gotten better over time. He’s definitely found his own style. We’re a long way from those odd bathtub and shower paintings.
As you’d expect, I’d like to focus on the irony of it all. Here we have a former President of the Unites States who started two wars, both against non-belligerent countries and with no evidence and less reason. Both wars rage on today.
It cost the U.S. whatever remained of its reputation and trillions of dollars. He didn’t start the decline and fall of the U.S., but he definitely encouraged it.
It cost Afghanistan and Iraq their existence, for all practical purposes. He didn’t start the decline and fall of Iraq and Afghanistan, but he definitely finished it.
Irony heaped on irony until it’s nearly painful to contemplate the injustice of it all.
And yet, Bush lives in peace and happiness and wealth, puttering around his painting studio. He’s chosen to paint the soldiers that he needlessly threw into war. He calls them courageous. No-one (of mainstream import) calls him out for pandering. No-one (of mainstream import) initiates war-crimes proceedings against him. The worst anyone says about George W. Bush is that he’s less useful than Jimmy Carter [2] in his post-presidency years.
I was made aware of this book by the article Wading Through Peanut Butter by Missy Comley Beattie (CounterPunch) who aptly credited Bush with “[a] breathtaking detachment from his decisions and their far-reaching aftermath.” And his book will sell like hotcakes, probably mostly to the people whose lives now suck because Bush didn’t do anything for them.
Obama’s next book will likely do the same, with the same ironic pain associated with it when he utterly fails to address the trail of horror his ineffective and mean-spirited presidency left behind. [3]
So Trump is not an isolated case. We just have very poor memories.
I see the foreword of George’s book was written by his wife Laura. Amazon’s “Look Inside!” feature shows me that she’s gotten a bit more jaded over the years. Here’s a sample:
“If you thought he was scatter-brained before, you should see him now that he spends all day locked up in a painting studio with turpentine fumes. My word, that man couldn’t find his ass with both hands when he was president, but now I’m married to a complete numbskull who thinks he can paint. Thank God I know he’s never going to bother reading this foreword […]”
It goes on like that for pages and pages. I think the foreword’s longer than the book. No surprise there.
Published by marco on 26. Feb 2017 18:01:15 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 29. Nov 2017 17:02:22 (GMT-5)
I’m still watching John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight, but I feel he’s slipping. He’s retreating to the safety of slagging on Trump almost exclusively which is both not very funny and not very helpful. Oliver is fading into the same vanilla and safe faux-leftism that characterized his ideological predecessors Jon Stewart and, to a lesser degree, Stephen Colbert.
Both Stewart and Colbert loved the military. By the end of their respective runs, their opposition to military adventures was not no longer a priori. This mirrored Obama’s position about dumb wars. Colbert is now on network TV and his monologues are kind of painful—already much more pandering and plain than Oliver’s are quickly becoming.
Trump is not the singular problem facing the nation. He’s not making things any better, but he’s not uniquely evil. In a way, his footsteps so far are so loud and clear that there is no way you can ignore him. It makes it pretty easy to track him and oppose him.
This is different from Obama who said very different things than he did. The U.S. did not change for the better in any significant way under Obama, but there are those who love him as the 21st-century FDR. He’s more of a 21st-century JFK—who was also a very overrated president when it came to actual policy.
Taking potshots at Trump gets old because he’s such an easy target. Trump doesn’t think before he acts or speaks. Yeah, tell me something I don’t know. It’s not that funny. Oliver: You’re making it too easy for yourself, getting laughs from the easy-to-please.
Lee Camp, on the other hand, stays laser-like focused on issues of import, week after week. His writing is excellent and his presentation is deeply funny. He doesn’t take sides with any party: he teaches us about the system.
For example, episode 137 of Redacted Tonight starts off with a fantastic monologue analyzing the cloying corporatist propaganda of the latest Starbucks commercial. It’s the very first segment, called The Global Mind Control People Don’t Talk About.
Camp begins with:
“Now, if you’re a fan of this show, you already know the mainstream media fucking suuuucks. We can all agree on that. And, right now, they’re freaking out because Trump is calling them fake news. And, Trump is both correct and he spends more of his day lying. That’s most of his day. So it basically amounts to a liar calling other liars out on their lying […] [1]
“Anyway, what I wanna say is there’s another kind of fake news, another kind of mind control, that we all see all day long and it’s basically never questioned, never analyzed, never really picked apart. I’m talking about commercials. Advertisement. Corporate bullshit that is forced down our eyeholes at a tremendous pace.
“[…] Those ads craft our culture, they craft our belief system.”
Camp takes a swipe at Trump but then moves on to more appropriate, insidious targets. He spends his time informing us about the system that controls us, regardless of who’s in power. I cut a bunch of the really good jokes out above in order to focus on the content. It’s funnier in real life. The whole show is good, but if you’re impatient, watch the first 12 minutes to see for yourself.
Published by marco on 26. Feb 2017 17:21:31 (GMT-5)
CNN is fake news. CNN is pure government propaganda. They may not be stumping for the current administration, but they’re definitely pushing somebody’s war-hawk agenda. Remember, CNN was born in the cauldron of the first U.S. Gulf War: it knows where the money is. It would be only too happy to make a ton of money reporting a juicy war with Russia. Don’t believe for a minute that CNN has any scruples.
I will prove this with a single article I found as the top search result for “Russian boat Connecticut”. I searched it because I’d just heard that this was, apparently, a thing and I wanted to find out more. I was suspicious that it was a mostly fictitious tempest in a teapot that the media uses to keep the plebes stirred up about WAR with RUSSIA, but I was going to reserve judgment until I’d read the article.
The article I found was Russian spy ship lurks off Connecticut coast by Ryan Browne and Barbara Starr (CNN). Not one, but two authors were required to write this 460-word article.
If I were to skim the article rather than read it—as almost everyone does these days—I would get the impression that Russia has fired cruise missiles either at American ships or Connecticut and/or flown air raids over same and that Michael Flynn helped them do it. That sounds pretty bad. Immago to my bomb shelter now kthxbye.
It leads off with a 1:04-minute video slideshow that throws the following images at you. The only thing that these images have in common is (A) they are mostly stock photos and (B) they are vaguely associated with Russia.
It’s not clear that this boat is the one they’re reporting on. I bet it’s not, but I’m not sure. What I am damned sure of is that this boat is not in international waters and this boat is definitely not “30 miles off the coast of Connecticut”, as the first damned sentence of the article claims. It’s also not really news when this same boat “conducted similar patrols in 2014 and 2015” and the “US Navy is keeping a close eye on it.”
I don’t know where the boat in the picture is (Cuba?) but it’s definitely doesn’t look like Connecticut. Thank goodness; I thought the Rooskies had already invaded.
The next panel is a map highlighting Delaware with a big scary red box with the words “RUSSIAN SPY SHIP” (all-caps in original). The article clearly discusses that Connecticut is a new places for the boat to have gone; what the hell is this map supposed to show? That the boat passed Delaware on the way from Cuba to Connecticut? That’s basic geometry. This isn’t a picture of anything to do with the article or the report. It’s just there to be vaguely scary.
Next, we move on to a picture of what might be a rocket taking off from somewhere. This is not a picture of a Russian cruise missile nor does the article claim that the cruise missile was launched from the spy boat that that article is supposedly about. The cruise missile is a completely different story and is mentioned again only in the final paragraph. Again, CNN is doing its damnedest to scare the shit out of people without actually lying about anything. This is propaganda on a level that would make even Alex Jones blush.
The two authors unleash both barrels against Russia, showing a picture of Michael Flynn, who has absolutely nothing to do with the article otherwise. It’s just a suggestion—you fill in the blanks. Is the Trump administration taking it easy on Russian spy ships that are cruising right up to Connecticut and firing cruise missiles? Maybe they are, maybe they aren’t. But we can’t put anything past those Rooskies.
Hey, guess what? We found another stock photo of a boat! This is a different boat, but the article says that the ship in international waters off the coast of Connecticut and the other in Russian waters in the Black Sea are the same. It’s right there in the following extremely poorly written sentence that segues jarringly from the report about the first ship and onto the second ship. I had to read it three time to realize that they’d moved halfway around the world in the middle of the sentence.
“The Leonov is a Vishnya-class spy ship, as is a Russian vessel that trailed the US ship that encountered close-flying Russian aircraft in the Black Sea on Friday.”
Is the picture above the American boat in the Black Sea? I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not. I would bet money that CNN and its awesome foreign-policy writers couldn’t care less. The point is not to inform but to make you feel like Russia is provoking war by daring to fly its planes close to American boats parked on Russia’s doorstep.
I can see on the tail that this is actually a Russian jet. It’s just there to show you how dangerous jets are, especially ones that buzz over the heads of those hapless American seamen who are just trying to bring good to the world by cruising near Russian waters in the Black Sea.
The CNN report just throws everything into a single garbage article full of innuendo and allegations without barely any actual information or reporting. The pictures are mostly stock photos and are worth about as much as the backdrops behind “on-the-scene” reporters who are really reporting from the safety of their home studio. It’s bullshit. It’s propaganda.
It takes a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the reader to extract what might actually be facts from this kind of news. The intent is to get you ready for war with Russia, not to tell you about actually bad things that are happening.
The implication is that the US is the only country on the planet allowed to have a military. Just that Russia has its own military is bad enough, but actually using it for patrols is a provocation tantamount to a declaration of war. It’s only thanks to the extreme restraint and easygoing, pacific nature of the US that we haven’t responded yet. But, when we do, it will be well-deserved, ammirite?
Published by marco on 26. Feb 2017 13:25:26 (GMT-5)
As it appears, the New York Times, The LA Times, CNN and other august news-gathering organizations like Politico and Buzzfeed have been barred from a press briefing. Clearly the republic teeters. When The Gray Lady is snubbed, can internment camps be far behind? As you would expect, this immediately became a first-amendment, nay, a constitutional issue for the faux-Left, with the NYT at the forefront, hoisting its own banner high.
I don’t think press briefings are in the Constitution, though, are they? They have no anchor in law. The White House can invite or disinvite whomever they like. There is no guarantee—there are just conventions. Heretofore, the NYT had been a good ‘ol boy, a member in good standing of the club. It stings when the mean girls don’t invite you to a party.
This is not to say that the move is without some import. The article The New York Times Is Not Invited by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) includes the following summary:
“By barring it from the room, the Trump administration has changed a norm, if not a law, that we took for granted. It tells us that he is either too petty or clueless to appreciate what he’s doing. On the other hand, the New York Times might want to brush up on the First Amendment as well. It’s not that special that it gets to wrap itself in “free press” while using its barrels of ink to spew advocacy masquerading as news.”
We should be concerned about an administration letting its words be filtered only through friendly news sources. In that case, it would be less news and more a press release. But it wasn’t a blanket ban of all non-friendly organizations; it was just a handful.
It is anyway the case that press releases are treated as news. The NYT is cheerily complicit in maintaining that status quo, as long as things go their way. In what way was the NYT ever more than just a propaganda hole for these press releases? When Obama gave them, they were predictably fawning, regurgitating his administration’s desired impression word for word.
Now that they’re in opposition, they spin everything the other way, deliberately interpreting every single move by the Trump administration in the worst possible light. [1] They are doing the same, predictably, with this incident, trying their damnedest to harness people’s unwitting outrage to support their own agenda.
Greenfield goes on in the article cited above,
“[…] the New York Times […] obsesses over the every move of the Trump administration, not because it’s necessarily newsworthy, but because it offers an opportunity to be critical. And its reporting and editorial content are nearly identical; it has been substantially biased. Sometimes, wildly disingenuous.
“Often, it omits, twists or distorts information to achieve a clear purpose of challenging Trump’s every move as ranging from horrifyingly evil to the worst thing ever. Some would argue that Trump deserves no less, but that’s not the point. Give the facts, explain them in a fair and balanced way and let readers draw their own conclusions. But that’s not how advocacy journalism works, and it’s the duty of a journalist today to tell readers who to love and hate. It doesn’t make the New York Times wrong in its conclusions, necessarily, but it does make their coverage facially biased.”
Imagine I showed up to a press conference with my self-printed earthli News badge and then wailed about the end of democracy and the loss of all first-amendment rights when they quite rightly didn’t let me in. The NYT has just been traditionally allowed in, but there is no law saying they have to let anyone in. There isn’t even a law saying that the administration has to hold press conferences. [2] And they do so quite rarely. This was a press briefing, which is much less formal. And the ban was for just this briefing, not for all future ones.
We’re supposed to expend our outrage on the side of the New York Times—a newspaper that has never seen a war it didn’t like—or the LA Times—a newspaper that fired its best cartoonist because he offended their bosom buddies in the LA police [3]—or for Buzzfeed—an organization that has spent most of its existence polluting social spaces with listicles and sideboob—or for Politico—100% in-the-bag for Hilllary and the Democrats, despite the neutral-sounding name.
Are you going to shed a tear for these organizations? I’m certainly not.
Published by marco on 22. Feb 2017 07:40:24 (GMT-5)
It would seem that the country is ripe for revolution, given the coverage of protests and unrest since the inauguration of The Donald. But the title of the article Incumbent Reelection Rates Higher Than Average in 2016 by Kyle Kondik and Geoffrey Skelley (UVA Center for Politics) reveals the sad truth. Whereas Americans have learned how to march again, they still don’t know how to to use their civic tools to get what they want.
“This election cycle, 393 of 435 House representatives, 29 of 34 senators, and five of 12 governors sought reelection (several of the governors were prohibited from seeking another term). Of those, 380 of 393 House members (97%), 27 of 29 senators (93%), and four of five governors (80%) won another term. These members of Congress and governors not only won renomination, but also won in November.”
Less than 50% of the eligible voting public went to the polls and, of those that did, they voted overwhelmingly to stick with the incumbents for whom they had consistently declaimed about 6% support. Americans either don’t care about these issues, aren’t informed about them, or don’t understand how voting works.
Americans aren’t alone, though. According to the talk Why you should love statistics by Alan Smith (TEDx), people in England—both citizens and their representatives—are uniformly and deeply uninformed about the numbers that underlie the decisions that they make about the policies that decide their lives.
This is yet another well-written, darkly comic and information-packed show by Lee Camp and his crew at Redacted Tonight on RT. [1] In this show, we hear that a bipartisan resolution easily passed the Congress, authorizing the executive to do anything in its power to prevent Iran from getting nuclear... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 21. Feb 2017 22:45:08 (GMT-5)
This is yet another well-written, darkly comic and information-packed show by Lee Camp and his crew at Redacted Tonight on RT. [1] In this show, we hear that a bipartisan resolution easily passed the Congress, authorizing the executive to do anything in its power to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. I thought it was Trump that trying to dismantle the hard-won treaty with Iran? Apparently, it’s the entire government.
This was passed on January 3rd, 2017, when Obama was still in power and when the Congress was well-aware who would be in charge in just three weeks. The saber-rattling against Iran is bipartisan (and probably strongly fueled by Israeli foreign-policy interests, as ever). In fact, Obama put a part of the U.S. fleet (and its allies) into the Gulf of Aden for a giant military exercise currently in progress—with the explicit purpose of “war-gaming a war with Iran”.
Camp asks us to imagine how the U.S. would react if Iran teamed up with China and Russia to practice war games against the U.S. in the Gulf of Mexico. This is madness. And blaming everything on Trump is a giant distraction. Paying attention to Trump’s little bullshit is to be distracted from the real, dangerous issues that Trump is definitely continuing—but that he is not at all alone in pursuing. The U.S. is doing what the U.S. always does, regardless of who’s in power: protecting financial interests by making war.
Just the week before, Camp discussed the Muslim ban, rightly pointing out that, bad as it was, it was only an extension of policies in place since years under Obama.
Finally, the most recent episode tackles the U.S. government subsidies that contribute to our own undoing.
It’s not that I haven’t been paying attention. I’ve... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 14. Feb 2017 07:12:32 (GMT-5)
I’ve been approached by some loyal fans of the blog as to when I will react to the cavalcade—the tumult—of events that most definitely qualify as public policy & politics. President Trump and his flying monkeys have been very busy indeed.
It’s not that I haven’t been paying attention. I’ve been reading a lot. I publish my reading list on Instapaper and you can see the list of articles I’ve liked (RSS newsfeed) as well the firehose of all articles I’ve read (also an RSS newsfeed). I also cross-publish the articles I’ve liked on Twitter.
I still take copious notes—I just checked and I have over 80 pages of unpublished notes and citations in my Public Policy & Politics alone. I’m falling behind, though, because everything ties together and, the longer I wait, the more source material I find—ironically enough, in articles that someone has managed to publish—and the notes grow longer, which takes longer to edit together, which gives me time to find more source material, and so on and so forth.
To date, I’ve applied the following requirements to my long-form articles:
Even when my time for blogging is more restricted, I write down my thoughts, but it’s never in what I consider to be publishable form. As I wrote above, I’m still reading a lot—and definitely discussing a lot (rule #1). Keeping track of sources with citations isn’t a problem (rule #2). I’m definitely not reacting too quickly (rule #3) or I wouldn’t be writing this article.
That leaves me with material that is either just citations with a few ideas and notes (violating rule #5) or so much material has come together that either copy-editing (rule #4) or universality (rule #6) has to go. I’m not going to ditch copy-editing, but I think relaxing rule #6 will lead to far fewer violations of rule #5.
The conclusion is that I’m going to make more of an effort to publish more regularly instead of dumping a giant 25-page article every 30 days or so.
Published by marco on 22. Jan 2017 14:18:48 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 22. Jan 2017 23:17:08 (GMT-5)
Lee Camp is definitely in the lead when it comes to incisive coverage of politics with a humorous edge, as pioneered by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Unlike those two shows, he goes farther while staying on-point and not being partisan: his hate is pure and in sufficient supply for all responsible parties alike. For example, there’s his recent show on the inauguration and the march, which was really, really good.
Trigger Warning: show is broadcast by RT, the source of all evil in the world, according to the absolutely-not-beholden-to-the-US-power-elite New York Times and Washington Post.
Lee Camp and Co. provide insightful and measured coverage of the nomination hearings (focusing on Secretary of Defense). There are shots fired at (the left’s great hope) Elizabeth Warren’s lack of attack and (the other left’s great hope) Corey Booker’s craven kowtowing to Big Pharma. Obama is upbraided for all of the wonderful “dictator’s tools” he left for Trump—but Camp also points out that Obama didn’t invent most of these, that they’ve been available since Clinton and Bush, for the most part. But not only did (the left’s great hope) Obama fail to repeal the powers or curtail them—e.g. surveillance, drones, etc.—he expanded them.
Camp eloquently and humorously points out the problem with the resurgence of umbrage being taken by so many others: they act as if the evil of Trump is something special, something that the sheeple need to wake up to fight.
That’s the correct sentiment, but I take offense at the implication that the sheeple were justified in having been asleep to the exact same form of evil under Obama. Treating Trump as a special form of evil is the wrong approach—we have to be honest and see him as a natural extension of existing evil. If you treat him as special, you’ll go back to sleep once you’ve defeated him, you’ll sleep through the evil of Obama—or Cory Booker, who’ll sell us all to his pharmaceutical backers, or Elizabeth Warren, who’ll sell us all to the military-industrial complex that funds her state.
It was also nice to see him focus on the hearing where all sides come off looking beholden to special interests, instead of the one for Betsy Devos (Secretary of Education). Coverage of that hearing was much more one-sided because Devos is so clearly unaware of how the education system works in America today.
There’s a difference between knowing how something works, but being open to massive change and pleading for massive change without knowing how something currently works. Devos comes off looking bad and “the other side” (e.g. Al Franken) comes off as looking superior.
But we have to be careful of garnering too much self-congratulation from such hearings. Smug—but ultimately powerless—superiority is what got us into this situation in the first place. There’s a good chance that these champions will shit all over Devos—garnering accolades from their left-leaning fans—and then just approve her anyway when no-one is paying attention anymore. What good is that fleeting feeling of superiority then?
As the short post No Free Lunches by Corey Robin (Jacobin) points out: Devos’s response about free tuition for universities being “really great to consider and think about […] but […] there’s nothing in life that’s truly free” is pretty much the same thing that prominent Hillary Clinton supporters were saying when Bernie brought it up during the campaign. Your job is to criticize that answer regardless of who says it, not because of who said it. [1]
We all should learn to read the news more carefully, like in the post NYT Says Davos Elite Are Concerned Because Public Doesn’t Buy Their Lies Anymore by Dean Baker (CEPR: Beat the Press). Baker is the master of succinctly pointing out the capitalist/conservative bias inherent in supposedly left-leaning sources like the Washington Post and New York Times. His style is to restate what an article is really saying by removing the obfuscatory prose (i.e. propaganda). For example,
“Since these measures redistribute income upward to people like them, the Davos elite is perfectly happy with them. They only object to protectionist measures which are intended to help ordinary workers.
“The concern in Davos is that the public in western democracies no longer buys the lie that they are committed to the public good rather than lining their pockets.”
That’s the right way to read this article:
The article from the New York times is propagandistic garbage and should be ignored as a source of useful information.
]]>“I share the right-wing’s critique of Obamacare. It’s a disastrous bill. It was written by... [More]”
Published by marco on 9. Jan 2017 07:15:11 (GMT-5)
I’ve been watching a lot of Chris Hedges lately. Below is another video, this one from 2013, in which he discusses a wide range of topics from his essays, his many books as well as questions from callers.
“I share the right-wing’s critique of Obamacare. It’s a disastrous bill. It was written by corporate lobbyists. 2000 pages of it. It is essentially the equivalent of the bank-bailout bill for the pharmaceutical and insurance industries, $400 billion in subsidies. Meanwhile, the White House handed out exemptions because these corporations do not want to insure chronically ill children. Think of it in moral terms, it really means that we live in a country where it is now legally permissible for corporations—for-profit corporations—to hold sick children hostage while their parents frantically bankrupt themselves, trying to save their sons and daughters. This is the kind of world the corporate state creates.”
Published by marco on 8. Jan 2017 22:04:43 (GMT-5)
In the article Discussion between Mark Blyth and Wendy Schiller on Nov. 9, 2016 I transcribed quite a bit of Mark Blyth’s discussion of Trump’s recent electoral victory. In the video linked below, Blyth holds forth on similar themes, but 1.5 months before the election. Again, I’ve transcribed what I consider to be very nicely phrased and salient points from the 1.5-hour video below.
When discussing how to reason about the world economy, he showed a slide that he’d cadged from an IBM for Entrepreneurs presentation. The text from the screen capture (Imgur) is shown below.
The Digital Disruption Has Already Happened
- World’s largest taxi company owns no taxis (Uber)
- Largest accommodation-provider owns no real estate (Airbnb)
- Largest telecom companies own no telco infrastructure (Skype, WeChat)
- World’s most valuable retailer has no inventory (Alibaba)
- Most popular media-owner owns no content (Facebook)
- Fastest-growing banks have no actual money (SocietyOne)
- World’s largest movie house owns no cinemas (Netflix)
- Largest software vendors don’t write the apps (Apple & Google)
Next, he discussed the main thesis behind the global “Trumpets”, as he calls them. The motivation he outlines is so strong that, once you see it from his viewpoint, it’s hard to imagine that anything will happen but that Trump be elected and that the Front Nationale sweep the French elections next month.
“Now here’s the problem. If you look at France, you look at Spain and you look at Italy—most of Italy, at least—they can’t play that game. Now, they’re not big export countries. They’re large consumption countries. Now, if they had their own money—if somebody’s running a surplus, then someone else logically has to be running a deficit—if they had their own money, then they could do essentially devalue or whatever—you can do lots of things to protect yourself—but they all have the same currency.
“And they’ve also signed a set of agreements in 2012 called the Fiscal Compact, which basically bans fiscal policy in the Euro Zone. […] If you don’t allow them to run a deficit, the only thing they can do is permanently contract their economy. So you’re asking basically the Spanish, the French and the Italians to run permanent austerity budgets so that the Germans, the Poles and the Romanians can make money hand-over-fist selling to the Americans and the Chinese. Do you think that’s going to piss off the National Front?”
The global economy has taken a lot of knocks, about every decade or so for the last 40 years. People aren’t buying this new feudalism anymore because it’s now so transparently bad for most of them. The marketing machine is crumbling, screaming desperately to ignore the man behind the curtain.
“Maybe we’re at the point now that the thing that we’ve built is unraveling. Not just in terms of the collapse of the center-left or center-right party support. But basically because it’s economically unsustainable to run this super-competitive, insanely intense, disaggregated global network of production on a consumption base that’s levered up the wazoo because people have been borrowing to make up for the real-income gains they don’t have. And that’s hit the skids because we don’t know what to do.”
When asked what his platform would be as a hypothetical Senatorial candidate from Rhode Island—“from that power base!”—Mark responded:
“First one: everyone pays their taxes. No exceptions. I’ll even consider lowering rates if it’ll increase the take. […] Back in the 70s, corporates paid 20% of total taxes; today, they pay 2% in real terms. It’s abroad, it’s hidden, it’s transfer-priced, it’s a double-Irish-Dutch-sandwich, it’s all this stuff. Nonsense. Enough. Basta. We’re done with it.
“Number two: we really need to think about whether we need people to work. Because if you’re about to add robots into the mix of already-high inequality and low pay, you’re asking for trouble. It’s a bit like nationalizing healthcare. At the end of the day, everybody saves money because everybody isn’t showing up to the emergency room. […]
“Number three: we really need to be serious about doing something to abate the effects of global warming. From now on, anybody who says it’s a hoax by the Chin thing as global warming, you put them in a bag, you tie it off, you take a stick and you beat them.
“And then, if you raise tax revenues and increase infrastructure spending, which would actually abate global warming, it would mean that Boston Harbor wouldn’t actually rise by five feet, which means that my condo, at the end of its 30-year mortgage, which has been paid off by a Chinese investor, would all come to me and I’d make out like a bandit! So ultimately it’s self-serving.”
Of course, you’d have to constantly change the system to avoid another problem Blyth has mentioned in other talks: The Lukas Criterion (any system will be gamed). But those are pretty great topics to focus on. Good thing we have Mark Blyth to mention them—or we’d never hear about them at all.
Mark Blyth is absolutely brilliant. Here are some choice quotes that I manually transcribed.
]]>“How is all of this going to play out? Where is it all connected? Well, here’s a simple way of thinking about it. From 1945 to 1975, we targeted a... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Dec 2016 21:50:51 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 30. Dec 2016 22:06:08 (GMT-5)
The following video is well worth investing 90 minutes.
Mark Blyth is absolutely brilliant. Here are some choice quotes that I manually transcribed.
“How is all of this going to play out? Where is it all connected? Well, here’s a simple way of thinking about it. From 1945 to 1975, we targeted a particular economic variable called “full employment”. And there’s a thing called the Lukas Critique, which basically says that if you keep targeting something, people will game it. And they did: unions gamed it, employers gamed it. And the result was inflation.
“And after a while, that inflation became painful. Painful enough that the people who were hurt by it, the creditor classes in these countries, they banded together and funded a market-friendly revolution. And they deregulated finance and they deregulated banks and they integrated the economies of the world. And they globalized labor such that labor could no longer demand that it gets its share of productivity—because if you don’t, I’ll just move your job somewhere else.
“And all of those trade agreements—which is inevitable and we can’t roll back…you know you can go on the web and type “WTO Text” and you’ll find that it’s a very long, 700-page, legal agreement that took 5 years to thrash out between corporate interests, lawyers, lobbyists with very little input from civil society.
“The same is true of the EUs agreements on capital movements, the banking union, take your pick. And there’s a moment when people just began to figure out that for the past 30 years, from about 1985 until now, huge amounts of money have been generated in the global economy and, as we know from the work of Thomas Piketty and others, most of it’s gone up to a tiny fraction of the population. So there’s been a huge amount of growth, but hardly anyone’s benefited.
“[…]
“Now there’s a macro-economic underpinning to this as well. Because after we decided to target full employment for 30 years, we decided to target inflation for 30 years. I don’t see where the Lukas Critique doesn’t actually apply to that one as well. And we’ve managed to create a world in which you can dump 13 trillion Euros into the global money supply through quantitative easing and other programs and there’s no inflation anywhere.
“And here’s your problem. Once you’ve levered up your banking system and bailed it out and dumped that on the public purse and said you need to cut that terrible debt. When people’s personal balance sheets are still bloated from all the credit they took on in the 2000s and they don’t have wage growth and there’s no inflation to ease the burden of the debt, then the creditors fight harder to get their money back.
“So why Trump? It’s economic. If you recognize that simple fact, you can put Trump in there with Brexit, you can put Trump in there with Jeremy Corbyn, you can put him in with all the rest of it.
“And I’ll leave you with one set of numbers, which is an absolute planner for this whole thing. In 2015, Wall Street bonuses, not regular compensation, 7 years after they were bailed out with the public purse, totaled $28.4 billion. Total compensation paid to every single person in this country (the U.S.) who earns minimum wage: $14 billion. I’ll stop there.”
Because they’re all cheating. It reminds me of the 2008 crash, which was acknowledged days after the market actually crashed because all of the big banks wouldn’t mark to market until they’d shored up a “net short position themselves”. I’m citing from my review of The Big Short in Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2016.14. Another quote from that movie is also very similar.
“Look at the TABX. You can see that the CDOs are worth zero! So you know what they’re doing right? They’re selling their dog-shit CDOs, then they go to another bank and short the shit they just fucking sold! Right now, every bank in town is unloading these shit bonds onto unsuspecting customers. And they won’t devalue them until they get them off their books. This level of criminality is unprecedented, even on fucking Wall Street.”
After Wendy Schiller gave an encouraging speech to the precious snowflakes, talking about power dynamics between Republicans and Democrats, Blyth continued mercilessly.
“I think the Wall Street issue goes much deeper than this. If you download from Wikileaks the Podesta e-mails and start searching for place names, something very interesting happens. One of the place names that comes up the most is Martha’s Vineyard. Another one that comes up after that is Davos. Another one that comes after that is Washington D.C. and then basically the distribution of real places where real people actually live disappears into the tail.
“We talk about the Democrats, the Democratic Party. I don’t know who that is. I know that there’s a bunch of people who have made very nice, six-figure careers in D.C. bouncing from agency to agency, starting wars, getting promoted, never actually paying the cost for it, waiting for the next administration to give them another pay-hike.”
A little later, Blyth again:
“Let’s think about what Obama’s actually doing for his legacy. You know they were saying he was going to ram TTIP through a lame-duck session of Congress? A free-trade agreement. You that thing that lots of people were upset about?
“Let’s go to Europe for a moment. Sigmund Gabriel, the head of the Social Democrats [Germany]. I was at his shop 3 weeks ago, I said, where’s Sigmund? He was in Wallonia, campaigning for a free-trade agreement with Canada. This is the head of the Social Democratic Party. When their job is carrying water for corporations to get investor-protection treaties and then communing with Goldman, where the money is, then why would you believe in them? I think the credibility problem is absolutely enormous.”
These quotes are mostly to do with finance, but Blyth ranges all over with equal sagacity, especially in European and world politics and climate change. Here’s one more on climate change.
“I’ll tell you what’s not going to happen and I posted a map of heat signatures of all around the globe. The average high temperature for Providence in November is 53ºF. The average is 51.7ºF. Every single day this month has been about 10ºF above that. And this isn’t local to us. It’s roasting. The entire Arctic is 5ºF above normal.
“And we now have a government that says that. He says—and he says he was joking, but he did say it—that this is a hoax perpetuated by the Chinese government. And we know that the Republican Party en masse refuses to believe in climate change or global warming.
“This is your disaster. This is an unmitigated disaster. Paris is already redundant. It is completely redundant. 2ºC. We’re already there. Forget about it, right? So it’s just a question of when the water in Boston Harbor starts to hit the million-dollar condos and then maybe people will wake up about it. And it’s probably coming a lot sooner than we think, in that regard.
“Would it have been any different with Clinton in charge? I don’t think—I like to call it the “nudge” liberalism—incremental approach that those politicians seem to favor…they would have done a focus group to find out if people liked climate change or not and they probably would have found that many people don’t like it, so they probably would have left it alone. I don’t think they would have done anything different.
“They would both be equally hopeless. Basically, we’re roasting.”
A must-see.
I can’t even summarize this. Watch all of it. If you don’t understand it, be worried, then rectify the situation. Because they explain exactly what’s going on. With no deviation and no exaggeration. I was surprised to see how reasonable... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Dec 2016 21:41:55 (GMT-5)
The following video is well worth investing 90 minutes.
I can’t even summarize this. Watch all of it. If you don’t understand it, be worried, then rectify the situation. Because they explain exactly what’s going on. With no deviation and no exaggeration. I was surprised to see how reasonable West has gotten. He was on the Obama bandwagon for a few years.
Here are some choice quotes that I manually transcribed.
“It’s not a radical movement’s job to seize power. Its job is to make power fear it.”
“Indifference to evil is more evil than evil itself.”
“Once any cabal, whether it’s monarchic, oligarchic or anarchic, seizes power totally, it engenders political paralysis. In essence, you have…which we have with the Democratic party with Clinton and Obama, a self-identified liberalism that is a faux-liberalism. So it speaks in the traditional feel-your-pain language of liberalism, but it assiduously serves the interests of that oligarchic corporate cabal.
“And that means that the government is thrown into crisis because it is unable to respond to the rights, grievances, injustices, the most basic needs of the citizen. And all of that is getting worse in the name of austerity.
“The most dangerous institution in America is the war industry and the military. They are doing what in late empire these forces always do, which is expanded beyond the capacity of empire to sustain imperialism and military adventurism.
“Officially we spend less than 54% of discretionary spending on the military, but that masks all sorts of other spending, veterans affairs, nuclear arsenal and the whole black budgets, especially the intelligence budgets that we’re not allowed to see. By some estimates, we’re spending up to 1.6 trillion dollars per year on war.
“And total war, which was imposed on us by the corporatists, after WWII, who conspired with militarists not only for profit, but to make war on those social movements: it had both a political and economic agenda. And so the country is disemboweled physically, our infrastructure is crumbling, our unemployment figures are completely fictitious.”
“There’s a wonderful line in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason where he says that examples are the go card [unclear. -ed.] of judgment. That people would rather see sermons than hear sermons. It is only by example, it is only by living a certain kind of life, tied to a certain kind of community, weaving a grand vision that embraces all of humanity, if not all of sentient beings, that a sense of the good becomes contagious. That’s the only thing.
“Dysfunctional species that we are, in the face of space and time where narcissism, tribalism, envy, hatred, revenge, resentment—those are the dominant tendencies of our history as a species. And how do you break the cycle? Of the hatred, the domination, the resentment, the revenge and so forth?
“It’s by examples of people who are profoundly motivated with a deep sense of love of something beyond themselves, beyond their families, beyond their clans. That’s what democracy is: a moral ascension toward an embrace of something beyond just your individual, your own family or your own tribe.”
I heard from a few sources that the U.S. Congress finally voted against funding Israel. That is patently untrue. What actually sparked this rumor is that—for the first time... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Dec 2016 11:21:47 (GMT-5)
I figure that’s a better title than “Obama administration takes a significant step toward ending the occupation”.
I heard from a few sources that the U.S. Congress finally voted against funding Israel. That is patently untrue. What actually sparked this rumor is that—for the first time ever—the U.S. allowed a vote in the U.N. Security Council to proceed against Israel. Congress had nothing to do with it. The budget for Israel stands. The U.S. didn’t even vote against Israel. Instead, Ambassador to the U.N. Samantha Power abstained from voting.
Is resolution 2334 significant? Not really. It’s a non-binding resolution [1], which means that Israel will add it to the pile of other non-binding resolutions that they’re already got stacked next to the toilet. [2]
It’s an admonition, a recrimination. And this is the first time that the U.S. didn’t veto it. That’s the news. You might be excused for being underwhelmed. However, in this case, the bar has been set so low that this does actually count as news. It’s just that it won’t lead to a single bit of change in Israel.
The supposed background of the story is that the U.S. has been asking Israel to slow down its settlement-expansion. Netanyahu responded by increasing it. This has happened several times over the last decades, with few to no repercussions.
Now, finally, it has cost Israel something: a non-binding resolution has been filed in the official records of the U.N. I wouldn’t expect the white helmets to show up anytime soon.
This tepid response is the most anger that the Obama administration can muster, even at the very end, when it doesn’t matter anymore. What does matter to Obama is legacy. He wants to be remembered as having fought for a resolution in the Middle East, so he makes this tepid move, significant only to Washington insiders.
Predictably, all of the usual suspects got their panties in a bunch anyway. Because a bully demands 100% respect. Any deviation for slavish devotion is rewarded with a completely disproportionate response—to discourage future transgressions against its power.
The article Obama faces widespread backlash after abstaining from UN Israel vote by Rebecca Kheel (The Hill) cites all of the usual suspects, John McCain, Lindsay Graham, Tom Cotton, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and, of course, Charles Schumer. None of them said anything that will make you any wiser for having read it.
Isreal’s response was reasonable, thoughtful and measured, also as expected,
“In response to the resolution, the government of Israel retaliated with a series of diplomatic actions against members of the Security Council, including recalling its ambassadors, summoning member countries’ ambassadors, cancellations of visits, and cancellation of aid.”
The citations below are from the aforementioned comments.
Published by marco on 4. Dec 2016 17:43:11 (GMT-5)
In response to a link to the article and video Why Trump supporters stand by debunked claim (CNN) and the ensuing comments, I posted the following discussion.
The citations below are from the aforementioned comments.
To this, I received an insightful response that concluded with the following request.
“I’m interested in what you think could be done to convey facts to people without being or seeming elitist. Correcting someone when they’re just straight up wrong is never popular even when the stakes are low.”
I obliged with the following response.
Attention: failure to “condense complex information into soundbites that people can repeat.” [1]
I know it’s obvious, but I have to start with this: you won’t convince anyone they’re wrong by just telling them that they’re wrong.
If your viewpoints are really that divergent, you won’t be able to prove to them that they’re mistaken. Not without a lot of work.
You have to present information and help them find a way of assimilating it while saving face. In effect, you have to help them find a way to believe that they were never wrong in the first place while at the same time now believing the thing that you want them to believe, which is also the exact opposite of what they believed yesterday.
Not a mean feat.
Making a face that screams “I can’t believe you believe something so stupid and wrongheaded” (like the CNN interviewer) is obviously wrong. Condescension in general only helps you feel better about yourself. With it, you signal that you think the other person is a lost cause.
It’s about empathy, I think. Start with assuming that the person functions rationally. They may not behave rationally because they’re really, really bad at chaining together data, but their opinions came from *somewhere*. They might be misinformed—perhaps drastically so—but they are probably reacting to something real, some real problem in their lives. Their problem-solving is atrocious, but that is an opportunity to get them on your side. (Which is hopefully the side of logic and “reality”, whatever that is.)
On that note, another important tool is self-doubt. Doubt your information as much as you doubt theirs. Doubt your information *with* them. This is not to say that everything is up in the air. But sometimes you’ve worked years to build up opinions and a storehouse of information. It took you a lot of soul-searching and flip-flopping to get where you are. And then you present your current knowledge as a finished package and expect others to just accept it.
Why? Because you’re so smart? Sometimes that works, if they know you and know how damned smart you are. In my experience, even that is rarely enough. You have to convince them. That means that you have to take the time to show them how you got where you are. You can’t seriously just expect them to adopt your beliefs just … because… (You’re smarter? Your sources aren’t full of lies? Would that sound convincing to you were the situation reversed?)
You will have completely differently sources of information than they do. Show them that you know that your sources are also not 100% unvarnished, unbiased truth. You have to work to find common ground. You can guide them, but you have to let them lead the way. And if you see that they’re going somewhere interesting that you haven’t been before, roll with it. You might learn something. They’re not 100% wrong. Hell, there are more than enough real grievances in America that you can use as a common platform on which to build a solution.
If you let them see that you’re also in doubt, that can help. If you have no doubts about what you know, then you’re just as hopeless as they are.
So, the lady in the video (that I only watched for 15 seconds). She was yelling about 3 million illegal immigrants voting Democrat in California. First off, recognize that this discussion is an utter distraction for everyone involved. California was going Democrat anyway. It doesn’t matter. The only reason this is on TV is to show smug liberals how much smarter they are than the flyover-state folks. That kind of stuff sells like hotcakes and you can smash a bunch of ads for overpriced smartphones in there. Contributing to a reasonable conversation isn’t part of the plan. Distracting everyone from such conversations *is*.
The first step in talking to that lady—hell, in talking to anyone—is to empathize. You have to walk them back down the road of their opinions until you get to a place where you have common ground, where you can see where she might be coming from.
Why would she be up in arms about illegals? Because they’re taking jobs. This is true. They are terrible jobs, but jobs nonetheless. Are they also getting health care? Yes, some of them, some form of health care. Because we are not a nation of monsters. (Let’s let that assumption stand despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary.)
Why are those things a problem? Because, despite the protestations of the “real” media, the economy never recovered from 2008 for most people. Hell, most people never benefited from the “boom” leading up to 2008 since the last crash in 2000, the dotcom boom from which only a select few benefited … and so on.
At any rate, in 2016, there are not enough good jobs around. The jobs that are available are terrible and don’t pay well. And there aren’t even enough of those. Nor does it seem like anyone has a plan for creating the kind of jobs anyone wants to do for an extended period. There is no plan for long-term security, just dog-eat-dog struggle and let the market pick winners. That’s worked out for me, but I recognize that it doesn’t scale.
This is a real, legitimate problem. Well, what’s the liberal response? Educate yourself to a better job! Go to college! Everybody can be white-collar and above-average! Engage in the political process and make a change!
This rings hollow when you can’t keep your head above water, when you know these exhortations to improve don’t apply to you. You don’t want to go to college, you just want a job that doesn’t kill you and lets you feed your kids. How can you “engage” in local politics when you’re working two shift-jobs? Or when you’re hustling the whole time to find a job or make ends meet? When the only jobs are at check-cashing places or prisons? It’s not an insurmountable dilemma, but a solution is neither obvious nor easy. Making it sound like it is is condescending and unproductive.
Or we liberals want to provide entitlements and support programs—all great ideas, in my opinion—but without providing a way of letting people accept this kind of help without the associated stigma. Our society strongly associates worth and personal value with work, with labor. If you don’t have a job, you’re nothing. You don’t earn your keep. We’re now already deep into a world in which it’s no longer feasible to talk about full employment but the stigma of freeloading is still paramount. Those most affected see others taking entitlements and hate them. But they can’t then take the same benefits without sacrificing their entire world-view. People are hypocrites, but there are limits.
This is intractable. The solutions offered by liberals are pie-in-the-sky bullshit and flimflam (partially true) [2], so people lash out against others, against anyone that they’ve been told is the cause of their misery.
This deep problem can’t be fixed without serious restructuring and soul-searching by everyone involved. It’s going to take a lot of work.
It’s not just liberals who can be condescending. To draw an example at random, here’s one from the article Highlights from the comments thread on school choice by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) discusses food deserts below.
“There’s a defensible version of the term [food deserts], which is that in very poorly planned car-centered zoning-regulated cities without good public transportation it’s not always possible for someone without a car to easily get to the stores they want, but just posing the problem that way makes the solution pretty obvious.”
Yes, the solution is obvious: rebuild American society in a completely different way than it is currently structured. No more suburbs and don’t require people to have to provide themselves with a transportation infrastructure in order to feed their families. Done. Easy-peasy.
You’re not helping.
Most of this coverage comes from the same heedless simpletons who’ve failed miserably as... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 27. Nov 2016 16:57:12 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 28. Nov 2016 08:31:28 (GMT-5)
I haven’t been asleep. I’ve noticed that Trump was elected president of the United States. I’ve been following the hyperbolic reactions and speculations. Predictions of doomsday have been loosed with abandon.
Most of this coverage comes from the same heedless simpletons who’ve failed miserably as journalists umpteen times. But this time, we should listen to them because what they have to say is important. Any opinion that lines up with their own is valid—regardless from whom it comes (i.e. another fool who hasn’t passed up an opportunity to be spectacularly wrong in the past).
So I’ve taken my time with my reaction, to counterbalance the gut-reactions of the rest of the world. That doesn’t mean it’s any better—just that it’s less likely that I’ll regret what I’ve written. [1]
I was in Germany for the entire election, shifted 6 hours from EST. I led a two-day training on Tuesday and Wednesday; I traveled Monday night.
I’d mostly forgotten the election was even happening. I got a ride back to the hotel from a guy in my training and he asked what I thought about the election. I expressed no preference either way; he concurred, shaking his head. Urs asked if I could even stand not being able to check on results. I told him it wasn’t that difficult. Knowing my penchant for American politics, he didn’t believe me—but it was true.
I hadn’t really been following the U.S. elections very closely for a while but I had heard that either Hillary had an insurmountable lead or that Trump was closing the gap. That’s the kind of news you get from media more interested in remuneration than accuracy.
Some of the comics I read (e.g. XKCD, SMBC) were exhorting readers to vote—a whiff of desperation was in the air.
It was as I was searching for an accurate electoral map that I realized—unlike in other years—I was looking for electoral predictions for the first time after the election.
I didn’t check my phone [2], I didn’t check the interwebs, I just didn’t really care. I’d written off the election because both candidates were so abhorrent to me. I’d voted for Jill Stein months ago.
On election night, I’d come back to the hotel and had dinner and wellness to look forward to. The saunas helped me easily forget about the election. At least until a guy from the area asked me about it in the 95ºC “Blocksauna”—but all thought was gone again after jumping in the 5ºC “Polarbärbad”.
The next morning, I saw a text message from a friend about “if things go south here, I’m coming over there”, but someone always writes that during elections. Usually I check newsfeeds in the morning, but that’s on my computer at home, not on the work laptop. I don’t check Facebook regularly. I don’t use push notifications on my phone. I had another long day of training to run, so I quickly forgot about the election again.
Immediately after the training, we headed to the Bad Grönenbach train station (see image right). I’m in a foreign country with no data-roaming package and (as you can clearly see) no wireless in the train station. We were chatting about the training and next steps, not the election.
In Memmingen, we had to wait longer for our next train, so we went to dinner at Restaurant Zum Älles, which felt like it hadn’t changed since 1955. We were having a beer before dinner and toasted another successful training. The radio was on; the elderly proprietors were reading newspapers. No-one else was there but Urs and me.
I heard something about Martina Navratilova saying that she was surprised to see how racist America still was. It was then that it dawned on me that Trump had won. I had to ask Urs if it was true. He was astonished that I didn’t know. He’d known since that morning when he checked the news.
I gut-laughed. Literally. My look of surprise was enough to convince him that I was hearing about President Trump for the first time the day after the election. We ordered another round and toasted President Trump.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
I do care. Probably more than you. And almost certainly for longer than you. I’ve been paying attention for decades. Most of you just noticed that there is something deeply wrong with how America works. Welcome to the club. But you should sit down and listen for a little while before you start pretending that you’re in charge. The first step isn’t whining, and it’s also not claiming that you have the solution and everyone else is too stupid to see how right you are. The first step is getting a realistic grasp on the situation and then setting priorities.
I appear not to care because I didn’t see an upside to a Clinton presidency either, so I can’t get all broken up about her not being elected. I was thinking the other day that I could understand the uproar, had Trump defeated Bernie. That, in my mind, would have been a greater shame, narrowly missing out on having a much-more progressive president—one that you wouldn’t have to check every nanosecond to make sure he wasn’t going to sell us out behind our backs. You’d still have to keep tabs, but at least you could catch a catnap every now and then.
And, then, in a flash, I realized why people are in the streets: a lot of people think that that is exactly what happened. Think about it: if you’re deep in the bubble, then you have no idea that Hillary Clinton isn’t a progressive. You don’t even remember how she and her coterie of merry thieves flat-out stole the primary from Bernie Sanders. Those same Democrats are now calling for a recount and re-election because they think “they was robbed”.
These keening, hair-pulling depths of despair come from an unshakable belief that Hillary was the one and now we have the Devil incarnate. I’m here to reassure you both that Trump is no worse than many others (look up Lyndon B. Johnson and “racist quotes” and bask in the glow of racist cant from just a few decades ago) and that Hillary would have been just like all the others. That is, I’m reassuring you that your hopes were only dashed because you ever believed there was any hope in the first place. There wasn’t. The system makes sure of that. You shouldn’t be so broken up about this election because your first mistake was believing there was ever a good option in the first place. Join us. Join us at the table of malcontents and cynics. Join us at the grown-ups table.
The “Grown-ups table” is condescending, I know. It can be maddening when people claim that you don’t know enough to have an opinion. Or when people claim that what you know is wrong. But remember: “the more you know, the more you’re aware of what you don’t know”. If what you know often comes into conflict with reality, you have to reexamine what you thought you knew. If you don’t bother doing that, don’t be surprised when others don’t want to re-hash old arguments with you. If you were recently shocked to the very core of your being that Clinton lost, then please take the time to figure out how that came to be—and fix it—before you try telling everyone your new opinions.
The catastrophe hasn’t just started. Things didn’t just get cataclysmic. America was not a Utopia before Trump was elected; it was more an Elysium. Things have been bad for most people for a long while and both of the major parties are complicit in keeping things that way. Hillary would have continued things that Obama did, much as Obama continued things that Bush did. Be honest about their legacies and you’ll see they’re not that different: drones, surveillance, war, big-business giveaways, bank bailouts, class war.
You think you’re clever when you tell Trump voters that they’ve been duped. Of course they have. But so were you. Hillary was duping you hard. Just like Obama duped you. The peace president, remember? That was so good and so true.
The Paradise you’ve retroactively envisioned isn’t coming to an end. It never was. I’m glad that you’ve all started paying attention now that Trump is in charge, but it’s hard not to hate you all a little bit for being mindless zombies so long as the guy in charge wasn’t threatening your lifestyle. You only charge to action once you see something that might affect you and yours. Injustice that affects people out of your sightline? Meh. Drone away, Obama.
An objective look at major policy points shows no change. She wouldn’t have closed Guantánamo; she wouldn’t have pulled back troops; she would have fucked up climate-change policy to benefit world players just like Obama did.
Sure, we wouldn’t be talking about federal abortion rights if she were president, but neither would we be talking about the fact that most women in America don’t have de facto access to abortion because of insidious access policies that do an end-run around the law that Hillary wouldn’t change.
Would it be bad if abortion gets rolled back in the U.S.? Yes, but make sure that that’s actually an issue before spending all of your time and energy on it. If you’re attacking straw-men, you’re not doing anyone any good. It’s probably counterproductive because you’ll suck in a lot of other people whose time might otherwise have been well-spent.
Probably number one on the list of issues is the climate. Everyone’s pining for the days of the Paris Agreement. That’s stupid. That agreement was a sham from start to finish and, at best, an anemic patch on the gaping wound of climate change. But when you let others frame the debate for you, they get you to savage them unless they agree to the Paris Accords. Then they, slyly grinning, agree, because Br’er Rabbit doesn’t mind that briar patch at all.
Does it look like Trump is going to be terrible for the environment? Yes. But look at Obama’s record. Trump will have to work really hard to change the slope of the downward trend of the last several decades, stretching from Clinton to Bush to Obama. Obama’s administration found trillions to keep banks healthy and expected you to be happy with a few paltry millions [3] for alternative energy.
The people Trump seems to want to hire look terrible.
But so do most of the people Obama hired. Remember Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education? Or Rahm Emmanuel as Chief of Staff? Or Larry Summers, Jack Lew (Citigroup) and Timothy Geitner as Secretaries of Treasury or economic advisors? Or billionaire investment banker Penny Pritzker as Secretary of Commerce? Or Tom Vilsack as Secretary of Agriculture? The guy who wanted to give away whatever money we had left to the corn lobby, who also doesn’t believe in global warming? Leon Panetta as Secretary of Defense? And now head of the CIA? Samantha Power as U.N. Ambassador? Susan Rice as NSC Chief? Or Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State? Hell, those three ladies never saw a third-world country they didn’t think they could bomb back to health.
Do you know how toxic those people are to a progressive America? Or were you just not paying attention?
It didn’t start getting bad with Obama, I know. What about George Bush as President? Was that better than Trump? Really? With Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense? Or Cheney as Vice President? Condaleeza Rice as Secretary of State? She also never saw a country that she didn’t want to bomb flat, which makes you despair for the supposed soft touch of a woman in the halls of power. Or John Ashcroft, followed by Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General? Henry Paulson—Mr. TARP—as Secretary of the Treasury?
Keep going back. Bill Clinton. Madeleine Albright—Mrs. “Half a million dead kids in Iraq isn’t too high a price to pay”—as Secretary of State. Robert Rubin—Mr. Citibank—and Larry Summers as Secretaries of the Treasury.
Go back more. Bush the first. Cheney as Secretary of Defense. Dan Quayle as the hapless Vice President (the king of useless Vice Presidents).
Ronald Reagan was President, for God’s sake. An actor who’d lost what little brains he ever had. A hateful, vengeful, spiteful man who covered it all with a folksy attitude.
Carter had Zbigniew Breszinski as a top advisor. That got us into Afghanistan for the first time.
Before that we had the hapless Gerald Ford, who kept Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State, the man who set the bar for violence in that position that all of his many admirers/successors have struggled to match. He started off Donald Rumsfeld in his first turn as Secretary of Defense. Dick Cheney was his Chief of Staff.
Before him was Richard Milhouse Nixon, say no more. He had Henry Kissinger as Secretary of State first, which should say enough about his attitude toward global violence.
Trump’s going to have to try super-hard to make his cabinet as bad as his predecessors’. That’s not to say he won’t be able to do it. But stop pretending that he’ll be the first to stack his team of advisors with rich-loving, climate-denying warmonger billionaires.
You feel like you’re winning, but you’re winning the battle they set up for you, while their troops annihilate everything else. And “they” here is not just Trump. If you’re going to be useful, you have to acknowledge and “own” Obama’s legacy too. And Hillary’s. To be in this club, you can’t be in any other club.
Published by marco on 24. Oct 2016 22:34:25 (GMT-5)
In An Ocean of Misdirection, Vote Hillary or we’re all gonna die!, The left’s answer: blame everything on the Russians and Trigger-happy: Hillary Clinton vs. the World, I tried to organize my thoughts about the upcoming election, with dubious success. In this article, I focus more on the direct danger that a Clinton administration may be for the world, especially with her expressed intent in Syria.
The article The Hillary Clinton Presidency has Already Begun as Lame Ducks Promote Her War by Diana Johnstone (CounterPunch) is a good place to start, with a wealth of background on the war in Syria.
“In effect, the U.S. Air Force acted as air cover for the Islamic fanatics […] This was not only a violation of the cease-fire painstakingly worked out by Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. It was an open military aggression by the United States on the territory of a sovereign state. […]”
The article War or Peace? by Dennis Kucinich (CounterPunch) concurs:
“A US attempt to impose a no-fly zone in Syria would, as Secretary Clinton once cautioned a Goldman Sachs audience, “kill a lot of Syrians,” and, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dunford, lead to a war with Russia. If the US has not been invited into a country to establish a “no-fly zone” such an action is, in fact, an invasion, an act of war.”
Reassuringly, the article Why a No-Fly Zone Will Not Solve the Crisis in Aleppo by Patrick Cockburn (CounterPunch) doesn’t think that even Hillary is reckless enough to try a no-fly zone, despite her oft-repeated support of the plan.
“The proposal put forward to shoot down Russian and Syrian aircraft over Eastern Aleppo in a bid to end the bombardment of this part of the city is wholly unrealistic. The West is not going to risk a war against a nuclear power and its Syrian ally in order to help the 250,000 to 275,000 civilians trapped there. To pretend anything else is empty bombast detached from the realities on the ground. The danger of such wild schemes is that they divert attention from more realistic plans to save the besieged from further suffering and death. (Emphasis added.)”
Unfortunately, the emphasized phrase—“empty bombast detached from the realities on the ground”—sounds just like standard U.S. foreign policy.
A follow-up article Destroying Syria: a Joint Criminal Enterprise by Diana Johnstone (CounterPunch) discusses how the U.S. is bending the story in Syria to suit its purposes.
“In this view, the rebels disappear. So do all their foreign backers, the Saudi money, the Wahhabi fanatics, the ISIS recruits from all over the world, the U.S. arms and French support. The war is only about the strange whim of a “dictator”, who amuses himself by bombing helpless children and blocking humanitarian aid. This view reduces the five-year war in Syria to the situation as it was portrayed in Libya, to justify the no-fly zone: nothing but a wicked dictator bombing his own people. For the public that likes to consume world events in fairy tale form, this all fits together. Sign a petition on your computer and save the children.”
This is just how the future Clinton administration wants it. It’s just how Libya was “handled”. It’s just how Iraq and Afghanistan were “handled”. Simplify the story to one of pure evil to drum up support at home, then throw the U.S. military at it and sit back and profit. The war will eventually blow up in everyone’s faces, but only after enormous benefits in personal power and wealth have been reaped. And the plan follows along on the path plowed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama in those other countries, to radicalize the Middle East in order to soften it up for takeover.
“The plain truth is that Syria is the victim of a long-planned Joint Criminal Enterprise to destroy the last independent secular Arab nationalist state in the Middle East, following the destruction of Iraq in 2003. While attributed to government repression of “peaceful protests” in 2011, the armed uprising had been planned for years and was supported by outside powers: Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United States and France, among others. The French motives remain mysterious, unless linked to those of Israel, which sees the destruction of Syria as a means to weaken its archrival in the region, Iran.”
As ever in the Middle East, U.S. interests are strongly tied to those of Israel—no matter how fanatical or self-destructive they might be for both countries. The obsession with Iran and Iraq and now Syria has more than a little to do with the increasingly militant Israel which, under Netanyahu, is more belligerent and confident in its power than ever.
Once again, we have a black/white narrative with no room for the grays of reality (as described in An Ocean of Misdirection). Just like U.S. citizens were easily led to believe that Iraq was behind 9/11 and could attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons in 40 minutes—remember Condaleeza’s mushroom cloud?—now we’re riding to the rescue of Syrian innocents, fighting the dastardly evil of Assad and his puppet-master Putin.
An op-ed On the Bombing of Aleppo by George Soros (New York Review of Books) inadvertently lays bare the machinery of propaganda.
“Other articles in The New York Times and elsewhere have vividly depicted the suffering of the people of Aleppo and the heroic efforts of the doctors and civilians like White Helmets who are risking their lives to help them. When the facts are fully established, Putin’s bombing of Aleppo will be viewed as among the modern world’s most egregious war crimes. (Emphasis added.)”
“When the facts are fully established.” That is almost exactly right. Once the right facts have been distilled to form the accepted history, the American people will once again be primed to ride out to war.
At least he’s honest, even though he’s probably unaware of it. Yes, by the time the NYT has fulfilled its propaganda mission, its reader will view Putin as Hitler. Setting it up for Hillary to tee it off. Why are these people so gung-ho for another World War? Or are they truly deluded that they can push Russia over so easily?
Back to Johnstone:
“This works because most Americans just can’t believe that their government would do such things. Because normal ordinary people have good intentions and hate to see children killed, they imagine that their government must be the same. It is hard to overcome this comforting faith. It is more natural to believe that the criminals are wicked people in a country about which they really understand nothing.”
On Assad and Syria: a Reply to a Reader by Diana Johnstone (CounterPunch) continues by pointing out the utter cynicism at all levels in the media’s focus on the children of Syria while at the same time ignoring the U.S. role in the area. Namely, that the U.S. is kinda sorta supporting both sides, being against ISIS because of course you have to be against ISIS but kinda for ISIS because the Russians and Assad are also fighting ISIS and we can’t let the Russians win. (See The left’s answer: blame everything on the Russians for a rundown of how bad the Russians are.)
“The root of the problem, as I say in my article, is a longstanding ambition by the United States and its allies to replace the Syrian Arab nationalist state with an obedient pro-Western clique, friendly to Israel. Since that seems out of reach at the present, the strategy is simply to keep the war going as long as possible, deepening the chaos, until nobody much is left except the exiles in London being groomed by Western powers to win rigged elections.”
“By dragging out the war, more and more children will die, as well as adults, whose lives are also worth something. But it is interesting that humanitarian propaganda focuses only on children, as if realizing that most Westerners are totally indifferent to the massive deaths.”
The Obama administration’s handling of Syria has led to a morass that is killing thousands and leaving millions more without homes. If the U.S. would just team up with Russia to kill off ISIS—stabilizing Assad in the process—it would be a sub-optimal achievement, but still better than what’s happening now. It could possibly staunch the bleeding, though there are no guarantees.
Instead, they dither. But there’s a method to the seeming incompetence. Johnstone is a longtime chronicler of Clinton, with her recent book Queen of Chaos and continues to comment in the article Hillary Clinton’s Strategic Ambition in a Nutshell by Diane Johnstone (CounterPunch). She makes a credible case there that “[Hillary] wants to achieve regime change in Russia.” Furthermore,
“She enjoys the support of most of the State Department and much of the Pentagon, and Congress is ready to go.”
The modern-day Curtis Le Mays will happily ignore the reality of war to get them some Rooskies. The American people are only too happy to ignore their economic misery at home to focus their blame on Russia, a comforting and familiar enemy.
Citing Hillary Clinton herself from her Goldman speeches, the article Hillary Clinton and Syria: Stupidity or Something Worse? by Eric Schuler (Antiwar.com) reveals that Hillary is well-aware of the implications of her war-hawkishness. She knows what it means to try to enforce a no-fly zone over Syria. America has the power to do it and it furthers her personal agenda of what’s best for America. Civilians will die in droves. She just doesn’t care. Hell, she has Madeleine Albright as a role model, who also though that half a million Iraqi kids were a small price to pay for keeping Saddam Hussein cornered in Iraq.
Here’s Hillary herself, assuring her 1% sponsors that she’s got it all under control.
“So we’re not as good as we used to be, but we still – we can still deliver, and we should have in my view been trying to do that so we would have better insight. […]
“To have a no fly zone you have to take out all of the air defense, many of which are located in populated areas. So our missiles, even if they are standoff missiles so we’re not putting our pilots at risk – you’re going to kill a lot of Syrians. So all of a sudden this intervention that people talk about so glibly becomes an American and NATO involvement where you take a lot of civilians. (Emphasis added.)”
Clinton’s proven that she will continue to be dangerous. She herself said that she would be. She’s a war hawk. Hillary knows what will happen. But the tasty target of regime change in Russia—toppling terrible Putin and getting a pliant Yeltsin-like puppet back in there—is worth any price.
A question that may bubble up in the mind of an America-firster is “could it work?” That is, if Hillary is elected and Hillary is so gung-ho to go at Russia to topple its regime, could that happen? Would Russia (with Putin at the helm, not Yeltsin) just tuck its tail between its legs and go home? Would Russia just accept America’s fake apologies for downed planes and avoid further conflict? That doesn’t sound too likely. I’m not willing to bet on it, even if Hillary and her merry band of interventionist/warriors is.
Do you know what a no-fly zone over Syria means, exactly? It doesn’t mean no planes can fly. It means that Syria itself is not allowed to fly planes. Nor can its allies. Only NATO is allowed to fly planes. For everyone’s own good, of course,
Syria has no air force of its own, to speak of. Their ally Russia does, though. Syria invited Russia to help them prosecute the war against the rebels, to help the legitimate, elected government end a civil war. I am for now ignoring what Assad has done to his own citizens because international law largely ignores it. Sovereign nation means that each nation decides what happens within its own borders. The UN security council decides which interventions are legitimate.
The NATO intervention in Syria has only been approved by NATO. By what authority does NATO impose this sanction? None but the authority of violence. It’s illegal. Even if the UN rubber-stamps it, it’s illegal. Syria is embroiled in a very violent civil war. What right do we have to pick sides?
And what if Russia doesn’t back down? Are we really willing to risk WWIII to save face? Such an outcome is looking far more likely with Hillary at the helm than Trump. Trump’s a terrible, terrible person, but Hillary’s playing on a whole other level. She’s a fanatic, imbued with a religious conviction that conceding any perceived ground against any perceived enemy or settling for less than the entirety of any possible hare-brained idea that enters Washington’s head is insupportable. Once something’s been proposed as an American goal, she will defend it to everyone’s death.
The article Hillary Clinton’s Axis of Evil by Pepe Escobar (CounterPunch) discusses what might happen if Hillary and her crew provoke the hornet’s nest further.
“The only serious question then is whether an out of control Pentagon will force the Russian Air Force – false flag and otherwise — to knock out US Air Force fighter jets […] the question is whether the Pentagon will risk launching WWIII because “Aleppo is falling”. […] The US government is holding open a first-strike nuclear capacity against Russia. Hillary firmly supports it, as Trump made clear he “would not do first-strike”.”
Whereas everyone—even the supposedly most-loose cannon of all loose cannons Trump—has taken nukes off the table, official U.S. policy is that they are always on the table. Hillary certainly wouldn’t take them off and neither would NSC chief Susan Rice and neither would U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power—none of whom has ever seen a target they couldn’t deem ready for reaping/”saving” with their asinine Responsibility to Protect [1].
And then, maybe, BOOM goes the dynamitenuclear warhead.
Forget hold-your-nose-and-vote. Forget lesser-evil-voting. Forget Chomsky’s advice, which is always the same. [2] It’s not working anymore. Lesser-evil voting has gotten us to the bottom of the barrel, to these two candidates.
A vote for Hillary is a vote to continue these crimes. Could Jill Stein stop them? Probably not. Would she try? Maybe. Maybe she would. She might at least say something negative about it, rather than trying to spin it positively, as a measure promoting our safety. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for: get someone in office who lies to us less.
What if Russia decided—without stretching the comparison too far—that America is waging a war against blacks, using its own police army to murder them in large numbers? Can Russia invade America, to protect it from itself? For humanitarian reasons? It sounds ludicrous, right? But that’s the right the U.S. and NATO claim in Syria…and Iraq…and the former Yugoslavia. We bomb everyone to save them from themselves. Hillary was right there for all of it.
If NATO sets up a no-fly zone, then NATO planes (read: U.S planes.) will shoot down any Russian planes that dare to fly over Syria. That is the sum total of what Hillary means when she says no-fly zone. Either that or Russia will take its toys and go home with its tail between its legs, afraid to help its ally Syria try to save itself. That’s what Hillary thinks. And she’s supposed to be the foreign-policy genius.
Apparently Putin is simultaneously an existential threat to America and also a whipped puppy who’ll just fade into the background as soon as Hillary waves her strong pimp hand around. Laughable, but there you have it. This is what people believe when they back Hillary. They may not be aware of it, but that’s the policy she’s espoused. And Trump supposedly stands alone as a foreign-policy naif who will lead us into inadvertent war with his big mouth. Apparently we have plenty of people like that in the U.S. government already. It seems that he would fit right in.
Israel’s pretty happy with this situation, not coincidentally. High-level Israeli officials have expressed approval of how shitty things are going in Syria. The last remaining secular Arab nation has fallen apart completely and they don’t get any refugees. Perfect. Iran is unhappy. Even better. Israel’s happy, so Hillary gets money and support. Hillary hates Iran. She didn’t come up with a treaty when she was Secretary of State. She’s hinted that she’ll work to dismantle what she considers to be a bullshit treaty full of concessions that Kerry agreed to.
As I wrote in An Ocean of Misdirection, “Reality, in its prosaic, tepid grays, has no place in this world of light and shadow.”
If one is almost ludicrously terrible (Trump), then the other (Clinton) must be saintly good. But that’s not the case at all. Hillary is lying as well. About a lot of things. Just like her predecessors. They all lie to get into office. Think of all of Obama’s biggest promises.
Most politicians even admit it: they claim that they have to lie in order to get elected, but that then they’ll show their true colors and then, my friend, we’ll all roll up our sleeves and really fix this country. Sound familiar?
And then they don’t. And then all the usual suspects profit even more and all the usual worthless people suffer and die and 1½ years from now the next presidential campaign starts. And we get to hear how Hillary dare not make too many waves—you see, that’s the reason she hasn’t even looked at a single progressive plank in her platform—else she’ll spoil her chances for that all-important second term.
If you could just have a little patience and see your way to voting for her again, well, my friend, that’s when the sparks will really fly! That’s when she’ll spread her progressive wings and let loose with all sorts of policies that will cement her legacy as the most important person to stride the Earth since Mohammed himself.
Of course, she’ll unfortunately have to wait until the last six months of her second term to do it—like poor Obama, who’s just so hamstrung by the process that he can’t be as progressive as he told us all—so many times—that he is. It brings tears to my eyes just to imagine how beautiful it will all be, for everyone—the poor, the tired, those huddled masses, that wretched refuse. All of ‘em comin’ out on top!
Only 7½ more years, people, hang on just 7½ more years.
Published by marco on 24. Oct 2016 22:34:23 (GMT-5)
In An Ocean of Misdirection, Vote Hillary or we’re all gonna die! and The left’s answer: blame everything on the Russians, I tried to organize my thoughts about the upcoming election, with dubious success. I discussed the intense propaganda effort behind demonizing everything that is not Hillary. In this article, I try to build a more solid case against that tremendous push.
Taking on Clinton these days is not so easy, especially for those on the left. In the US of A, if you’re left of center politically, then you’re a Democrat and they hate you if you’re not on board with Hillary.
The article The Hillary Push: Manipulation You Can Believe In by Carol Dansereau (CounterPunch) writes:
“The One Percent interests that long for Hillary to be President are doubtlessly thrilled with how things are going. It’s not just that vital issues are being ignored. It’s also that the screws are being tightened on anyone who would consider not voting for Hillary. The wealthy beneficiaries of business-as-usual must be enjoying the spectacle of “progressives” attacking anyone straying from the One Percent script. A friend of mine was called “idiotic” the other day when she mentioned possibly voting for a third party candidate, for example. I personally was labeled “puerile” for pointing out that submission to the manipulation that surrounds us only makes things worse.”
My sentiments are pretty much in line with the desperate cry of anger and anguish expressed in the article Long Drive Home by Kim Nicolini (CounterPunch) (emphasis added).
“I am an ant crawling up the street in my car, and all around me, I feel the complete disregard of human lives across the globe. I feel those hideous looming heads that have dominated international media (the blustering red faced pig and the stone faced blonde smirker), and I feel their torrents of shit spilling over the mountains like an apocalyptic flood. I feel sick and invisible.”
“I don’t want a part of any of it. Hear me now. I am not for any of this, and none of this is for me. I am stranded on the island of lost souls who are the salt and breath of this earth and who are being stomped to the ground one political move at a time, regardless of parties. Parties are just marketing strategies, and I’m not buying any of it.”
“I look at Hillary Clinton’s smug face, and I think, “What the fuck do you know about anything you privileged cunt?” Excuse my French. Do you have any idea what it means to be a working full time mom who does all her own housework and laundry and fixes the broken sink and builds the school projects in the garage? Do you know what it’s like to be a woman whose only option in the world for survival is the sale of her own body? When was the last time you were at a Coin Star cashing in change and being charged 8 cents on the dollar to buy something for your kid? I was there two weeks ago. Hillary Clinton you are no icon for women.”
“Fuck you Hillary Clinton. Fuck you Feminists who think she is some kind of revolutionary answer to the glass ceiling. I know what the glass ceiling feels like. Hillary has never been part of that world. Smug. Privileged. Clueless. And full of power and money. Shut the fuck up.
“Girlfriends of the world, I got news for you. Feminists themselves are for the most part elitist leftists who think they are populists. They have not been down in the trenches.”
“That bitch doesn’t care about me or you. She cares about herself. She has primed herself to win this election, and she will because she has the cultural and economic capital to do it. And she is mobilizing her power to run the final stretch as I type these words. And she has left me feeling betrayed and invisible. Fuck you twice Hillary.”
Angry but honest. And more than a bit on target.
Nicolini fervently describes a candidate who doesn’t care at all about the things that her campaign says she cares about. Hillary’s expressed platform is belied by her actual experience. Democrats wants us to vote for her to get all of the wonderful things that they list in her platform. Her past effect on most of those very same issues has been negative.
It is not believable to me that she will clean up Wall Street, that she will empty our prisons, that she will get us single-payer health care. Even if she were to make a half-hearted attempt in those directions, I would expect her to give up more quickly than even Barack Obama did. Her whole platform is—even as described by Reich and Michelle Obama (if you actually read what they write; see Vote Hillary or we’re all gonna die!)—Clinton is not as terrible as Trump, who is a child-raping Nazi.
That’s all that really matters, isn’t it? In a live-blog of one of the debates, Idiot Winds at Hofstra: Notes on the Not-So-Great Debate by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch), points out that
“Campaign contributions from white billionaires have favored Hillary by a 20-to-1 margin over Trump.”
That’s odd, isn’t it? Are you comfortable that the 1% just as heartily approves of Hillary as you do? The article Trump Unchained by Mike Whitney (CounterPunch) builds on this point.
“When you turn on Washington Week (Gwen Ifil) on public TV and see an assembled panel of six pundits–three conservatives and three liberals–and all six turn out to love Hillary and hate Trump; you can be reasonably certain that the election is rigged, because that’s what rigging is. Rather than providing background information about the candidate’s position on the issues so voters can make an informed decision, the media uses opinionmakers to heap praise on one candidate while savagely denigrating the other. The obvious goal is to shape public opinion in the way that best suits the interests of the people who own the media and who belong to the establishment of rich and powerful elites who run the country, the 1 percent. In this case, the ruling class unanimously backs Hillary Clinton, that much is obvious. (Emphasis added.)”
In this next section, I’ve included citations from other writers, all discussing the various transgressions in Hillary’s past as Senator and Secretary of State
Idiot Winds at Hofstra: Notes on the Not-So-Great Debate by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) goes on to discuss her military bona fides. Here Hillary and the Donald are equally gung-ho.
“A new report on the insanely expensive F-35 fighter jet shows that the plane barely flies in cloudy weather. Both candidates support building a fleet of these Cold War relics, as does Bernie Sanders, who wants them based at the airport in Burlington.”
But we really need to cut entitlements to cut down the debt, right Hillary and Donald? Et tu, Bernie?
Let’s move on to the climate, the problem that Trump doesn’t admit exists—and Hillary ignores. So, for that matter, does the Obama administration. Sure, he throws a few shekels to alternate energy, but it’s a drop in the ocean—into which he’s allowed more drilling platforms for sweet, sweet petroleum.
“Since the moment Bernie Sanders endorsed Clinton, the Queen of Chaos has scrubbed any mention of the perils of climate change from her prepared speeches. Perhaps Lester Holt will venture to ask a question about this vexing subject tonight. He could start with a story from today’s news: “Under Obama US will fail to meet emission targets.””
Since Hillary, the Obamas and the Democratic Party all agree that Hillary will be a continuation of the progressive glory that has been Obama’s reign, let’s see what he’s up to.
“In related news, the Obama administration quietly announced today drastic rule changes that will substantially weaken the Endangered Species Act by placing complicated and intractable burdens on environmental groups working to protect rare species. The rule changes are deemed a huge gift to the timber, mining and oil cartels. (Emphasis added.)”
Hooray! Anything for energy independence, right? Go Team Obama!
The article Billions Down the Afghan Drain by Brian Cloughley (CounterPunch) rightly asks if anyone running for president even wants to admit that we’re still at war in Afghanistan.
“Certainly there should be a plan to get Afghanistan out of its quagmire, but the NYT does not point out that American taxpayers were duped into supporting the fatuous US-NATO war by rabid propaganda, led by such as the NYT, which, we should remember, was an enthusiastic supporter of the war on Iraq.”
You know who else was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq war? Hillary. And then there’s Obama’s support for Saudi Arabia, which Hillary and Trump will both happily continue. Saudi Arabia is killing Yemenis as fast as it can, with U.S. support and U.S. weapons. A lot of them.
The article Increasing Support for the War on Yemen Is Obviously Insane by Daniel Larison (American Conservative) explains:
“Even by the WSJ‘s standards, this is an insane position to take. The funeral massacre last week was obviously not carried out by “mistake.” The coalition repeatedly hit the same target to maximize casualties, and it chose the target because many high-ranking political and military figures were in attendance. The coalition wanted to hit the target, and it did so several times in a row. They weren’t concerned about the hundreds of civilians killed and injured in the process, and it is absurd to claim that they were. When presented with an obvious atrocity committed by a U.S. client, the WSJ predictably ignores the evidence and insists on even more aggressive support for the offending government.”
It’s not just the WSJ that ignores it. The Obama administration is really only pretending to reconsider its support of Saudi Arabia. If Saudis having carried out 9–11 wasn’t enough to shake U.S. support, then I can’t think of anything that would. Obama isn’t going to do anything of the sort in the last weeks of his administration. Hillary wouldn’t let him, and he wouldn’t dream of dictating which massacres she should support and/or encourage during her upcoming reign.
Moving on, the article Indictment: US Guilty of War Crimes by Norman Pollack (CounterPunch) discusses a NYT article about the lives of people tortured by the CIA, with emphasis on those from Guantánamo.
“The US plays hard ball. There appears to be no resting, either political party, the public at large, and when not directly implicated America has cultivated proxies worldwide to do its mission.”
Are we really going to claim that a Hillary presidency will be easier on political prisoners than a Trump presidency would? You can’t possibly believe that.
Hillary Clinton’s Axis of Evil by Pepe Escobar (CounterPunch)
“Anticipating an outcome of the US presidential election as a remix of the 1972 Nixon landslide, Hillary has also coined, George “Dubya” Bush-style, a remixed axis of evil: Russia, Iran and “the Assad regime”.
“That’s not even counting China, which, via “aggression” in the South China Sea, will also feature as a certified foe for the Founding Mother of the pivot to Asia.”
Hooray. Looks like any Americans interested in peace can go piss up a rope for the next 4—if not 8—years. And here again we are forced to turn to Trump as the voice of reason, defying not just the Democratic War Party, but also the Republican one:
“Donald Trump once again made a rational point – expressing his wish for a normalized working relationship with Russia. […] Here’s what Trump said; “I don’t like Assad at all, but Assad is killing ISIS. Russia is killing ISIS and Iran is killing ISIS.””
“In parallel, the deafening talk about Washington now advancing a Plan C in Syria is nonsense. There has never been a Plan C; only Plan A, which was to draw Russia into another Afghanistan. It did not work with the controlled demolition of Ukraine. And it will not work in Syria […]”
In the video Redacted Tonight #119 by Lee Camp (YouTube), he says
“We are children. Look, kids get into schoolyard fights for basically two reasons: to defend their perceived honor or to steal their lunch money. They never do it to bring democracy to the other kids.”
Remember when Hillary was Senator and Secretary of State? And tried to stop all of these wars? Neither do I.
She and her merry crew are quite on board with all of this violence—all in the name of humanitarianism, all perpetrated in America’s name.
If Hillary’s done such bad stuff, why is she still at large? The article To Win The Presidency, Sacrifice Law by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) (a lawyer) discusses Trump’s accusation that Hillary should be in jail. The privileged have always gotten away with a lot of things for which the lower classes would be jailed.
“There’s damn good reason to believe that had Clinton been anyone else, she would have been prosecuted and, if convicted, sentenced to prison. Lesser government employees have enjoyed a vacation at Club Fed for lesser recklessness. And had there been an independent prosecutor, that might well have been the outcome.
“Trump wasn’t being a dictator, claiming the authority to jail his political opponent. […] Try deleting stuff from your computer while under congressional subpoena and see how it works out for you. […] unless you’re of the view that important government officials aren’t held to the same law as the rest of us, efforts to contort Trump’s point into some Machiavellian ploy are ridiculous.
“[…]
“Watching Rachel Maddow last night, dripping with smug self-righteousness […] it occurred to me that everyone has abandoned serious and mature thought in favor of throwing whatever feces is available. […] So be it. We get the government we deserve.”
Indeed we do.
See Syria: Hillary’s lever to topple Russia for a discussion of the main flashpoint.
For those of us alive during the cold war, the current atmosphere in the U.S.—and, indeed, most NATO countries, if not all of Europe—is reminiscent of the cold war.
... [More]
Published by marco on 24. Oct 2016 22:34:20 (GMT-5)
See An Ocean of Misdirection and Vote Hillary or we’re all gonna die! for the articles and thoughts that led up to this one.
For those of us alive during the cold war, the current atmosphere in the U.S.—and, indeed, most NATO countries, if not all of Europe—is reminiscent of the cold war.
Everything—but everything—is Russia’s fault.
Did something bad happen? They say that Putin did it.
Do you have proof? They ask you, Are you now or have you ever been a communist?
McCarthyism is back in spades.
While the Soviet Union was at least nominally communist—it was more of a totalitarian commissariat—modern-day Russia isn’t even close to being communist. The accusation persists, though Russia is officially a constitutional republic, with elections and everything. Russia actually functions more as an oligarchy—similar in many ways to the U.S. We’ll agree not to discuss the validity of elections in either of these countries.
Why is Russia back in the news? Nominally, at least? Well, the Democrats see that country as a catspaw in their attempt to gain presidential office. Whatever happens, blame the Russians and let the media and people’s simplistic, misplaced fears carry you to victory.
Was Russia behind these recent hacks? The DNC hack that exposed how the DNC steered the primaries into Hillary’s hands? The hack revealed by Wikileaks that exposed campaign manager Podesta’s mails? The hack that exposed Hillary’s Goldman speeches?
Hillary says so. Obama says so. His administration says so. The mainstream media says so. Trump doesn’t believe it, but he’s a conspiracy nut. Plus, he’s best friends with Putin, so of course he would say Russia didn’t do it.
Isn’t it suspicious that the U.S. so readily concedes to having so easily been hacked by the Russians? You would think that the U.S. would be too proud to admit that it’s so vulnerable—but this vulnerability serves a higher purpose: getting Hillary elected.
So the U.S. goes all in, with Hillary announcing at one of the debates that “17 different secret service agencies” say that the Russians were behind all the recent hacks. Would Hillary lie about that? The article No, Hillary, 17 U.S. Intelligence Agencies Did Not Say Russia Hacked Dem E-mails by Fred Fleitz (The National Review) points out the obvious: only two agencies even wrote anything about it and they both only said that the methods “are consistent with the methods and motivations of Russian-directed efforts”, which is as good as saying nothing at all. No proof is offered to pin this on the Russians. Hell, the methods and motivations of all hackers is to steal and reveal information.
Have Russians hacked us before? The article The Russians Have Been Hacking Us For Years, Why Is It a Crisis Now? by Keith Binkly (CounterPunch) covers cases in recent years. But my recollection is that the finger of blame for cybercrime tends to point at the enemy du jour—sometimes Iran, sometimes China, sometimes Russia, sometimes North Korea—whoever Emmanuel Goldstein needs to be that day. The finger is never pointed at the companies that can’t seem to safeguard sensitive data.
This red-baiting should be laughable, but it still works extremely well. Instead of focusing on the content of the mail—tacitly admitted by Hillary and her campaign to be real—people are focused on those pesky Russian hackers. The actual content never really made headlines. Russia’s purported and utterly fictitious involvement did. Day after day for as long as the Democrats need it to be in the news.
And keep it in the news they do. The article Clinton blasts Russian cyber-attacks as bid to install Trump as a “puppet” by Joe Mullin (Ars Technica) writes (Emphasis added):
“In one of those speeches, Clinton expressed a desire for a “hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.”
“Clinton responded by making the role of WikiLeaks the issue.
“This has come from the highest levels of the [Russian] government, from Putin himself, in an effort to influence our election,“ Clinton said, referencing Vladimir Putin, the Russian president. “Finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this? And make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in this election?”
““That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders,” Trump responded. He continued:”
“I don’t know Putin. He said nice things about me. If we got along well, that would be good. He has no respect for her, no respect for our president. And I’ll tell you what—we’re in serious trouble. We have a country [Russia] with tremendous numbers of nuclear warheads. And she’s playing chicken. Putin, from everything I’ve seen, has no respect for this person.”
Of course, Ars Technica—100% behind Hillary with no reservations—chalks this all up as a win for her. But it doesn’t sound like she won that exchange at all. What Trump said is eminently sane. Read it again. It’s sane. It’s 100% correct. If you didn’t know it came from Trump, you’d be agreeing with it. What Hillary said is deliberately poking a hornet’s nest, reviving McCarthyism just to terrify the American public into electing her. The Russians are coming! Ooohh, so scary, Hillary.
Although I personally don’t find the citation of “open borders” so scary either, Hillary’s response—not a denial, but lashing out against the accuser [1]—is a classic sign of someone trying to distract you from the fact that the accusation is true. It seems like Wikileaks really did get the original transcripts.
The blog post I Wake You Up for the Presidential Debate by Scott Adams (The Dilbert Blog) includes the following, cited at length, because it ends in the most salient point.
“And I’m here to tell you that if you are afraid that Donald Trump is a racist/sexist clown with a dangerous temperament, you have been brainwashed by the best group of brainwashers in the business right now: Team Clinton.
“I remind you that intelligence is not a defense against persuasion. No matter how smart you are, good persuaders can still make you see a pink elephant in a room where there is none (figuratively speaking). […]
“If you are wondering why a socially liberal and well-educated cartoonist such as myself is not afraid of Trump, it’s because I don’t see the pink elephant. […]
“If you are an anti-Trumper, you might reject my point of view as manipulative or naive. I can’t change your mind with a blog post. But you can change your own mind. Just ask others if they see the addition to reality that you see. If others don’t see the pink elephant in the room, and you do, the elephant isn’t there.
“Look for that pattern. Once you see it, you’re awake.
“Then vote for whoever has the policies you like.”
Vote for whoever has the policies you like. Or the policies you can live with. Don’t vote for the one who’s screaming the Russians are coming out of fear.
The post The Crook Versus the Monster by Scott Adams (The Dilbert Blog) continues this interesting thought.
“Trump has successfully framed Hillary Clinton as a crooked politician. Meanwhile, Clinton has successfully framed Trump as a dangerous monster. […] As of today, Clinton has the superior persuasion strategy. Crook beats monster.
“Reality isn’t a factor in this election, as per usual.”
That’s quite a good summary. This next part I don’t quite agree with:
“The biggest illusion this election is that we think the people on the other side can’t see the warts on their own candidate. But I think they do. Clinton supporters know she is crooked, but I think they assume it is a normal degree of crookedness for an American politician. Americans assume that even the “good” politicians are trading favors and breaking every rule that is inconvenient to them. I’ve never heard a Clinton supporter defend Clinton as being pure and honest. Her supporters like her despite her crookedness.”
I think that’s giving a lot of the supporters I’ve been reading too much credit. In Vote Hillary or we’re all gonna die! (earthli News), I presented quite a bit of evidence that Hillary supporters are 100% on board, not that they’re balancing a pragmatic and cynical worldview.
Those supporters I’ve cited in other places seem like they’ve really drunk the Kool-Aid. I don’t think they’re holding their noses anymore, even though they may have started out that way. Instead, they’re doing what people always do: confabulating to re-build their perception of the past to match the realities of their present in a way that makes them look like heroes in their own personal narrative.
If you’re making a calculated vote, that’s kind of a shitty thing to do. If you’d have preferred to vote for Bernie or Jill, but are voting for Hillary in order to prevent Trump’s election, then you can’t feel too grand about your role in the democratic process. If, however, you magically and suddenly can convince yourself that Hillary is, in fact, a sterling candidate whose every view aligns with all of your own? Well, then, you’ve won your own personal race and can sleep soundly.
Does it matter that this is all fake? Not to you. You don’t remember that it’s fake, that you ever thought differently. This new reality is just as real as the previous one was. All of the mud being slung at Hillary? Just mud flung by misogynistic and jealous fools. So I don’t give Hillary voters as much credit as Adams does, although I’m surprised to find that my faith in humanity is even shakier than his…so perhaps I’m missing something.
Hillary also wastes no time in accusing her opponent of colluding with this dastardly enemy—an accusation nearly unprecedented in American politics. She’s accusing Trump of being a traitor and getting away with it. And everyone thought that the media was in bed with Trump.
Hillary is planting seeds in the American mind-space to make it much easier to swallow the bitter pill of going to war with Russia after we start shooting down their planes over Syria. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s take a look at what Syria might mean to our future in Trigger-happy: Hillary Clinton vs. the World (earthli News).
Published by marco on 24. Oct 2016 22:34:17 (GMT-5)
As described in a recent article, Ocean of Misdirection (earthli News), now that the election is only weeks away, Democrats are coming out as increasingly fervent. Everybody’s piling on the hyperbole. Hillary Clinton is not just the choice to make, she is a world-changing, peace-bringing successor to one of the best presidents America has ever had. Democrats will continue to fix America. Long may they reign. [1]
While I’m almost certain that Republicans are doing the same thing, their news sources are too right-wing for me to regularly visit. With the mainstream media and many purportedly left-leaning commentators having pledged unquestioning support for Hillary, it’s their acquiescence to propaganda that seems more important to the outcome of the election. This type of supporter will use their influence to elect Hillary with a mandate and then melt into silence as she does none of the things that they supported her to do.
For example, the article Obama: “progress is on the ballot” by Jason Kottke—a normally more reserved commentator—practically gushes,
“[…] here’s Hillary Clinton’s latest campaign commercial. This is right up there with the best political ads I’ve seen.”
He goes on to cite Obama’s speech to the Congressional Black Caucus, where Obama concluded with,
“[…] our progress is on the ballot. Tolerance is on the ballot. Democracy is on the ballot. Justice is on the ballot. Good schools are on the ballot. Ending mass incarceration, that’s on the ballot right now.”
This is pure propaganda. I guarantee that a Hillary administration will do as little about reducing mass incarceration as an Obama administration did. Prison populations continue to rise inexorably, overcrowding is rampant. Just because Obama granted a few clemencies at the end of his presidency—as all presidents do—doesn’t suddenly make him a hero of the people, tearing down the walls of injustice.
Likewise, there is no clear idea of how “good schools” will ever be seen in America again. Obama’s administration has seen the flowering of the charter-school system—a market-based solution to public schools. A Clinton administration will do as little for those who can’t afford private school as Obama’s did.
Another fervent supporter lends his voice in the article Why All Progressives Must Vote For Hillary by Robert Reich. His calls for electing Hillary have become increasingly strident, militant and unforgiving of non-adherents.
Reich got the marching orders from the Clinton campaign to shore up Democratic support by equating voting for a third party as treason. Below, we’ll see how Michelle Obama does the same. These people are not at all interested in who people actually want for president; they want to bully you into voting for their candidate. This is ugly and offensive.
Here’s Reich:
“But anything disgruntled Democrats may do that increases the odds of a Trump presidency – say, making a “protest” vote for a third-party candidate, or not voting at all – doesn’t just penalize the Democratic Party. It also jeopardizes our future, and that of our children and their children.”
He doesn’t just play the “won’t someone please think of the children” card, he jams it into your eye. This line of reasoning is also pure propaganda, tweaking people’s heartstrings about a vaguely defined group of American children while simultaneously ignoring children in the rest of the world.
That applies not only to those who’ve already been subjected to Hillary’s seemingly insatiable policy of attacking other countries as Secretary of State, but also those who almost certainly will be killed under a hawkish Clinton administration. Americans don’t need to care about those kids. They should instead think of the little ones in the States, for whom a Jill Stein presidency would be an unmitigated disaster, right?
I honestly can’t tell what the article What Michael Moore understands about Hillary Clinton by Richard Brody (New Yorker) is trying to say. I think it approves of Michael Moore’s new 1-hour–long campaign ad for Hillary Clinton portraying her as the second coming. But goddamn if it’s not even harder than usual to decipher the New Yorker’s prose. For instance,
“Moore—a well-known and outspoken supporter of Bernie Sanders during the Democratic primary campaign—has done something different, better, and even majestic. He has made a film that, at its frequent best, raises his own celebrity to a political object and transforms that celebrity into a mode of combative yet deeply empathetic practical politics, even turns it into a political weapon of the sort that’s seemingly ready-made to combat Trump, whose candidacy, after all, is itself purely a product of the celebrity industry.”
Did that article even get an editor? Given that the author cheers Moore’s “[…] dreams of [Clinton’s] flurry of executive orders (a conservative’s nightmare); he envisions that she’ll replace old enemies (“Iran and North Korea”) with new ones (“Monsanto and Wells Fargo”)” then concludes that the “argument has been made and won”, it’s clear that both Brody and Moore are unquestioningly in the tank for Clinton.
Moore in particular has forgiven and forgotten all of her campaign’s collusion with the DNC against his former main man Bernie in his single-minded drive to avoid Trump. This is hardly surprising, as Moore’s history of supported candidates over the years is far from progressive and hasn’t shown much principle. Anyone remember his support of General Wesley Clark, who was in charge of bombing the hell out of the former Yugoslavia in the late 90s?
There has been a recent hue and cry for Michelle Obama for president (even here in Switzerland). This is probably because of a recent speech that she gave in support of Hillary Clinton. The hope of the Clinton administration is that a support of Michelle’s unassailable awesomeness [2] can be transferred to Clinton.
As with so much else, it seems to be working. A friend—who works for the State Department—wrote on Facebook,
“Years from now, this speech will stand out as one of the most important of our lifetime I think. Take 26 minutes out of your life and watch it, or you’ll be missing an important moment. For any of you with children, her words starting at 18:10 are monumental.”
Not living in a miasma of propaganda, I was of course dubious, but wanted to give it a fair shot. I wasn’t interested in watching or listening to the speech, but I dug up the Transcript: First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech in Manchester, New Hampshire by Michelle Obama (WhatTheFolly).
I couldn’t figure out which part was at 18:10, so I imagine the video becomes emotionally sweeping at 18:10 in a way not matched by the actual words. What is clear from the transcript is that she’s a master manipulator, like her husband.
This is a campaign speech. Michelle’s stumping for Hillary. Democrats see that they can finally use Trump’s awfulness to put him out of commission. Hillary’s campaign smells blood in the water and they’re going for the jugular with this speech.
And people are biting. Commentators are gushing “speech of the century”—in the same way that they did for her stupid speech at the DNC—because she’s a woman and people don’t hate her yet. Hillary can’t plausibly give this speech, but Michelle Obama still can.
Since I’m not in the bubble, I read it and heard just another stump speech, full of hyperbole and invective aimed at the other side. A lot of what Trump says and does is terrible, but the latest revelation seems to be a bigger lever—for whatever reason.
Just to put this into perspective, though, 12 years ago, Trump discussed women in disgusting ways. We can have a conversation about whether this is historically non-presidential another time (I’m looking at you, Kennedy and Clinton). But Michelle Obama is married to a man who has sent out drones almost every day of his eight-year presidency and—according to the CIA—these drones killed innocents killed more often than not. Among those innocents were women and children.
But Michelle doesn’t talk about those women and children because it would make her husband look bad and talking about those people’s deaths doesn’t help Hillary’s campaign. Talking about those deaths—actual deaths, not just threats of harm or personal slights—would probably hurt Hillary’s chances.
The kids who matter are instead the precious innocents in America who might have overheard Trump’s bad words about women. In fact, she feels positively “sick” about the bad words spoken about women by that demon.
Actual dead women don’t matter because they’re faceless, nameless and of the wrong nationality. Also, her husband killed them. Instead, she turns to look at his Nobel Peace Prize on the mantel and contemplates how to further Hillary’s campaign—on how to get yet another warmonger into the highest office in the land.
We have a president who runs a world-girdling military that kills hundreds, if not thousands, every day. This is all extrajudicial and carried out on the authority of force. All too often, we just don’t care to target better, erring on the side of our own safety rather than on the side of people who don’t matter one whit.
The next president will continue this tradition, perhaps expanding it. Hillary helped Obama steer Libya off of a cliff with a long, sustained NATO bombing campaign. Thousands and thousands died. But deaths in war don’t matter to us. They are un-people. What matters, what is horrifying, would be if the next president didn’t respect women.
Hillary respects women, right? She’s a woman, so how could she not? Does it matter that her policies have been terrible for women, blacks and black women, most of all? Not really.
And then there’s the bullshit stories about six-year–old boys who spout some form of wisdom. Didn’t Michelle’s husband also have the pleasure recently of citing a six-year–old boy who was wise beyond his years? Such a coincidence. If you want to peddle pap to fools, then tell them that a child said it and it lends the statement incredible import.
Whereas these words directly from Michelle might sound hackneyed and naive, when cited as the words of a child whose view of the world is being shattered by our incredible barbarity, they gain momentous meaning. It’s an old trick. People will fall for it in droves. But remember that when you sympathize with a child’s viewpoint, when you shed every vestige of cynicism, when you consider all those who accept barbarity in the world as monsters themselves who don’t care about making the world a better place, the world doesn’t magically change with you. You’ve just adopted a worldview that is not compatible with reality.
As usual in the U.S. of A: killing people is OK; demeaning them is “intolerable”. Incredible violence is entirely acceptable, but a nip slip is the worst thing that could ever happen.
People’s capacity for listening to this kind of pap—and being deeply affected by it—seems limitless. Michelle Obama empathizes with working women, with women walking in the street, being ogled. But how would she know? Really? She’s lived in a bubble for most of her adult life—even more so over the last eight years. She is, for all intents and purposes, royalty, just like Hillary and Trump. They’re all the 1%.
And Michelle Obama will talk all day about the plight of women, but not a single word about how mistreated blacks are in this country. Why? Because the woman “angle” hits Trump harder than the “black” angle.
Therefore, not a word is lost in this speech about the war on minorities. Is this because her husband’s administration issued a 100% backing of the police forces in America? Barack Obama also has nothing to say about blacks being gunned down by police at unprecedented rates.
Neither of them are going to allow caring about an issue like that get in the way of their careers or Hillary’s. You’ve got to have your priorities. Barack Obama has spent the last several weeks smoothing his path to working in venture capital in Silicon Valley after his presidency, if you needed to know where his priorities lie.
The latter 40% of the speech was Michelle literally listing Hillary’s campaign points. She wraps up with a good five minutes of even-more-standard fare, begging the electorate to get out the vote for Hillary.
For example,
“Well, during her four years as Secretary of State alone, Hillary has faced her share of challenges. She’s traveled to 112 countries, negotiated a ceasefire, a peace agreement, a release of dissidents. She spent 11 hours testifying before a congressional committee.”
11 whole hours? How is Hillary even still alive after that? So strong.
Again, citing Michelle,
“We know that when things get tough, Hillary doesn’t complain. She doesn’t blame others. She doesn’t abandon ship for something easier. No, Hillary Clinton has never quit on anything in her life.
“So in Hillary, we have a candidate who has dedicated her life to public service, someone who has waited her turn and helped out while waiting.”
Michelle’s point seems to be that people should vote for Hillary just for being brave enough to run for president, for not “quitting”. Plus, also, it’s “her turn”. There’s a line of succession to think of here. Presumably, Michelle will be next after Hillary’s eight years.
Michelle continues,
“She is an outstanding mother. She has raised a phenomenal young woman. She is a loving, loyal wife. She’s a devoted daughter, who cared for her mother until her final days. And if any of us had raised a daughter like Hillary Clinton, we would be so proud. We would be proud.”
She lays it on pretty thick though. Is Hillary running for Pope? If you’re not in the bubble, this is laughable, but if you’re under the waves, this kind of stuff hits you right in the feels.
Trump goes unnamed in the speech, but he’s the star of the show.
The First Lady hits the “won’t anyone please think of the children?” button pretty hard. As if no-one else’s suffering matters. We should only do the right thing when the feelings of American children are at stake, when the feelings of our own children are at stake. When their little feelings are threatened.
Aw, hell, when Trump is basically threatening with his every move and word to find, rape and kill all of your children. Personally. With gusto. That’s what’s at stake here: mass child-rape if Trump is elected.
Michelle calls out “vicious language”—without naming Trump—smoothly blending talking about “When you’re a celebrity, they let you do anything” with actually committing rape, being a predator, a convicted criminal.
Trump’s statement is almost 100% true, echoed by Bill Clinton many years ago. It’s also quite relevant to Michelle’s speech.
For example, when you’re a celebrity like Michelle, they let you give a speech that stumps for a candidate with more than enough blood on her hands, ignores a husband who has even more, all to focus on the problem of a man who is disrespectful to women.
So Michelle’s celebrity allows her to get away with that offensive act, for which she is lauded by every brainwashed goof in the land, who will start to call for her to run for Senate or President or to dream gooey-eyed about Michelle getting her own Peace Prize who-knows-maybe-she-could-just-have-Malala’s-we’ve-all-forgotten-about-her.
Michelle wasn’t satisfied with hacking at Trump, though. To shore up Hillary, Michelle went after another woman: Jill Stein.
“And if you vote for someone other than Hillary, or if you don’t vote at all, then you are helping to elect her opponent.”
Don’t vote for that vote-vampire. Stein is literally trying to get a child-rapist elected for president. She clearly hates children. [3]
So St. Michelle’s support of women extends to just one very specific woman. But that should come as no surprise by now.
Continue these thoughts with The left’s answer: blame everything on the Russians.
A sea of propaganda covers the population of the U.S. For the most part, it goes unnoticed. Its greasy, tepid depths cover their heads in lazy, turgid swells. Ancient Greeks had but a river—Americans reside beneath a whole ocean of Lethe’s waters.
Just weeks away from the 2016 U.S.... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 24. Oct 2016 22:34:10 (GMT-5)
A sea of propaganda covers the population of the U.S. For the most part, it goes unnoticed. Its greasy, tepid depths cover their heads in lazy, turgid swells. Ancient Greeks had but a river—Americans reside beneath a whole ocean of Lethe’s waters.
Just weeks away from the 2016 U.S. presidential election, the machinery of the ruling class has steadily increased a torrent of endless wealth to churn these depths. The surface heaves as powerful currents of brainwashing media bludgeon an already stunned and impotent populace.
Exhausted minds are incited to fever pitch, urged to positive—and negative—excitement about one candidate or the other. Were they able—for just a few moments—to tread water, they might shake away the cobwebs, see the world more clearly. Instead, they are trapped beneath the waves, swaying in the currents of imposed thought like kelp.
Even once-strong minds that had resisted the lazier eddies before the storm, have now succumbed their principles. They capitulate utterly. Their support for one candidate or the other—though at first grudging—becomes a rabid defense of that person. One candidate is a God striding the Earth, rejuvenating America by his or her very existence, the other a wholly evil abomination, engendering chaos and ruin in his or her every shambolic move.
Reality, in its prosaic, tepid grays, has no place in this world of light and shadow.
Continued in:
Published by marco on 12. Jun 2016 18:20:28 (GMT-5)
I’ve just about finished reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. He’s a humor writer with a penchant for interviewing odd people. In the book, he discovers a checklist for determining whether someone is a psychopath. Throughout the book, he notes which checklist items a particular conversation with an interviewee triggers, even when that person is clearly not a psychopath. He gets kind of carried away with it, which is pretty funny.
It’s kind of easy to start doing it yourself, too.
Which brings me to my example, the introduction from Hillary Clinton’s Speech on Donald Trump and National Security (Time Magazine).
“I believe in strong alliances; clarity in dealing with our rivals; and a rock-solid commitment to the values that have always made America great. And I believe with all my heart that America is an exceptional country – that we’re still, in Lincoln’s words, the last, best hope of earth. We are not a country that cowers behind walls. We lead with purpose, and we prevail.”
This is supposed to be an inspiring speech, delivered by a woman who will lead America into a new era. But the speech is full of the same vague threats and references to American power as any other high-level official is wont to make. The phrase “clarity in dealing with our rivals” is a not-even-that-well-veiled threat. Our rivals will toe the line or we will stomp them flat. That’s clear enough, isn’t it? “As an unmuddied lake, Fred. As clear as an azure sky of deepest summer.” [1]
If we’re being honest, “the values that have always made America great” are those of empire and rapacious capitalism. To no one’s surprise, Hillary pledges to continue in this vein. And why not? Why stop a good thing, right? “America is an exceptional country […] the last, best hope of earth.” What arrogance. Classic psychopath.
So we’re almost guaranteed that war will continue, since America won’t “cower[…] behind walls” and will “prevail”. This isn’t even coded language—this is straight-up belligerent, offering war to any and all comers.
Hillary again,
“And if America doesn’t lead, we leave a vacuum – and that will either cause chaos, or other countries will rush in to fill the void. Then they’ll be the ones making the decisions about your lives and jobs and safety – and trust me, the choices they make will not be to our benefit.
“That is not an outcome we can live with.”
The arrogance continues, with Hillary sadly contemplating a world without America, a world in “a vacuum”, in “chaos”. A world governed by other countries who won’t have Americans’ best interests at heart, as Hillary and her elite backers do. Not content with only threatening America, Hillary now threatens Americans that if they don’t choose her, don’t choose a belligerent “strong” American, “other countries[…]’ll be the ones making the decisions [, which will] not be to our benefit.” The last sentence shows her sacrificing herself for the sake of America, to defend them against an existential threat, whether or not they recognize it as such. Even if weaker, more spineless Americans were willing to roll over for Europe, Hillary “can’t live with that.”
So, don’t you dare elect a namby-pamby pussy like Bernie Sanders who’ll give everything away to his secret lovers, the European socialists, or Donald Trump, who’s too stupid and inept to realize that he’d give everything away to the other strongmen of the world. Instead, elect Hillary because she’s the only possible strong hand on the tiller that can guide America to even more greatness. Such unbelievable bullshit, really. No more or less than other high-level politicians, but still so tiring that we’re still at this unproductive point.
Citing Hillary from the same speech,
“Take the threat posed by North Korea – perhaps the most repressive regime on the planet, run by a sadistic dictator who wants to develop long-range missiles that could carry a nuclear weapon to the United States.”
North Korea’s rockets over the last couple of years have either exploded on the launch platform or dribbled into the Sea of Japan a couple of kilometers from the launch platform. There is no sign of improvement. But by all means, let’s all shit our pants in terror of North Korea. Does anyone else remember Condaleeza Rice’s threats during Bush’s first term? That Saddam had nuclear missiles that could hit new York in forty minutes? That we had to deal with him harshly and preemptively else we’d be seeing a “mushroom cloud?”
How much more psychopathic can we get? We see threats everywhere. Even when these threats never materialize—or we later learn that they never could have materialized—we continue to believe in this alternate reality, in this fiction that keeps America at the center of everything, a beacon of moral hope for the rest of the world. A world that would be lost in a benighted renewal of the dark ages without America to lead it. #2: Grandiose sense of self worth and #13: Lack of realistic long-term goals.
And here’s Hillary, reading from the same playbook as Condaleeza Rice. In fact, picking another of Bush’s Axis of Evil countries as the new atomic enemy. Literally the same playbook. And America in 2016 is so chock-full of dupes that we don’t even realize that we’re being read the exact same bedtime story, warned of the exact same boogeymen, all in order to get us to give up everything we have in the name of a security that the elites can’t provide because we had it all along.
Want more evidence that we’re reliving the past? Hillary next talked about a missile-defense system.
“When I was Secretary of State, we worked closely with our allies Japan and South Korea to respond to this threat, including by creating a missile defense system that stands ready to shoot down a North Korean warhead, should its leaders ever be reckless enough to launch one at us. The technology is ours. Key parts of it are located on Japanese ships. All three countries contributed to it. And this month, all three of our militaries will run a joint drill to test it.
“That’s the power of allies.”
Do you remember who else wanted a missile-defense system? Reagan, way back in the 80s. It was technologically and politically unfeasible back then, but the elites in America never gave up their dream of being able to administer their belligerence without fear of reprisal.
When American politicians talk about a missile shield, they’re not talking about a way of defending against first strikes. The most effective—and cheapest—way to prevent first strikes is to stop being a dick to everyone.
Missile defense is designed to prevent the retaliatory strike from wreaking havoc in America after America has already struck first. Of course, America would never really strike first—there would have to be a legitimate threat, like “that other country was looking at us funny” or “our soldiers might have died in a conventional attack”. That would easily be enough to justify a nuclear strike. It was the last time.
But that’s why the American elites want a missile shield—because they want to be assured that when they nuke some other country, that other country can’t nuke their penthouses in New York or San Francisco or Washington. If the only threat were that the America heartland would be blown to Kingdom Come, then they would have gleefully used nukes decades ago.
As soon as they have their shield—their guarantee of personal safety— they’ll be able to legitimately threaten to—as former presidential candidate Ted Cruz so elegantly put it—“find out if sand can glow in the dark” and America’s enemies will know that any retaliatory strike will be shot down by the amazing missile-defense shield.
This would be horrible enough if true—or possible. The U.S., while claiming the moral high ground, is seeking weapons to be able to blackmail the world into giving it everything it wants. At the same time, it sells this plan as a way to keep the world safe. Classic psychopath.
But it’s not possible. Israel has had a modicum of success with its missile-defense shield, but Hamas’s rockets suck and are poorly aimed in the first place. The U.S.‘s “shield” is just a giant military-industrial-complex boondoggle designed to pour more money into the coffers of Hillary’s sponsors.
It happens all the time. It’s a fairy tale of fear to get money from terrified and stupid sheep. The Obama administration is currently haggling over a military-defense spending bill that includes an extra $20 Billion of weapons included by John McCain that the Pentagon hadn’t ordered, doesn’t want and wouldn’t know what to do with.
What the hell does this have to do with the real world? This is the stuff of Hollywood summer blockbusters. This is not reality. These are the fictions peddled by those—and their backers—who want to inhale vast quantities of the U.S. federal budget for themselves.
Hillary continues:
“And it’s the legacy of American troops who fought and died to secure those bonds, because they knew we were safer with friends and partners.”
Jesus, does anyone even really listen to what she’s saying? This doesn’t make any sense. She’s just shoving in buzzwords, paeans to the troops, because she couldn’t figure out where else to say it. Ask a soldier how awesome it is to work side-by-side with U.S. allies like the Afghan or Iraqi army. While they’re probably right to do so—they’re being asked to help support an empire in which they at best play a patsy—they do have a tendency to run away from battlefields and give up vast amounts of land to the enemy.
If you don’t believe that North Korea is a credible threat, then Hillary has two more for you, real world-class heavy-hitters who’ve been hankering after hegemony for years.
“Now Moscow and Beijing are deeply envious of our alliances around the world, because they have nothing to match them. They’d love for us to elect a President who would jeopardize that source of strength. If Donald gets his way, they’ll be celebrating in the Kremlin. We cannot let that happen.”
That’s it? That’s the awesome, game-changing speech? A playground dig on Trump because his election would make our enemies happy? Are Moscow and Beijing really our enemies?
“That’s why it is no small thing when [Trump] talks about leaving NATO, or says he’ll stay neutral on Israel’s security.”
That’s true. Those would be awesome, game-changing moves. NATO should be disbanded. It’s the most dangerous and war-like organization on the planet, funded and staffed 75% by the United States. It’s the tip of the spear of empire. And what’s wrong with “staying neutral on Israel’s security?” Shouldn’t we be impartial there? Especially with the large majority of power and war crimes on the side of Israel, which has literally gotten away with murder because of U.S. support?
This speech is only a slam dunk for people who don’t pay attention, who don’t know what’s going on and who don’t know what the real problems of the world are. Sure, she addressed domestic issues, but that was one paragraph and this speech was hailed as a “foreign policy” speech, which means no-one really cared about those platitudes.
Here they are, by the way,
“That means investing in our infrastructure, education and innovation – the fundamentals of a strong economy. We need to reduce income inequality, because our country can’t lead effectively when so many are struggling to provide the basics for their families. And we need to break down the barriers that hold Americans back, including barriers of bigotry and discrimination.”
If I would bother doing a search, she probably jams this paragraph into every speech, hurrying past it to get to the parts that her donors care about. It’s actually chock-full of good stuff, but none of her policies could realistically lead to any of these coming true.
She’s clearly not going to do any of the stuff on that list. Just like her predecessor—who promised pretty much exactly the same stuff—hasn’t done anything about it during his eight years, either. He couldn’t even close Guantànamo. He had other things to take care of, like making sure the fat-cats were adequately fed and the little brown people of the world adequately bombed. Hillary, should she be elected, will find—much to her consternation, I’m sure—that, once those two duties are taken care of, there’s just no time left over for fixing “infrastructure, education, income inequality [or] break[ing] down barriers of bigotry and discrimination.”
No-one in the U.S. has invested in “infrastructure [or] education” for a long time. These are in shambles and need to be rebuilt from the ground up. That’s actually much more than what Hillary said: she wants to “invest” in it. This is a carefully chosen word that makes no promise of results. Similarly, she wants to “reduce income inequality”, but that makes no promise of any real change, other than at least somewhat acknowledging that the income inequality is too high. Also, while we’re at it, let’s end discrimination. That’s basically Bernie Sanders’s whole agenda, wrapped up in one small, throwaway paragraph.
But go ahead and elect Hillary. We can wait another eight years for all of that minor stuff. Just as long as the economy gets financialized and wars get funded.
She was in a hurry to get to the foreign-policy craziness, though, so no time to linger.
“And it’s no small thing when he suggests that America should withdraw our military support for Japan, encourage them to get nuclear weapons, and said this about a war between Japan and North Korea – and I quote – “If they do, they do. Good luck, enjoy yourself, folks.”
“I wonder if he even realizes he’s talking about nuclear war.”
Hillary is the fear-monger here. There is no reason to believe that Japan will go to war with Korea. Why would they? Especially if the U.S. isn’t there to agitate?
Granted, there is a grave nuclear threat in the world, but it’s because people like Hillary will not back off. It’s not because of other countries that tensions are so high. It’s because of America. Of course, America would say that tensions are high because other countries won’t see reason and do exactly what America says. Hillary is squarely in this camp.
Again, from Hillary’s speech,
“Take the nuclear agreement with Iran. When President Obama took office, Iran was racing toward a nuclear bomb.”
Bullshit. This was always a fiction. Iran was eventually able to use this fervently believed fiction about their nuclear program in order to get more concessions from the U.S. But they never had plans to build nuclear weapons. That was always a lie. Hillary almost certainly knows that. It’s a huge lie. No-one who matter cares.
“The world must understand that the United States will act decisively if necessary, including with military action, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon. In particular, Israel’s security is non-negotiable. They’re our closest ally in the region, and we have a moral obligation to defend them.”
Here’s where more of the psychopathic stuff kicks in. Right after trumpeting about how great her diplomacy was in getting Iran to the table she immediately and literally threatens them with military attack. Maybe she’s not-so-secretly pissed that Iran was able to get America to lift the economic sanctions by promising to abort their non-existent nuclear-weapons program. Iran quite clearly won that deal, but was forced to win it. It was like something out of Dr. Strangelove or Catch-22.
Hillary continued,
“Donald Trump says we shouldn’t have done the deal. We should have walked away. But that would have meant no more global sanctions, and Iran resuming their nuclear program and the world blaming us. So then what? War? Telling the world, good luck, you deal with Iran?”
Again, Hillary cites Trump and makes him sound saner than she is. Yes, Hillary, we really should have just let it drop, forgotten about our fictions about the Iran nuclear program. And, yes, Hillary, we should have stopped the crippling and criminal economic sanctions against countries that have done nothing to harm us. The world would have been better for it. Trump is correct in saying that (if he really said that, by the way).
But you, Hillary, need to portray America as a hero saving the world from a threat that America itself invented. All so that America can then pat itself on the back and ask the world to throw it a party for kicking so much ass. Classic psychopathic behavior.
Hillary continued her tirade against Trump (who is objectively the star of her speech),
“He has no sense of what it takes to deal with multiple countries with competing interests and reaching a solution that everyone can get behind. ”
This is patently untrue. For whatever reason, he keeps getting people to help him build things, then putting his big, fat name on them. Methinks Mr. Trump is more than familiar with dealing with multiple conflicting interests. This is not an endorsement of Trump’s negotiating skills because I don’t know about them, but what Hillary said is empirically untrue—Trump has dozens, if not hundreds, of times gotten his way in large, multi-party negotiations.
It’s similar to the supposition that Jewish and Arab leaders would be loath to deal with Trump. Why not? They dealt with a black guy, didn’t they? Do you think they like dealing with a woman more? Is that their reputation? Trump has been in real estate for four decades, much of it in New York and New Jersey. You better believe he’s already negotiated with roomfuls of Arabs and Jews dozens of times. Again, I’m not promoting Trump, but objectively putting the lie to the supposition that he wouldn’t be accepted. Putin says he would prefer Trump, but he’d eat either one of them for breakfast.
Speaking of Putin, Hillary also lambasted against the next big enemies: China and Russia. Wait a minute, didn’t her husband get China most-favored nation status, back in the 90s? And what the hell did Russia do to us, other than to collapse from the Soviet Union, end the cold war and leave the U.S. as sole superpower?
“Countries like Russia and China often work against us. Beijing dumps cheap steel in our markets. That hurts American workers. Moscow has taken aggressive military action in Ukraine, right on NATO’s doorstep.”
These myths are just too convenient and well-believed for Hillary to let go of them. Beijing dumps steel. Sure they do. They were probably invited in by U.S. corporations only too happy to buy cheap steel from Chinese slaves instead of from filthy, grasping U.S. union labor.
Then there’s the giant lie about Russia’s actions in Ukraine. Russia has taken no military action there, despite the protestations of both Europe and the U.S. Ukraine’s problems are entirely due to the putsch that the U.S. funded with $5 billion. It is known. [2]
Anthropomorphic climate-change is real. Trump doesn’t believe in it (or so he says). Hillary thinks it makes her a pro-science green leftist to stand in contradiction to Trump on this issue. It does not. Believing in scientific fact is the bare minimum we should expect of our leaders.
She also believes in another favorite myth of the American faux-left: that they actually care about climate-change and have actually done something about it. For example,
“It’s how our diplomats negotiated the landmark agreement on climate change […]”
Did I miss something? Did we agree to something “landmark” recently? Oh, yes, last year sometime. The world is still patting itself on the back for agreeing to a carbon target that’s 2.5–3 times higher than science tells us it should be. Truly a staggering achievement. We have a climate-change agreement and can feel good about having solved that problem—all without changing a single thing about how we operate. That’s the kind of solution America likes—superficial and not changing a damned thing. That’s the kind of president Hillary would be, too.
I know, it sounds ridiculous, right? But there’s nothing a neocon can’t blame on external, shadowy forces when her interests and her backers insist on it. She linked the two in back-to-back sentences.
“[…] we need a real plan for confronting terrorists. As we saw six months ago in San Bernardino, the threat is real and urgent. Over the past year, I’ve laid out my plans for defeating ISIS.”
These are domestic terrorists, living in America. [3] They are not The Americans-style sleeper agents. They are just unbalanced Americans. Most terrorism in America is home-grown. Still, it’s all ISIS’s fault for having made such an alluring web site. And why would the web site be so alluring, Hillary? Aren’t these people already living in the most exceptional country in the world? What reason could they possibly have for being upset?
Maybe the drone wars of Mr. Obama? Or some other horror visited on Muslims by a former Secretary of State? It must be difficult to campaign when you can’t rail against the current administration. Not only because you don’t want to spoil Obama’s support, but also because your agenda is basically “more of the same”. So Hillary rails against a potential President Trump, all the while getting us all accustomed to the idea. This is just bad marketing. But I digress.
After blaming the shooting in San Bernardino on ISIS—which is ludicrous—she says that we have to continue to stomp the Middle East even flatter. Because that will stop domestic shootings. I’m not kidding.
“We need to take out their strongholds in Iraq and Syria by intensifying the air campaign and stepping up our support for Arab and Kurdish forces on the ground.”
Hooray, more and bigger war! You talk tough, Hillary. If you’re sick of war, you cannot vote for Hillary.
“He’s [Trump’s] actually said – and I quote – “maybe Syria should be a free zone for ISIS.” Oh, okay – let a terrorist group have control of a major country in the Middle East.”
She calls Trump weak because he wants to get out of the war in the Middle East. Granted, we started it and fanned the flames to a bonfire, but leaving is better than continuing to fan those flames. We’ve been at it for almost 15 years and have made it worse and worse, every year. Also, news flash, Hillary: a terrorist group already does have control of major countries in the Middle East, more or less. The U.S. has been there for decades and we’re the biggest terrorist in the world.
“He also refused to rule out using nuclear weapons against ISIS, which would mean mass civilian casualties.”
This is standard U.S. policy—“not taking anything off the table” is how it’s usually characterized. Hillary is dissembling by implication here because, if asked, she would have to admit that she, too, does not take anything off the table. She, like every other candidate before her, will not unequivocally state that nuclear weapons will not be used in a first strike. Russia and China have done so repeatedly, just for comparison.
“Launching a nuclear attack. Starting a ground war. These are all distinct possibilities with Donald Trump in charge.”
Is Hillary suggesting that these are not “distinct possibilities” with her in charge? Because her record says otherwise. She is the war hawks of war hawks. Just a few paragraphs ago, she threatened to escalate the war in the Middle East and said that “Israel’s security is non-negotiable”. How is that any different than what she says Trump will do whenif he’s elected president? [4]
“Sixth, we need to stay true to our values.”
Oh my God, are you seriously listing six points? Could you be any more boring? And “staying true to our values” only weighs in at number six? Fine. Hold on to your hats, folks, Hillary’s turning up the jingoism and exceptionalism to 11.
“The truth is, there’s not a country in the world that can rival us. It’s not just that we have the greatest military, or that our economy is larger, more durable, more entrepreneurial than any in the world. It’s also that Americans work harder, dream bigger – and we never, ever stop trying to make our country and world a better place.”
Ugh. Here’s some fairy tales for you, America. Please concentrate on this shiny bauble instead of the shit sandwich your lives have become.
Some of what she says is true. The U.S. economy is, by certain measures, still the largest. It is increasingly financialized and hollowed-out and doesn’t have a strong future, but it’s currently still the biggest.
The military is also the largest by far. That is something Americans should really worry about being so proud of. The giant military is a symptom of America’s real long-term problem: it’s a villain with a violent, mean streak and an inflated and utterly unrealistic sense of its own goodness. There’s that psychopath thing again.
American politicians are like preachers promulgating a religion. For example, here’s Hillary winding up her speech with America’s version of “can I get an Amen?”
“There is no challenge we can’t meet, no goal we can’t achieve when we each do our part and come together as one nation.
“Every lesson from our history teaches us that we are stronger together. We remember that every Memorial Day.
“[…] our country represents something special, not just to us, to the world. It represents freedom and hope and opportunity.”
I don’t think that’s what the world thinks when they see your plane, Hillary. Only in the bubble of fantasy that it’s your job to maintain is America a shining beacon on a hill—the rest of the world has long since decided that America is the most dangerous state on the planet. There are several surveys over the last two decades that clearly point to America as the number-one danger, in the eyes of the world.
Hillary ends with a promise to America and a threat to the world.
“I’m going to do everything I can to protect our nation, and make sure we don’t lose sight of how strong we really are.”
Now that’s the America that everyone else sees, although Hillary thinks that this is a positive statement. It’s vaguely threatening, in a plausibly deniable way.
Just for laughs, let’s look at the psychopath list again. To assess someone, you rate them 0–2 on each question. If the sum of all answers is over 30, they’re a psychopath. Isn’t science awesome? [5] The following aren’t really applicable to a nation, so they fall away by default for America. Neither do they apply to Hillary. Item 11 is more her husband’s wheelhouse. And they’ve been married for decades, so Item 17 doesn’t apply either.
“Item 3: Need for stimulation / proneness to boredom.
Item 11: Promiscuous sexual behavior.
Item 12: Early behavior problems.
Item 17: Many short-term marital relationships.
Item 18: Juvenile delinquency.
Item 19: Revocation of conditional release.”
But the remainder of the list is a great match, for both America and Hillary.
“Item 1: Glibness / Superficial.
Item 2: Grandiose sense of self worth.
Item 4: Pathological lying.
Item 5: Conning / manipulative.
Item 6: Lack of remorse or guilt.
Item 7: Shallow affect.
Item 8: Callous / lack of empathy.
Item 9: Parasitic lifestyle.
Item 10: Poor behavior controls.
Item 13: Lack of realistic long-term goals.
Item 14: Impulsive.
Item 15: Irresponsibility.
Item 16: Failure to accept responsibility for own actions.
Item 20: Criminal versatility.”
Still, that only gets America and Hillary to 28 out of 40 on the test, so I guess they’re not psychopaths after all—they just both have most of the really terrible character traits of psychopaths. If we don’t want to change anything about America, then Hillary really is the best match.
Hooray. I feel much better now.
That’s all from just one speech, a speech that was greeted with relief, delight and admiration by media and officials alike, across the political spectrum.
Americans don’t listen to the words in these speeches. They don’t hear what their leaders are actually saying. America’s allies and enemies do. Think of how most people go to their house of worship. They nod their way through the sermon, not really listening to the words, basking only in the familiar cadences. When I’m forced to go to a service, I leave with a million questions, because what they’re saying is often quite disturbing. The regulars just don’t hear it anymore.
I’ve taken time out to dissect a speech of Hillary’s and not one of Trump’s because the media is lauding this speech as groundbreaking. I wanted to see for myself. Trump’s speeches don’t need analysis because his supporters don’t care what’s in them, he probably doesn’t even care that much and the media isn’t paying attention either. But Hillary is supposed to be the strong-minded alternative. She is not. This speech is a mishmash of jingoism and lies with an unhealthy obsession with Donald Trump—reading the speech, it felt like he’d already been president for months and she was campaigning to replace him.
]]>“The arrival of the first female presidential nominee was undoubtedly a huge moment in American history and something even the supporters of Bernie Sanders should recognize as... [More]”
Published by marco on 10. Jun 2016 09:55:38 (GMT-5)
The article Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) includes this passage, right at the top.
“The arrival of the first female presidential nominee was undoubtedly a huge moment in American history and something even the supporters of Bernie Sanders should recognize as significant and to be celebrated.”
I can’t agree with this facile lip service to political correctness.
How can it be a huge moment when nothing has changed except for the genitalia? The ideas are the same. The policies will be the same. The platitudes are the same. The hope is the same. The execution will be the same. There is no huge moment, there is no change coming, there is nothing in America that will be better or worse because of Hillary Clinton.
The people for whom things are great will continue to profit and benefit. The overwhelming majority for whom America is a cancerous influence will continue to suffer.
Significant? Should we all pat ourselves on the back for being enlightened enough to nominate a female president? Why? Dozens of countries have already elected one. Even a backwards military regime like Myanmar has Aung San Su Kyi, who is a true breath of fresh air on the world stage. Even Pakistan—a Muslim country, by the way—already had Benazir Bhutto who, though not quite as neoliberal as Hillary is, wasn’t anywhere near as enlightened as Su Kyi. She was more or less Pakistan’s Clinton—and they did that back in the 90s. There was Margaret Thatcher, the neocon to end all neocons, who was just as heartless and evil as any man. Congratulations, England.
And now America has found its own woman to lead it. One who won’t change anything, who won’t be any better than a man, who won’t fulfill the promise of benevolent leadership that we’d hoped a woman could offer. Instead, we get a bait and switch, as usual. America is a con job from top to bottom, so why should this be any different?
Bush had Condaleeza Rice advocating war and antagonizing enemies and allies alike. Colin Powell looked positively gentle in comparison. She didn’t clash with Richard Perlman or Paul Wolfowitz or Dick Cheney.
Obama had Hillary herself to flatten Libya for him, egged on by Samantha Power (now ambassador to the U.N.) and Susan Rice (former ambassador to the U.N., now National Security Advisor). There are already woman in positions of power and influence, but they’re only allowed in if they’re exactly as brutal and stupid—brutish—as the men they’re replacing. America might not care about genitalia anymore, but you still have to know which side your bread is buttered on.
So stop telling me to celebrate Hillary’s nomination like it means anything. It only means something to dupes who haven’t been paying attention—who only see gender, not substance.
When a politician sways with whichever wind blows hardest, it’s called triangulation. They try to find the combination of positions most likely to yield enough votes to win election. Those of us who don’t run for office call it being dishonest and unprincipled.
Americans have... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 19. May 2016 22:35:48 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. May 2016 16:06:32 (GMT-5)
When a politician sways with whichever wind blows hardest, it’s called triangulation. They try to find the combination of positions most likely to yield enough votes to win election. Those of us who don’t run for office call it being dishonest and unprincipled.
Americans have been told for years that such judgment is idealistic, that in real-world politics, there is no room for a person with principles. We are even happy to see our candidate doing what we interpret as “lying” because we know that our candidate is duping people for votes. Those people won’t get what they want. We will, though, because our candidate isn’t lying about the issues that we support. It all seems so clear, every single time. We get swept up every single time.
This time will be different.
He didn’t mean to hit me.
I love him or her.
Every damned time, right?
How has this worked out for Americans? In no particular order and clearly not exhaustive:
The most honest politicians will not triangulate. They say what they mean. We reward them with a concession speech.
Slightly less honest politicians will triangulate only as much as needed in order to win office. Recognizing the ethical danger, they compromise their principles as little as possible, make as few promises that go against the grain of their ideals as possible and incur as little political debt as possible. They usually guess incorrectly and also get to pick up the phone at the end of a long evening on election day.
The true egomaniacs wants as many votes as they possible can. They want as many votes as they can get their greedy hands on. They want a mandate. What’s a mandate? A mandate is a gift a politician gives to themselves where they get to do anything they want because the strong wind of democracy is at their back. Only those willing to flout the will of the people would stand in their way. Who would be so corrupt? So undemocratic? So un-American?
These politicians realize that most people don’t really pay attention. They pick a horse based on a single reason—whether or not that reason is based on verifiable fact is irrelevant—and ride that sucker for all it’s worth. Nothing can coax them down from there once they’re saddled up. Even the smallest investment of time and effort is enough to trigger the sunken-cost fallacy.
Because their voters are so unquestioning, so strident and their faith so unshakable, the egomaniac politicians don’t have to worry about actually making sense or being consistent.
You can be both for and against abortion, for or against increasing the military, for or against big banks, for or against police violence, and so on and so forth.
Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton both fall firmly into the camp of egomaniacs. I’ve already discussed Donald Trump’s shortcomings in other posts, but let’s take a look at who he’s up against.
Hillary will be the Democratic nominee. There is no way that Bernie Sanders can catch her in delegates. No-one who matters (read: Democratic party leadership) cares that the superdelegates are undemocratic. Their votes will count; they may even sway the nomination. It won’t matter.
Bernie was a schmuck and a traitor to his cause for even trying to get the Democratic nomination. The Democratic party would never have nominated him. They’re actively exhorting him to quit right now. He is clearly a viable candidate with a lot of support and a lot of votes. It doesn’t matter.
For those with their hopes pinned on Bernie, you can hold out a bit of hope because he hasn’t quite yet—as commanded by … wait, he’s not even a Democrat. Why does he care so much what they think? Now that he’s used his candidacy to drag the Democratic party machine our of the shadows and into the light, he should officially break from them and declare as Independent.
He won’t though. I don’t think he will, anyway. He’s already declared that he will support Hillary if he’s not nominated. His supporters are unlikely to go for that, they are unlikely to transfer their loyalty from his platform to Clinton’s. The platforms are so different.
But who do they vote for then? Jill Stein, of course. They won’t, though, because people don’t know who the Green candidate even is. They know who Sanders is now, though. He’s got momentum. It’s a mess if Sanders doesn’t continue.
Where Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders seem to be more in touch with the majority of Americans, Hillary and Trump travel in circles so distant, they don’t even understand certain questions and concerns anymore. As comedian Bill Burr put it in an interview with Conan O’Brien last year, Bill Burr on Hilary Clintons Bilderberg connections, Republicans and Nestle. (YoutTube)
“Dude, Hillary Clinton goes to those Bilderberg Meetings, that’s like the illuminati stuff right? She probably hooked up with some guy with a goat’s head and then she goes out on TV and she’s talking to people who drive snowplows like she can relate to ‘em.”
The entire Clinton machine is now shitting their pants about potential cannibalization of votes, about Sanders being “Nader”, about how a vote for anyone but Clinton is a vote for Trump. If you don’t vote for Hillary, if you vote for Sanders anyway or for Jill Stein, it’s as good as voting for Trump. Sanders himself has bought into this terrible argument.
So we have Hillary running not as a candidate, but as an anti-candidate, as “not Trump”.
It’s such a relief for everyone because the election no longer has to be about tedious issues, even tangentially. Now we can get down to the business of issue-free politics.
So I’ve been following Clinton’s career since her days as “co-president” to her days as junior senator from New York to her years as Secretary of State—where she oversaw/orchestrated the destruction of Libya and could barely contain her joy in an interview when she declared “we came, we saw, he died!” She was talking about the democratically elected leader of Libya, whom her air force was instrumental in deposing, all without congressional approval.
I didn’t really need to know more about Clinton to know that I wouldn’t want her as president. Her physical gender seems not to matter in her decision-making, despite the fervent hopes of her most ardent and unquestioning supporters. [1]
But we can also look at her contributions to the ACA, about which she’s so proud, which she thinks makes her look ultra-left? The article The Awful Lull by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation) describes it as follows,
“[…] as though it’s a great thing that Americans can shell out $10,000 a year for medical coverage that only kicks in after you rack up the first $6,000 in charges. (Forgetting for a moment that the costs are an hallucination of the “ChargeMaster” system designed to lavish six-figure salaries plus bonuses on the maestros in the hospital executive suites.)”
Enriching elites while with money sucked from the poor is policy that’s right in Hillary’s wheelhouse.
The article Feminism is Bigger Than Gender: Why I’ll be Happy in Hell Without Hillary by Barbara Maclean (CounterPunch) has a list of many more troublesome positions.
- Voted for the still ongoing Iraq War and an escalation of the Afghanistan war
- Voted to bail out Wall Street and the big banks
- Voted against splitting up the big banks
- Voted for the TPP which protects Wall Street banks and huge corporations from any regulations that would interfere with their profits
- Voted for the Keystone Pipeline – a pending environmental disaster
- Voted for border fence legislation
- Voted for off-shore drilling
- Supported raising the minimum wage to $12 an hour, even though the proposal is to raise it to $15 an hour, only after having her arm twisted – which will still leave people far below the standard of living
- Stated that she was for abortion only in “rare” circumstances
- Is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations, the defender of the elites, with her daughter also recently installed as a member
- She has announced that she was “very flattered when Henry Kissinger said I ran the State Department better than anybody had run it in a long time” (The Nation, Feb. 5, 2016)
- Supported decimating the welfare system during her husband’s presidency and suggested women on welfare were “just sitting around the house doing nothing” – referred to “these people” as “deadbeats”
In the list above, some might be surprised that getting Henry Kissinger’s endorsement is a bad thing. Kissinger is an old-time warhawkwar criminal, responsible for the deaths of millions in Asia, but also in possession of a Nobel Peace Prize. He’s not dead yet, so the establishment—which cares only about the promulgation of its own wealth, for which Kissinger is a good thing, and not little brown people, for which he’s very bad—continues to shower him with adulation. As mentioned in The Show Must Go On by Missy Comley Beattie (CounterPunch), “The Department of Defense presented Henry Kissinger the Distinguished Public Service Award on May 11.”
So Hillary’s choice of foreign-policy advisor seems to have been the best choice after all. That is, if you accept the official narrative that Kissinger was a boon to “public service”, then you don’t care about anyone but Americans and the official American narrative that puts them at the top of a hill, in a shining city. If you don’t care about non-Americans, then Hillary is your president, because neither does she. With extreme prejudice. She is an extremely hawkish policy-maker who’d never met a war or “intervention” she didn’t like.
Ditto for her membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. It’s a great thing if you think the current kings of this world should continue to be kings while the rest are serfs. And serfs are what we are to the Clinton machine, unless we can be proven to provide value. Hillary gives the impression that she hasn’t associated with anyone who couldn’t do something for her—money, influence, power—in decades. Trump gives the same impression.
However, instead of assuming I already knew everything I needed to know, I leavened my opinions with a helping of self-doubt and went to the Clinton home page to take a look at her platform.
To the left is the very first thing I saw. It kind of sets the tone for Clinton’s current campaign.
The caption is mine, but the panic is hers. Or rather, it’s not panic, is it? The Clinton campaign knows that you don’t have anywhere else to go if you’re a Democrat. You’ll vote for Hillary or you’ll get Trump.
The “not Trump” role in her campaign will probably only grow stronger. Why campaign on issues when you can just try to terrify people with an orange-haired bogeyman into voting for you?
Sit down, shut your leftie mouth and do as you’re told. The grownups are doing their thing. Hillary will let you know when and where to place your vote.
You know how we talked about triangulation many paragraphs ago? Well, when Hillary was running against Sanders, she had to track left so she didn’t look like such a shitty Democrat vis à vis Bernie Sanders. Now? Not only can Hillary veer back to her wheelhouse of conservative warmongering, she can track right now.
The sunken-cost, choice-less Democrats will follow. And maybe a Republican or two will jump ship out of horror at Trump.
That’s her campaign’s hope anyway.
With the Democratic nomination locked up, Hillary no longer needs to run as a Democrat. This frees her up to run against Trump as an alternative Republican.
Republican icons are lining up. The endorsement to the right was in the news articles at Clinton campaign headquarters.
Why should any Democrat care what Laura Bush thinks? They’re not expected to, of course. They’re already sitting down, shutting up and waiting to be told when to vote.
That endorsement is for Republicans. There’s another endorsement citing one of the Koch brothers saying he’d be fine with Hillary. Does that warm the cockles of a Democrat’s heart? Of course not. But Hillary doesn’t have to care what they think anymore. It’s general-election time!
I personally think that her campaign is taking it too far. Check out the banner at the top of the main home page.
Is that really good politics? Plastering your opponent’s name all over your own campaign materials? It feels like Trump’s already getting to her and her campaign.
Hillary’s campaign released a video that consists only of top Republican leaders denouncing Trump.
The ad makes Trump look anti-establishment, whereas it suggests that Hillary is very much of the establishment. This is not a point in Hillary’s favor for many voters. The establishment has 9% support among Americans (although it is consistently re-elected at over 95%).
Don’t buy that myth. It’s stupid and reductive. Just as there are many legitimate reasons to vote against Trump, there are many legitimate reasons to vote against Hillary. There are far fewer reasons to vote for either of them.
The article My Kind of Misogyny: I Don’t Care If They Call a Warhawk “Cankles” by Amber A'Lee Frost (The Baffler) provides a well-written summary of some of these anti-Hillary arguments (some of which I’ve already covered above).
“The left feminist critique of Hillary Clinton is being intentionally ignored by high-profile feminists because its very existence contradicts a thesis they hold dear: that criticism of Hillary Clinton—even from the left—is primarily the domain of misogynistic men who hate to see a strong woman succeed.”
Whereas there are many of these characters, they’re hating a bad candidate for the wrong reason. So you can’t say that they’re wrong for not voting for Hillary, but can say that they are utterly incapable of rationally choosing a candidate. If you vote against Hillary because she’s a woman, while it’s true that you’re the definition of a misogynist, the larger problem is that you’re an idiot.
If you vote against Hillary because she’s single-handedly responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi rather than because she totaled the entire country of Libya (see bragging about it above), then you’re a deluded and misguided voter, but more savable than the misogynist (though, let’s be honest, probably not savable at all if you’re still babbling about Benghazi after almost four years).
Ms. Frost continues,
“Just as I don’t see Traister or Marcotte [pro-Hillary pundits, ed.] running to the aid of Sarah Palin or Ann Coulter when right-wing women are the targets of sexist derision (and boy are they ever), I’d have to tick pretty far down my prioritized list of feminist concerns before I got to “Pitying the politically powerful multi-millionaire poised to run the country.” (Emphasis added.)”
Nobody really cried “misogyny” when an uninformed fool like Sarah Palin tried to take the national stage and was rightly called a fool. However, when a warmongering power-hungry douche-nozzle like Hillary Clinton is called out for her past record, the hue and cry are raised stridently. Is that perhaps because these defenders just aren’t aware of Hillary’s record? That they don’t even bother to address the legitimate arguments against Clinton because reading is hard? And accusing someone of misogyny is easy? That, perhaps, they’ve taken just as facile an approach to choosing a candidate as the misogynists, but just in the opposite direction?
Then isn’t someone who’s voting for Hillary because she’s a woman just as unqualified an idiot voter as the one who isn’t voting for her for the same reason?
Ms. Frost continues,
“That so many established feminists appear to favor one exceptionally rich and powerful woman over the millions of women in dire need—many struggling as a direct result of horrifying policies of Bill’s that Hillary still supports to this day—is alarming to me.”
This is a strong point—and one that gets to the heart of the matter. Hillary is the 1% just as much as Trump is. Hillary is a multi-multi-millionaire and is raking it in ever-faster each year, making the most of her elite connections. When she’s had a chance to make policy, what’s shone through is that the concerns of poor people are at best secondary. She may claim the opposite now, but so does every politician while running for office.
Just as Obama being the great black hope was always a fantasy—because he was just as willing to lie about everything with his admittedly soaring oratory skills—so, too, is the great female hope, for the exact same reasons. It’s an utter fantasy to think any different, given the undisputed facts about Hillary’s record.
Speaking of Obama, Ms. Frost had this to say,
“Obama’s presidency has not yielded much in the way of material gains for black people in America, and it’s hard to imagine what a symbolic feminist victory like a female president would guarantee for all but the most privileged of women. As it stands, I’d no more vote for Hillary than I would for a Margaret Thatcher or a Sarah Palin.”
To cite the president who came before Obama who said in 2002,
“There’s an old saying in Tennessee − I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee − that says, fool me once, shame on − shame on you. Fool me − you can’t get fooled again.”
We have utterly failed to heed Mr. Bush’s sage advice. [2] We failed to heed it in 2004, when America reëlected him. We failed to heed it in 2012 when America reëlected a proven warmonger who’d been elected as a peace president. We are heading full steam into making the exact same kind of choice again. I suppose that, once we’ve installed Hillary in the White House—as is her due [3]—we can all get ready to be fooled again in 2020, when she runs for reëlection.
“And isn’t that the simpler explanation of left dissent from Team Clinton? It’s not that critics of Hillary are largely misogynist or even that they’re obsessed with political purity. It’s that she’s a proven neoliberal warhawk, a Wall Street sycophant, and a consistent enemy of the poor. (Emphasis added.)”
Why are Sanders supporters automatically labeled as misogynists, as so-called Bernie Bros? Is Bernie’s entire appeal really to be cataloged as not-Hillary/not-female? Or are the establishment democrats not willing or able to see the problems with their chosen candidate and how Bernie addresses many of those issues? The entire establishment doesn’t want Bernie—he’s bad for business. The most facile way to try to take the wind out of Bernie’s campaign’s sails is to call his supporters misogynists, painting with a broad brush. The media is utterly delighted to play along, because they’re happy to fiddle while the empire burns. The kickbacks generally aren’t bad, either.
Ms. Frost on Sanders,
“It’s a strange sort of “misogynist” who condemns Clinton for her endorsement of “welfare reform,” which eviscerated a social safety net that primarily benefited women and children. And who are these misogynists who question Clinton’s time on the board of Walmart, a company known for its mass exploitation, particularly of women? What a misogyny that decrees the women of Iraq deserve lives free of American war! There’s a misogyny that advocates for childcare, healthcare, free university parental leave?”
Being against Hillary doesn’t make you a misogynist. Hillary, simply by dint of being a female, doesn’t represent all women, nor should she. Despite being a woman, she’s disqualified by her class and her policies from doing so. If you want to support someone who has the right ideas to put America on a better track, try to keep Sanders in the race. If you really want to support a woman with the same values, support Jill Stein instead.
It probably won’t matter anyway. If Sanders doesn’t run, Hillary will try to bleed away Republicans frustrated with Trump. I think that strategy will backfire because it’s only elite Republicans who prefer Clinton to Trump; the majority of Republicans wouldn’t piss on her if she was on fire. Trump or Clinton: either way is going to suck. But we should be getting used to that.
Published by marco on 16. Apr 2016 22:52:18 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 16. Apr 2016 22:55:01 (GMT-5)
I was digging and sorting and deleting old bookmarks the other day and came across this clip from the 2011 White House Correspondents Dinner. I don’t want to take anything away from him with the analysis that follows: Seth Meyers really knocks it out of the park for his whole 20 minutes or so. Really good material.
But there’s something I noticed. I’ve cued up the following clip at the point in his presentation where I feel he may have influenced the future of the U.S. of A. without even realizing it. If it doesn’t cue, then you can jump to the 12:00 mark to see what I’m talking about.
Do you see what I saw? The simmering anger, the utter lack of self-deprecation on Trump’s part during the whole several-minute–long segment during which Meyers relentlessly eviscerates him?
Can you feel the boiling anger? The way Trump harnesses it, focuses it, hones it to a diamond-sharp tip of a spear that he will use to ramrod America and make Seth Meyers eat his fucking words? Are you getting that vibe too?
Five short years later and Seth Meyers has got to be reëvaluating his comments. If he’d just left Trump alone—or not leaned on him so hard…
Seriously, he would just not let up. I was almost feeling a bit bad for Trump. Aren’t you supposed to hammer on the sitting president during this shindig? Instead, Meyers helped forge the T-1000–like determination that is catapulting Trump to the presidency. Or not. Whatever happens, the man made a huge splash.
I’ve heard that Trump still sends pictures of himself—years later—with his hands circled and the text “See? Normal-sized.” to the journalist who first accused him of having small hands. Given that, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Trump is running purely to show that fucking upstart Meyers who can’t win the presidency.
If Trump becomes president of the U.S., send your hate mail to Seth Meyers.
Everyone else? Hold on to your hats… Nah. You know what? Considering the U.S. has had one war criminal after another as president, U.S. citizens might sob and cry about how horrible Trump is as president, but the rest of the world won’t notice the difference.
As Yemenis, Pakistanis, etc. can’t tell the difference between Bush’s and Obama’s drones today, death from above will look the same to them, whether it comes from Trump or Cruz or Clinton.
Published by marco on 5. Mar 2016 14:39:23 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 5. Mar 2016 16:44:54 (GMT-5)
Since Trump won the primaries, the press and representatives on both sides of the aisle in America have stepped up their level of panic to at least DEFCON2. Nearly everyone who’s anyone is pulling on the handbrake as hard as they can to prevent the ever-more imminent disaster of a President Trump. At this point, the entirety of the press has nearly forgotten that Hillary and Sanders are even running in the other party’s primary because Trump is doing such a good job making Trumpzilla/the Trumpdozer/the Trump Train seem utterly inevitable.
Why does it seem so inevitable? Why are people panicked? Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has been writing a bit on this topic. Adams is a trained hypnotist and business consultant who’s training allows him to pick up cues and tricks used by others similarly trained. He calls Trump the “Master Persuader”.
In the post, Republican Debate (March 3) Scorecard (Master Persuader Series), Adams recounts the results of Trump’s first “bad” debate, the first one in which even FOX News went at him much harder on his policies. This is obviously where Trump is weakest. While he’s a master persuader, he doesn’t really have any concrete plans or coherent ideas. That’s not the point of his campaign. His campaign is all about winning for himself. As I mentioned in my previous article (The Winning Ticket in 2016), I don’t this he has the first clue about what he’d do once he gets to the Oval Office.
That doesn’t matter, though, as Adams points out.
“The FOX News debate moderators annihilated Donald Trump last night. They highlighted huge problems with his budget plan, showed inconsistencies in his policies, and hammered him for his Trump University “scam” as some would call it. It was Trump’s first bad debate night.
“And when I say FOX annihilated Trump, I mean they guaranteed a Trump landslide. People don’t like the establishment, in case you haven’t heard.
“We’re past the question of whether our politicians are lying to us. That’s a given. The system forces them to lie to get elected. I’m not sure the voters care at this point. (Emphasis added.)”
The voters do not care about lying of the kind Trump is accused of. Trump’s lies are just the kind of lies that Americans have been taught are the “good” kind of lie, the lie told to get ahead, to do better than those suckers who aren’t willing to lie a little bit to make America better. Or “great again”.
Trump’s been caught in one lie after another, about pretty much anything under the sun—and it hasn’t mattered a bit. Everything he does only seems to make him stronger, shocking everyone who matters in politics and the media.
The reason they’re so panicked now is that they are no longer in control of the narrative. They might get it back at some point—the history of the last seventy years says that they will—but there will be damage to their reputations and they will lose some previously unquestioning adherents to the American Way. Every incident like Trump’s candidacy causes waves whose ripples are unpredictable in their reach and longevity.
From the post, The Persuasion Reading List by Scott Adams
“When I listen to Donald Trump, I detect all of his influences back to Erickson. If you make it through this reading list, you might hear it too. I don’t know if Donald Trump would make a good president, but he is the best persuader I have ever seen. On a scale from 1 to 10, if Steve Jobs was a 10, Trump is a 15.
“You know how the media has made fun of Trump’s 4th-grade-level speech patterns?
“The joke’s on them.
“He does it intentionally.
“Because it works. (Emphasis added.)”
Trump seems to know what he’s doing, even if he probably couldn’t tell you exactly why he’s doing it. The Republicans, on the other hand, don’t seem to have their hand on the tiller anymore. They might get control back—they have before—but it’s not going to be by parading Mitt Romney ferchristssake in front of the American public. Whose idea was that? America could barely stomach him four years ago when the gargantuan force of the Republican party was 100% at his back. They bring him back now? When no-one’s heard a word from him for four straight years? Why on Earth would anyone care what Mitt Romney thinks about anything?
It’s just another reason why it feels like they might have lost their touch. It’s almost as tone-deaf as Hillary’s unwavering support of Kissinger. Though it’s clear that, in her circles, at least, he’s a fucking hero, she pays a lot of people a lot of money to keep her apprised of how the other 99% thinks—and the rest of us have wanted to convict him as a war criminal for decades. She’s too deep into her bubble, though, just like the rest of them.
The media, at least on the left, have tried to poke holes in the blustering bloviation of Trump before, but it only seems to strengthen him. They don’t understand what’s going on. Shouldn’t it be obvious that a moron can’t win? As the article Revenge of the Simple: How George W. Bush Gave Rise to Trump by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) points out, the exact opposite is obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention, who’s picked up the lessons not only of the last dozen years but the last forty.
“But Trump isn’t the beginning of the end. George W. Bush was. The amazing anti-miracle of the Bush presidency is what makes today’s nightmare possible.
“People forget what an extraordinary thing it was that Bush was president. Dubya wasn’t merely ignorant when compared with other politicians or other famous people. No, he would have stood out as dumb in just about any setting.”
Not only was he dumb, but he was proud of it. He didn’t have to be smart about anything because things just kind of always worked out for him.
Dubya was also quite high on the “Master Persuader” scale outlined by Scott Adams: there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that, when you actually met him, you were very quickly on his side and wanted to be friends with him. This is witnessed by the fact that people supported him fervently despite the obvious disastrousness of his policies in almost every way. You could chalk up some of this ignorance to the sway that American propaganda holds over its people, the degree to which this propaganda gets them to vote against their own interests—but Dubya’s reality-bending charisma clearly also had something to do with it.
Taibbi goes on to describe just how dumb Dubya was/is:
“If you could somehow run simulations where Bush was repeatedly shipwrecked on a desert island with 20 other adults chosen at random, he would be the last person listened to by the group every single time. He knew absolutely nothing about anything. He wouldn’t have been able to make fire, find water, build shelter or raise morale. It would have taken him days to get over the shock of no room service.”
Is he really that dumb and entitled? Bush stands out as a modern president who hasn’t done anything with his legacy of having been president other than cashed in on a book deal. [1] His claim to fame is that he’s taken up painting. Unlike Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton, he’s utterly disappeared from public life. Bush has no charities, no organizations or benefits to which he could draw money with his star power. I don’t think he’d even know where to start. As Taibbi writes, “Bush went to the best schools but was totally ignorant of history, philosophy, science, geography, languages and the arts. [2]”
How does this compare to the impending and unheralded disaster that would be a president Trump?
“The Roves of the world used Bush’s simplicity to win the White House. […] But the plan was never to make ignorance a political principle. It was just a ruse to win office.
“Now the situation is the opposite. Now GOP insiders are frantic at the prospect of an uncultured ignoramus winning the presidency.”
Really? Now? They seem to have literally forgotten about Bush. And even Taibbi forgets to mention Reagan, who was the original idiot/hand-puppet president of the modern era. They both had mean streaks that we thought belied a sort of angry intelligence, but they were really just lashing out when they thought people were laughing at them for being stupid, as has nearly every bully since time immemorial.
Reagan…Bush…both intellectually unqualified to be president of the U.S. by any reasonable measure. Only a few years ago, the Republican party was yelling at everyone who would listen that we weren’t allowed to consider Sarah Palin’s obvious ignorance when discussing her qualifications for higher office. [3] And now Trump’s too stupid to lead? You know what? I think we should just ignore everything these fools have to say and decide for ourselves. [4]
“Compared to Bush, Donald Trump is a Rutherford or an Einstein. In the same shipwreck scenario [from above], Trump would have all sorts of ideas — all wrong, but at least he’d think of something, instead of staring at the sand waiting for a hotel phone to rise out of it.”
And, as Adams pointed out [5], America no longer cares what the media says about Trump. Anything they say against him is interpreted as the panicked babblings of an effete press corps who fear they’re losing control of the message to the masses. And the masses taste blood in the water. And Trump knows how to chum those waters to his advantage. And it’s all the fault of the press and the ruling elites who spent decades teaching Americans to act this way, to support a candidate despite his stupidity. Even the more ignorant Americans are possessed of a craftiness and vindictiveness that would allow to vote for someone who might destroy their country as they know it just to show those snooty bastards who think they’re in charge.
“And all of the Beltway’s hooting and hollering about how “embarrassing” and “dangerous” Trump is will fall on deaf ears, because as gullible as Americans can be, they’re smart enough to remember being told that it was OK to vote for George Bush, a man capable of losing at tic-tac-toe.”
On top of that, who knows what we would get with any of the candidates? Hillary is probably the most-known quantity: she would rule pretty much as she has to-date as Secretary of State and Senator. Voting for Hillary is a vote for changing nothing in America. If you’re in the privileged few, then you vote for Hillary to keep things rolling along as they are. America keeps its class system, it’s racism, its inequality, its lack of jobs, it’s abhorrent foreign policy. She’d stretch things in some places—she’s a real warmonger—and shrink things in others, but the essential shape would remain overall the same.
With Sanders, we know what wants to do, but it’s hard to imagine even a single plank in his platform being executed in America.
Trump? There are some constant threads: jobs, fairness, etc. But what he says he wants kinda varies from day to day. [6] But isn’t that just being honest about every President? People thought they knew what they were getting in Obama and they got pretty much the same policies as Bush, but from an ostensibly much smarter guy. Those who didn’t want Obama thought they would get a Caliphate and didn’t get that either.
Intelligence really doesn’t seem to matter a good Goddamn. Policy-wise, nothing has changed in America for 16 years—hell, 40 years. Even Bush: people voted for him as a small-government Republican. He expanded the Federal government almost more than any other president ever with the Department of Homeland Security and his two ill-adviced wars. Ditto for Reagan, who was elected to kill deficits and instead grew the deficit and national debt like no other president before him.
Does it even matter that we don’t know what Trump would do as president? Would it matter if we thought we did? Whatever we think the president will do, he or she pretty much does what the previous president did, Nobel prize or no, intelligent or stupid, well-read or ignorant.
Although he’s settled in a more staid and professional style of late, Taibbi unpacks a lot of of his former snark in this post, with gems like:
“Guiding Bush the younger through eight years of public appearances was surely the greatest coaching job in history. It was like teaching a donkey to play the Waldstein Sonata. It’s breathtaking to think about now.”
Published by marco on 2. Mar 2016 21:39:27 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 2. Mar 2016 21:42:14 (GMT-5)
The Trumpdozer rolls on, showing the world the real America. The article How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) makes the case that Trump is the logical result of the American electoral process, which is not to be confused with the presidency itself, which while often cruel and capricious is not really a joke. People die because of it. As Taibbi says,
“The presidency is serious. The presidential electoral process, however, is a sick joke, in which everyone loses except the people behind the rope line.”
How likely is it that Trump will get elected? People have been saying “impossible” since Trump took the lead last summer and never let go—in almost every single poll. But Taibbi says it much more eloquently,
“A thousand ridiculous accidents needed to happen in the unlikeliest of sequences for it to be possible, but absent a dramatic turn of events – an early primary catastrophe [didn’t happen, –ed.], Mike Bloomberg ego-crashing the race, etc. [“almost zero” chance –ed.] – this boorish, monosyllabic TV tyrant with the attention span of an Xbox-playing 11-year-old really is set to lay waste to the most impenetrable oligarchy the Western world ever devised.
“It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.
“And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average. (Emphasis added.)”
He’s been conning people successfully for 69 years, he understands that there’s no such thing as bad publicity [1] and he seems to have just the right mix of insane racism and hatred of “the man” that a good part of America shares. I wouldn’t be surprised if his actual base spreads into disgruntled Democrats and independents as well.
So that’s depressing. Of all of the candidates, I find Jill Stein to be the most appealing, with Bernie Sanders second behind her. While I don’t play politics with my vote—I vote for whom I want, not the least-worst candidate I think has a shot of getting elected—I must consider electability in this case because, for me, Stein and Sanders are close enough for the “yooge” difference in electability to matter.
So here’s my plan for how to get Bernie elected.
Just in advance: you’re not going to like it.
No-one is going to like it. It’s appalling and Machiavellian, but it will work.
There ya go. Bernie in the White House in 2016. Trump for ongoing entertainment value.
And the media and parties and the establishment and the virulent and simplistic economic system have paved the way for this all-around catastrophe. The very nature of the media and parties makes them institutionally unable to prevent any of this. They have broken the voters and they are no longer in control. [10]
Sanders/Trump 2016. You read it here first.
“Trump isn’t the first rich guy to run for office. But he is the first to realize the weakness in the system, which is that the watchdogs in the political media can’t resist a car wreck. The more he insults the press, the more they cover him: He’s pulling 33 times as much coverage on the major networks as his next-closest GOP competitor, and twice as much as Hillary. (Emphasis added.)”
“Trump had said things that were true and that no other Republican would dare to say. And yet the press congratulated the candidate stuffed with more than $100 million in donor cash who really did take five whole days last year to figure out his position on his own brother’s invasion of Iraq. [Jeb, in case that’s not obvious. –ed.]”
The media is 100% not behind Trump. They can’t stop talking about him, but they want anyone but him to win. And, for once, it doesn’t matter. The more the effete media hate him, the more supporters he gets. And they cannot stop giving him face-time.
“The candidates sent forth to take on Trump have been so incompetent they can’t even lose properly. […] All of which virtually guarantees Trump will probably enjoy at least a five-horse race through Super Tuesday. So he might have this thing sewn up before the others even figure out in what order they should quit.”
This came true. Rubio has only ¼ of the delegates that Trump does after Super Tuesday.
“The unwelcome attention seemed to scare Cruz back into scripted-bot mode, where he’s a less-than-enthralling presence. Cruz in person is almost physically repellent. Psychology Today even ran an article by a neurology professor named Dr. Richard Cytowic about the peculiarly off-putting qualities of Cruz’s face.
“He used a German term, backpfeifengesicht, literally “a face in need of a good punch,” to describe Cruz. […] it’s his tone more than anything that gets you. He speaks slowly and loudly and in the most histrionic language possible, as if he’s certain you’re too stupid to grasp that he is for freedom. (Italic emphasis in original; bold emphasis added.)”
“Paul Singer, known as The Vulture, won a $4.65 billion payment from Argentina — nearly ONE HUNDRED TIMES his “investment” of $50 million in old Argentina bonds. It was, in finance speak, the most successful “vulture attack” ever.”
“No one should be surprised that he’s tearing through the Republican primaries, because everything he’s saying about his GOP opponents is true. They really are all stooges on the take, unable to stand up to Trump because they’re not even people, but are, like Jeb and Rubio, just robo-babbling representatives of unseen donors.”
“The first thing you notice at Donald Trump’s rallies is the confidence. Amateur psychologists have wishfully diagnosed him from afar as insecure, but in person the notion seems absurd. […] What’s he got to be insecure about? The American electoral system is opening before him like a flower.”
“This is part of a gigantic subplot to the Trump story, which is that many of his critiques of the process are the same ones being made by Bernie Sanders. The two men, of course, are polar opposites in just about every way – Sanders worries about the poor, while Trump would eat a child in a lifeboat – but both are laser-focused on the corrupting role of money in politics. […] He hammers Hillary and compliments Sanders. “I agree with [Sanders] on two things,” he says. “On trade, he said we’re being ripped off. He just doesn’t know how much.” […] He goes on. “And he’s right with Hillary because, look, she’s receiving a fortune from a lot of people.””
“A race against Hillary Clinton in the general, if it happens, will be a pitch right in Trump’s wheelhouse – and if Bill Clinton is complaining about the “vicious” attacks by the campaign of pathological nice guy Bernie Sanders, it’s hard to imagine what will happen once they get hit by the Trumpdozer.”
“Nine out of 10 times in America, the candidate who raises the most money wins. And those candidates then owe the most favors.
“Meaning that for the pleasure of being able to watch insincere campaign coverage and see manipulative political ads on TV for free, we end up having to pay inflated Medicare drug prices, fund bank bailouts with our taxes, let billionaires pay 17 percent tax rates, and suffer a thousand other indignities. Trump is right: Because Jeb Bush can’t afford to make his own commercials, he would go into the White House in the pocket of a drug manufacturer. It really is that stupid. (Emphasis added.)”
“The triumvirate of big media, big donors and big political parties has until now successfully excluded [sic] every challenge to its authority. But like every aristocracy, it eventually got lazy and profligate, too sure it was loved by the people. It’s now shocked that voters in depressed ex-factory towns won’t keep pulling the lever for “conservative principles,” or that union members bitten a dozen times over by a trade deal won’t just keep voting Democratic on cue.”
A lot has been said about this case that is wrong. I’ve read a few articles and comments from relatively... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 21. Feb 2016 23:19:23 (GMT-5)
The news is that the FBI has requested that Apple comply with a court order to crack a single iPhone—that belonging to one of the suicide killers at the San Bernardino massacre last year.
A lot has been said about this case that is wrong. I’ve read a few articles and comments from relatively knowledgable sources and what they have to say makes a bit more sense than the typically hyperbolic interpretation in the major media—and, of course, social networking sites.
The article The Department of Homeland Apple by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) provides a good primer on what the government is likely to think when the demands of law enforcement collide with the so-called principles of a large corporation.
“I explained that a judge, faced with tech impossibility, would just order that it happen. Like ordering the sun to rise in the west, the law doesn’t recognize technological capability or impossibility. The judge orders an outcome and it becomes a party’s problem to make it happen. Can’t be done? Courts enforce the laws of the United States, not the laws of physics.”
Why do things work this way? Well, because the law of the land is that the government needs to obtain a warrant in order to search through effects. Once it has a warrant, though, then it damned well better be able to search through those effects and heaven help whoever gets in the way.
The government is eminently uninterested in philosophical discussions about whether information to which no-one has access even exists. It will instead claim that Apple could gain access to this data if it truly wanted to. When Apple claims that it’s technically impossible, this is viewed as dissembling.
“From the government’s perspective, as well as the court’s, it doesn’t give a damn what Apple wants. It wants in because that’s what the government says is critical to whatever hyperbolic claim of saving lives from terrorists it spouts. And from the government’s point of view, that’s its job. And the government gets what it wants.”
The government has the weight of being right almost 100% of the time about this: can’t almost always means won’t. With warrant in hand, the government is under no further obligation to justify its demands. It does not care that the information will likely lead nowhere new. It does not care that the trail it could follow is most likely very, very cold. And it really doesn’t seem to care that its actions would be opening Pandora’s box, if I’m allowed a bit of hyperbole of my own.
Greenfield again:
“Precedent says that the government can do this, and so it can. How unreasonable and ridiculous you think it may be is no longer the issue. Welcome to the law.”
Politicians with terrible ideas, motivations and reputations—e.g. Francois Hollande, Hillary Clinton, David Cameron—have all been clamoring for backdoors in everything. The FBI is just launching a salvo—likely in coordination with others—to see if it’s possible to get those back, back to where we were just a few short years ago before Edward Snowden played a large role in spurring tech companies to build phones with end-to-end encryption to which even didn’t have keys.
The technical solution proposed by the government may sound quite convoluted, but it is likely the deformed child of a conference table full of lawyers.
The article The Last Bite of Apple’s iPhone by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) expands a bit more on the views outlined above. It’s important to note that Greenfield is not for allowing the hack, but trying to talk some sense into techies that don’t seem to realize the true gravity of the situation. Many in the tech world are crowing about how the government can’t win, when all precedent is on the government’s side. Apple can’t win…unless the government lets it.
Below, Greenfield explains why tech writes like a certain Manjoo from the New York Times are incorrectly framing the issue.
“A fundamental precept of American jurisprudence is that “the law is entitled to every man’s evidence.” What Manjoo fails to grasp is that law enforcement holds the trump card: neither the courts, nor the government, care more about Apple’s problems, technologies problems, the fate of world privacy, than they do about their own hegemony. In a battle between the law and all the arguments against compelling tech companies to do as they’re ordered, the courts have a weapon that cannot be dismissed. Judges get to decide which side wins. Judges will not be dismissed because some tech-lover like Manjoo loves tech more than law.”
Even granted that we don’t want the government to get a rootkit that they could then apply to anyone’s phone to crack it (once again, returning us to the situation in the early 2010s), do we really want the tech companies to win? They’re not answerable to anyone but themselves whereas the Justice Department is at least tangentially beholden to the voter, at some level.
“[…] if Apple, Google, Facebook prevail, and prove themselves mightier than our government, any government, then their CEOs become our new Overlords, omnipotent kings who cannot be stopped or controlled. At the moment, they seem like benevolent kings, standing up for something with which we agree. But did you get to vote on Tim Cook ascending to the throne?
“As Lord Acton explained, power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. We may despise the government’s assertion of power over our privacy, but does that mean we’ll like it better when the power is in Tim Cook’s hands? Or Mark Zuckerberg’s?”
This is an excellent question. I’m not really comfortable with anyone having that level of control, but if someone’s going to have it, it would better in the hands of an organization that is at least structurally democratic.
The next article is US v. Apple: The Government Seizes The Narrative by Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice).
“Although Apple had yet to submit a piece of paper in response to the warrant granted by Magistrate Judge Pym, the government made a tactical decision to pre-empt its response by filing a motion to compel Apple to comply.
“Rather than assist the effort to fully investigate a deadly terrorist attack by obeying this court’s order, Apple has responded by publicly repudiating that order.”n itself, this is a remarkable claim. After all, Apple has retained counsel to represent its interests in this matter, and its lawyers have yet to express Apple’s legal position. Public announcements, such as Tim Cook’s letter to Apple customers, are of no legal significance, and Apple’s opportunity to respond to the initial warrant had not elapsed. But the government saw the opportunity, and seized it.
The motion to compel is a brilliant tactical move by the government.”
He goes on to discuss the All Writs Act from 1789 and how there were previous attempts to establish precedent in the case of U.S. v. New York Telephone. In that case, the Second Circuit held that “the government could not compel innocent third parties to do its bidding”. The Supreme Court reversed, though. In the words of Justice White,
“The government had obtained a valid warrant, and “[t]he assistance of the Company was required here to implement” the warrant. […] citizens have a duty to assist in enforcement of the laws.”
This may seem like a weak pile of precedents on which to base a case, but a Supreme Court decision is the law of the land. Greenfield writes that the question really is as follows,
“if this issue was determined by a geek, the technological issues would predominate. But it will be decided by a judge, and this warrant raises the issue of hegemony. Will the law allow technology to dictate what the government is permitted to do? Will tech rule, or law?”
Even assuming that a corporation/citizen does have a duty to help the government—which sounds kind of hyperbolic and suspicious, even coming from a Supreme Court justice—just how much help are they expected to give? As much as the government needs, no matter how much they screw things up? Who foots the bill?
Which data does the FBI actually want? What do they already have? And which gap are they trying to fill? As tweeted by Edward Snowden (Twitter), the FBI “already has all of the suspect’s communications records—who they talked to and how—as these are stored by service providers, not on the phone itself.” Metadata? Check.
Also, “The FBI has received comprehensive backups of all the suspect’s data until just 6 weeks before the crime.” In case you weren’t aware, Apple makes iCloud backups available to law enforcement when presented with a warrant. They complied.
“Copies of the suspect’s contacts with co-workers—the FBI’s claimed interest—are available in duplicate from those co-worker’s phones.” The metadata they want is probably already in their hands, but they suspect that there are new contacts that they need to see, related to the case.
Also, “[t]he phone in controversy is a government-issued work phone, subjected to consent-to-monitoring, not a secret terrorist communications device. The “operational” phones believed to be hiding incriminating information, recovered by the FBI during a search, were physically destroyed, not “shielded by Apple”.” The device was monitored the whole time—and not by Apple–during the six weeks in question. What more do they want from the phone itself? This seems much more like an attempt to very publicly prove that the government can force a company to bypass its own encryption. All of the information they could hope to gain from the phone would seem to already be in their hands. Any additional information can be obtained from other sources.
As detailed in Apple: We tried to help FBI terror probe, but someone changed iCloud password by Cyrus Farivar (Ars Technica), Apple had already tried several times to give the FBI access to the phone legally and within the definition of its own user agreements.
“After days of working with the FBI […t]he idea was to force the iPhone 5C to auto-backup to Farook’s iCloud account. With a legal court order, Apple can and does turn over iCloud data. […] Apple suggested that the FBI take the iPhone 5C, plug it into a wall, connect it to a known Wi-Fi network and leave it overnight. […]When that attempt did not work, Apple was mystified, but soon found out that the Apple ID account password had been changed shortly after the phone was in the custody of law enforcement, possibly by someone from the county health department. With no way to enter the new password on the locked phone, even attempting an auto-backup was impossible. Had this iCloud auto-backup method actually functioned, Apple would have been easily able to assist the FBI with its investigation.”
So, somebody messed with the phone and triggered the auto-lock feature so that no backups to a warrant-friendly source could be made.
The article If FBI busts into seized iPhone, it could get non-iCloud data, like Telegram chats by Cyrus Farivar (Ars Technica) cites the FBI as claiming that,
“[…] we know that direct data extraction from an iOS device often provides more data than an iCloud backup contains.”
This contravenes Apple’s statements about its own iCloud backup service. It’s also what I would be led to believe: if Apple lets me back up to the cloud, then I damn well better be backing up to the cloud. If my phone is stolen or damaged, I don’t want to only get some of my data back. I’ve made a deal with the devil and agreed to give Apple a copy of all that I hold dear—they better actually deliver on their promise.
The FBI claims that certain apps don’t back up to the cloud, that there are messengers that are end-to-end encrypted. That app’s messages will only be on the phone. But won’t they also be in an undecryptable format with a separate password, one that Apple can’t possibly hope to help the FBI use? The FBI wants Apple to crack the phone so that they can get access to data to which Apple has no access? And what chance does the FBI have of cracking an app that specifically designed to prevent cracking?
While the article The FBI v. Apple isn’t at all the way you think it is by Robert X. Cringely (I, Cringely) ends up floating a pretty specious and utterly unfounded, though hopeful conspiracy theory, it does remind us quite correctly that maybe all is not as it seems with the FBI’s order.
“There’s something that doesn’t smell right here. The passage of time, the characters involved, the urgency of anti-terrorism make me strongly suspect that the innards of that iPhone are already well known to the Feds. If I were to do it I wouldn’t try cracking the phone at all, but its backup on a Mac or PC or iCloud, so maybe that’s the loophole they are using. Maybe they didn’t crack the iPhone because they didn’t have to. Or maybe some third party has already cracked it, leaving the FBI with that old standby plausible deniability.”
It is likely that the FBI has already gotten all of the information it wants and is either (A) trying to set up a case as precedent to allow future cracks with a far better turnaround time or (B) trying to appear helpless in order to assuage a public that has their hackles at least a little bit of the way up.
Cringely’s theory that Obama has deliberately fooled the FBI into going for it on this case in order to lure them up to a Supreme Court that is currently missing a right-leaning justice who would have almost certainly tipped the scales in the direction of allowing the government access to any and all evidence that can even be purported to exist—well, that strikes me as not just far-fetched, but utter hogwash.
Published by marco on 26. Jan 2016 19:18:07 (GMT-5)
I find James Howard Kunstler to be worth reading more often than not. He writes engagingly and his insight into the devolution of capitalist society can be quite valuable, But he’s been more and more prone to going off the rails when he discusses issues of race. It’s usually not out-and-out racism; there’s a kernel of an idea that’s worth discussing, but usually not the way he’s discussing it. His phrasing betrays a tone-deafness that underlies much of his opinion in these areas.
For example, in a recent post The Agonies of Sensible People (Clusterfuck Nation), he writes:
“Finally, on top of his Wall Street connection, Bloomberg is Jewish. (As I am.) Is the country now crazed enough to see the emergence of a Jewish Wall Streeter as the incarnation of all their hobgoblin-infested nightmares? Very possibly so, since the old left wing Progressives have adopted the Palestinians as their new pet oppressed minority du jour and have been inveighing against Israel incessantly. Well, that would be a darn shame. But that’s what you might get in a shameless land where anything goes and nothing matters.”
That’s a lot of incoherent, vaguely racially charged and misguided babble. It suggests that Kunstler views the plight of the Palestinians as just some issue picked up by bored liberals, not an actual, serious war crime perpetrated by a state that the U.S. 100% supports. This is not the first time that Kunstler got very flustered and incoherent when he sees the need to defend Israel at all costs.
Kunstler further idly wonders whether America could even contemplate a Jewish candidate—as if poll-leading Bernie Sanders had been hiding his Jewishness somehow.
Yes, Kunstler got so swept in his fantasy that America would reject the otherwise-perfect Bloomberg just ‘cause he’s Jewish, he completely forgot that Bernie Sanders is way Jewier than Bloomberg and is doing just fine in polls—even in Iowa.
The reason I noticed is because this paragraph just swept in out of the blue, after a more trenchant analysis of another topic. Its presence is jarring and demands extra attention. It makes Kunstler seem hyper-sensitive about a largely non-existent anti-semitism—so much so that he invents it in order to be offended by it.
That he hasn’t written a word about Sanders is revealing. Sanders is Jewish, so Kunstler is unlikely to want to be too disparaging—lest he become that which rages against. But, because Kunstler doesn’t like socialists, he’s forced to forget entirely that Sanders exists. More of a libertarian bent, is Mr. Kunstler.
Where Israel deserve’s Kunstler staunch protection, however, he feels that black people complain too much and he cheerfully downgrades their issues in his depictions of them. In his 2016 predictions article Pretend to the Bitter End (Clusterfuck Nation), an otherwise well-written and insightful article contained a section titled “Race Relations and the Cowardice of the Thinking Classes” who’s content was incongruously ungenerous (as the depiction of the Arab-loving liberals above).
In defending his opinion that black Americans are disadvantaged because they are not getting a proper education in how to communicate grammatically in English, he leaves his conclusion deliberately open as to who he thinks is to blame for that. It’s not an uninteresting thesis—David Foster Wallace wrote quite eloquently and non-controversially on the topic in Present Tense [1]—but he quickly moves on to phrasing that reveals a less refined and less helpful underlying thesis. It’s perhaps easy to miss because he signals with only a few words, but Kunstler is far too good and generally careful a writer for this to be unintentional. He writes,
“I suspect that many people of good intentions are running out patience with this racket — and it is a racket for extorting preferential treatment and money from guilt-tripped white people. (Emphasis added.)”
The reader can only conclude that, while Kunstler never heard a concern of Israel’s he found trifling, the concerns of black people in America amount to a racket about which Mr. Kunstler has heard quite enough, thank you very much. Further on, he writes:
“The martyrs of the movement act in ways likely to get them in trouble, for instance the hapless 12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot brandishing a BB gun designed to look exactly like the US Army 1911 issue .45 caliber ACP”
There is no other way to interpret this than to understand that Kunstler thinks that Rice brought his shooting on himself because he doesn’t know his place. A black boy cannot play with a gun in America. When he is shot by the police in record time, it is the black boy’s own fault for not paying attention to this obvious rule.
“[…] Trayvon Martin beating down George Zimmerman”
That’s about the least generous interpretation of what happened in that case that you could possibly have. Zimmerman triggered the confrontation when he could have avoided it in myriad ways, then shot Martin, then avoiding any sentencing. Martin is dead for no other reason that that he was black and somewhere where Zimmerman thought he shouldn’t be. Zimmerman went unpunished because America agreed with that statement. Kunstler can only remember that Zimmerman was beaten unfairly and seemingly out of the blue.
“The trend will be for police to regard certain neighborhoods as “no-go” areas — if only to avoid the gigantic multi-million dollar litigations that grow out of these ambiguous confrontations.”
Now he’s sympathizing with the put-upon police who are repaid for their efforts in policing no-go areas—full of ungrateful animals—with lawsuits that bleed their nearly-empty coffers unfairly dry. Yes, because that’s exactly how things go, right? The poor get away with murder and get paid richly for it while cops kowtow?
“The larger question going forward is whether Black America will continue to insist on being an oppositional culture.”
Kunstler thinks that black America is solely responsible for its own plight because it is “oppositional”. If “they” would just play along, everything would be fine. If they only knew their place, they’d be fine. [2]
Where his financial and high-level international analysis can be trenchant, his national and social analysis is tone-deaf and not really worth serious consideration.
“They also will not recognize the need for a common culture in this nation, a set of truly shared values and standards of conduct.”
This, from the same guy who argues for balkanization everywhere else, who wrote at the top of the article that “[t]he coming crackup will re-set the terms of civilized life to levels largely pre-techno-industrial” and who has argued vehemently and eloquently against suburban culture and the loss of communal life. So while Americans in general should welcome a “crackup” that returns them to smaller, more manageable communities, he also cheerfully blames and shames blacks for not properly participating in the 380-million–strong current American culture. So, blame the outsider for not integrating properly. Ironic, considering his vehement defense of Israel and Bloomberg while espousing his own Jewishness.
I have had my doubts about reading Kunstler for a few years, but he’s usually made it worthwhile—for now. He’s making it more difficult to continue, though, because even when he makes good points, it’s hard to forget the giant pile of petty and racist opinions that lurk beneath. [3]
As usual with David Foster Wallace, you should just read the whole essay because a citation doesn’t do it justice. An excerpt nonetheless follows.
“What I am suggesting is that the rhetorical situation of an English class — a class composed wholly of young people whose Group identity is rooted in defiance of Adult-Establishment values, plus also composed partly of minorities whose primary dialects are different from SWE — requires the teacher to come up with overt, honest, compelling arguments for why SWE is a dialect worth learning.
“These arguments are hard to make — not intellectually but emotionally, politically. Because they are baldly elitist. [38] The real truth, of course, is that SWE is the dialect of the American elite. That it was invented, codified, and promulgated by Privileged WASP Males and is perpetuated as “Standard” by same. That it is the shibboleth of the Establishment and an instrument of political power and class division and racial discrimination and all manner of social inequity. These are shall we say rather delicate subjects to bring up in an English class, especially in the service of a pro-SWE argument, and extra-especially if you yourself are both a Privileged WASP Male and the Teacher and thus pretty much a walking symbol of the Adult Establishment. This reviewer’s opinion, though, is that both students and SWE are better served if the teacher makes his premises explicit, licit and his argument overt, presenting himself as an advocate of SWE’s utility rather than as a prophet of its innate superiority.
“[From a prepared speech he gives his classes…]
“Maybe it seems unfair. If it does, you’re not going to like this news: I’m not going to let you write in SBE either. In my class, you have to learn and write in SWE. If you want to study your own dialect and its rules and history and how it’s different from SWE, fine — there are some great books by scholars of Black English, and I’ll help you find some and talk about them with you if you want. But that will be outside class. In class — in my English class — you will have to master and write in Standard Written English, which we might just as well call “Standard White English,” because it was developed by white people and is used by white people, especially educated, powerful white people. [RESPONSES by this point vary too widely to standardize.] I’m respecting you enough here to give you what I believe is the straight truth. In this country, SWE is perceived as the dialect of education and intelligence and power and prestige, and anybody of any race, ethnicity, religion, or gender who wants to succeed in American culture has got to be able to use SWE. This is How It Is. You can be glad about it or sad about it or deeply pissed off. You can believe it’s racist and unjust and decide right here and now to spend every waking minute of your adult life arguing against it, and maybe you should, but I’ll tell you something: If you ever want those arguments to get listened to and taken seriously, you’re going to have to communicate them in SWE, because SWE is the dialect our country uses to talk to itself. (Emphasis added.)”
This is clearly a different subject with a lot of value in and of itself, but I thought Wallace at least was able to present a rational view on it without seeming derogatory. I’m not saying he’s right, necessarily, but that he presents a good point lucidly. While it could be argued that Kunstler is making a similar point, it seems to be coming from a different, far less-constructive place.
Published by marco on 10. Jan 2016 22:21:00 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 10. Jan 2016 22:21:51 (GMT-5)
I haven’t read much about Ammon Bundy and his gang’s standoff in Oregon. I’ve read so little about it that I had to look up where it was actually happening (other than knowing it was “somewhere in the U.S.”). So it’s some Arizona ranchers occupying a federal building in Oregon. This is definitely a step up from the domestic terrorism of the Unabomber or Timothy McVeigh because at least fewer people are being killed. Still, armed men have occupied federal property and are demanding the release of two of their family members from prison—any non-biased and halfway-objective definition of terrorism would have to include this act.
I admit I haven’t put much effort into reading about it because it sounds so overtly ridiculous, much like the peaceful protest/armed standoff against federal officers by Cliven Bundy [1] and co. a few years ago. It honestly sounds like people feeling oppressed but utterly unaware of the privileges that allow them to even feel oppressed in this way and to protest it without getting killed. Even if the grievance were to be legitimate—which Clive Bundy’s objectively was not and a cursory examination of Ammon Bundy’s leads one to the same conclusion there—armed resistance is not the way to solve problems in a civilized country.
And, even if we were to consider allowing it in cases where revolution truly seems to be the only answer, these guys are definitely not first in line. Last year, during the protests triggered by police violence, there were those quick to opine that blacks should stop complaining and work harder instead of abandoning their families in droves to go do drugs. Those same people now listen carefully with looks of concern to every word that drips from Bundy’s lips about the nearly unutterable obscenities that the oppressive government has visited on them when it’s not otherwise bestowing its largesse on them from its public coffers in the form of ranching subsidies.
Where the grievances of the Occupy Movement were founded in real problems that affect many, many Americans and were based on deep inequalities and injustices in the American system of governance, these grievances don’t seem like injustices at all.
Where Occupy asked how people were supposed to live in a system that imposes such crushing debt for so many simply in order to take part in society, these ranchers simply don’t want to pay taxes, or to pay to use public land or to be told when and how much they’re allowed to set it on fire.
Where Occupy addressed the underlying issues of an economic system that caused global economic collapse and instability, these ranchers are growing what are very personal issues into national grievances with very careful manipulation of people’s heartstrings and miseducation on issues of governance.
Where addressing Occupy’s grievances would lead to a more equitable and viable society for many more than just the 1%, the solutions stemming from these ranchers are utterly unviable. That is, “not paying taxes” doesn’t scale to everybody, else how would you pay anyone to maintain public grazing land?
Though Occupy didn’t offer concrete solutions, the implication that the richest should be reined in by getting a smaller slice of the pie or at least giving up more of it should they unfairly get it doesn’t seem so outrageous, unless you’ve been heavily indoctrinated in so-called “free market” religion. Extending the mantra of “stop taxing us” and “let us use public land for free” doesn’t scale. At all. All it is is “I’ve got mine, Jack” and, once I’ve got it, no-one else gets it, ‘cause that wouldn’t be fair.
Just because it’s a mentality that might just win out in the short term doesn’t make it any less stupid or any more long-term viable.
There might be more to it, I know, but that’s really what it looks like so far. And, even if there were deeper subtleties, I don’t believe that most of the people who are so quick to throw their support behind these ranchers are doing it for those subtle reasons. Americans are trained from birth to simultaneously hate their own government and to unwittingly live off its largesse. The ignorance is often deliberate. This cognitive dissonance goes a long way to ensuring that they shut discussion down immediately lest uncomfortable reality intrude.
What the ranchers are doing sounds for all the world like a reality show, though, and will likely be picked up as a new Netflix-only series by 2017.
The article The Dumb and the Restless by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) (sub-titled, “Ammon Bundy and his band of weeping, self-pitying, gun-toting, wannabe-terrorist metrosexuals are America’s most ridiculous people”) closes with the following,
“There’s no doubt that these people are dangerous, but their ridiculousness is a huge part of who they are. Incidentally, this is true of groups like the actual al-Qaeda, too, led as they are by men in beards and Rick-Perry-style “smart glasses” who play at being religious scholars and intellectuals when in fact they are the kind of people who are afraid of cartoons and lie awake at night wondering if it’s permissible to play chess with a menstruating woman. Just because a person is dangerous does not mean he’s not also absurd.
“The Bundy militiamen are an extreme example of a type that’s become common in America. Like the Tea Partiers, they seem to not only believe that they’re the only people in history who’ve ever paid taxes, but that they’re the only people who were ever sad about it. What they call tyranny on the part of the federal government just means putting up with the same irritating bills and regulations and other crap that we all put up with, only the rest of us don’t whine about it in the front seats of our cars while posing in front of tripods.
“Again, these people may be dangerous, but their boundless self-pity, their outrageous sense of entitlement and their slapstick incompetence as rebels and terrorists are absolutely ridiculous. Sure, it may not help, but how can we not laugh?”
The opposite postulate holds as well: just because a person is absurd, that does not mean he’s not also dangerous. While I agree with Taibbi that we should laugh at them to dispel their power, we should still keep a careful eye on who’s not laughing. If there are enough people not laughing, they could react in ways that we don’t foresee because we aren’t taking them seriously.
Otherwise, we’re all self-satisfied and oblivious fools, judging “those idiots” who don’t know anything about anything and then utterly shocked to discover that those idiots are now, for all intents and purposes, in charge. [2]
This advice applies to all interest groups that use numbers—even seemingly small numbers—to exert control over the powerful on behalf of the weak. Sometimes this pressure achieves ostensibly “good” results—a union negotiates living wages or better benefits for its workers and the company for which they work is still profitable—and sometimes it’s bad—groups exert P.C. pressure to force companies and individuals to submit to ridiculous demands.
If we dismiss those who automatically lend credence to such special-interest groups out of hand, we run the risk of being extremely surprised when those groups end up exerting no small amount of control over our own lives. [3]
Here is where we often confuse who’s winning and losing. It’s very possible to lose reputation while winning everything else. That is, you think you’ve won against someone because you’ve made them ridiculous, but you’ve only beaten them on an inconsequential battleground while losing everywhere important.
Witness “bankers” (or the financial community) since 2008. Once again, in the wake of the global crash, everyone hates them and their reputation is terrible. On the other hand, almost all economic gains in the last seven years have gone to them. So what do they care if we think they’re losers, when by the only measure that matters in our society—money, in case you haven’t been paying attention—they are very definitely winning?
While we smugly consider ourselves better than “those people”, we continue our lives of quiet desperation while “those people” live lives of luxury unparalleled in history and financed purely by a largesse born of ignorance, self-satisfaction and an utter misunderstanding of power structures.
Published by marco on 22. Feb 2015 11:40:49 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 22. Feb 2015 14:07:33 (GMT-5)
In defense of Islam (3QuarksDaily) cites a same-named blog post by Ross Douthat (New York Times) in which he uses quite-dense prose to obfuscate the central message: he argues that the fanaticism of ISIS rises directly from Islamic scripture and shouldn’t be treated as necessarily crazy. The first step in ending a needless war is the recognition that the enemy is not crazy, but Douthat’s interpretation is more insidious, I think.
“Western analysts tend to understate not only the essential religiosity of ISIS’s worldview, but the extent to which that worldview has substantial theological grounding. It isn’t just a few guys making up a cult out of random bits of scripture; its political-religious vision appeals precisely because it derives “from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.” And we ignore the coherence of those interpretations at our peril: The Islamic State’s “intellectual genealogy” is intensely relevant to its political strategy, and its theology “must be understood to be combatted.””
He seems to argue, as others did before him—and as contemporaries like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins do—that Islam is inherently violent. This is a spectacularly tone-deaf and unproductive line of argument that fails to recognize the unbelievable level or violence and religious justification for it employed by the society in which Douthat—and all of his tone-deaf contemporaries—find themselves. The U.S. military is an extremely religious organization. It would be much more honest to just argue that humanity is inherently violent, independent of religious affiliation.
Douthat goes on to soften his initial paragraphs to “give the rest of Islam credit for being, well, Islamic as well, and for having available arguments and traditions and interpretations that marginalized this kind of barbarism in the past, and God willing can do so once again.” This is a wonderful sentiment but how is poor Islam to control its worst elements when crusading Christianity is constantly whipping up fervor with its bombs and suffering? And then there is the underlying superiority of these argument in which Douthat talks of “synthesiz[ing] Islam fully with Western modernity” as if there were a natural progression of civilization in which the current Western one was clearly superior to anything else. If we were to dig through objectively, that may end up being the case, but assuming so a priori is not bound to be convincing to those over whom you are claiming superiority—especially when it’s not immediately obvious.
I happened to stumble on an older, unpublished blog post that I wrote in early 2009 that described the exact same attitude of the west toward Islam, in this case as channelled by the late Christopher Hitchens.
Christopher Hitchens is an exquisite writer of English, as is Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s books are, on the whole, amazing reads, and Hitchens’s articles as well, when he’s not raging too hard about some of his more deep-seated, right-wing opinions (the unending justness and rightness of the Iraq war being one particular such hobby-horse). Assassins of the Mind by Christopher Hitchens (Vanity Fair) talks of his relationship with Rushdie over the years and, in particular, the violent attitude that leads followers of a religion to heed a fatwa issued against a novelist.
It is interesting that the violence of Islamic extremists gets consistent copy from Hitchens while examples abound of similarly violent efforts at suppression by others as well. When he speaks of “a shadowy figure that has, uninvited, drawn up a chair to the table”, it is very easy to get confused and think he is talking of the Holocaust, when he is, in fact, speaking of the outbreak of violence one can expect when writing, saying or showing something that may be taken as offensive by extremist Islam. It certainly seems to be granting a tremendous amount of power to a population segment that is (A) much more often getting the shitty end of the stick and (B) on the wane for years now, were it not for the efforts of exactly the governments that Hitchens so wholeheartedly continues to support in their efforts to do the Crusades right, once and for all.
It is especially ironic that the publishing cycle brings this article to the light of day now, two weeks into the latest, ghastly Israeli steamrolling of Gaza, when international commentary has failed to bring any serious form of condemnation to bear against Israel for their having thrown themselves into an attack based seemingly exclusively on tactics that are war crimes. For many that see the problem, that “shadowy figure” of the Holocaust prevents them from speaking out as they would against any other nation that acted in a similar manner.
When Hitchens calls Iran “the prison house that is the Islamic Republic”, he is only partly correct because such a statement can only be an exaggeration with a nation that has such a rich culture. It applies far better to a nation like North Korea, for example. His heart’s in the right place, but his condemnation of an entire nation—the 127 writers he mentions excluded, of course—puts him dangerously close to having his opinion interpreted as an implicit assent to a regime-change in Iran, as has been sought by the same regimes that brought us the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, of which Hitchens still approves, though not unreservedly. So, he’s right, but a bit too enthusiastically and exhibiting a bit of the fanaticism that he so rightly condemns in the target of his ire.
“To indulge the idea of religious censorship by the threat of violence is to insult and undermine precisely those in the Muslim world who are its intellectual cream, and who want to testify for their own liberty—and for ours. It is also to make the patronizing assumption that the leaders of mobs and the inciters of goons are the authentic representatives of Muslim opinion. What could be more “offensive” than that?”
]]>“King Abdullah’s reign brought about marginal advances for women but failed to secure the fundamental rights of Saudi citizens to free... [More]”
Published by marco on 30. Jan 2015 17:00:54 (GMT-5)
HRW is clearly in the pocket of the U.S. government. From a recent tweet, which linked to the article Saudi Arabia: King’s Reform Agenda Unfulfilled (HRW),
“King Abdullah’s reign brought about marginal advances for women but failed to secure the fundamental rights of Saudi citizens to free expression, association, and assembly. […]”
The verb employed here is not accurate. You cannot fail at something without actually trying it. In the main tweet, they do it again, characterizing a purely imaginary “reform agenda” as “unfulfilled”.
I suppose this tweet could be just misconstrued as misguided and uninformed, but isn’t HRW supposed to be on top of exactly the type of regime led by King Abdullah for 14 years? What exactly are they for, if not that?
Let’s take a look at another twipitaph, this one for Hugo Chavez and linking to the article Venezuela: Chávez’s Authoritarian Legacy (HRW)
“After enacting a new constitution with ample human rights protections in 1999 – and surviving a short-lived coup d’état in 2002 – Chávez and his followers moved to concentrate power. They seized control of the Supreme Court and undercut the ability of journalists, human rights defenders, and other Venezuelans to exercise fundamental rights.”
This is a pretty harsh characterization of a regime that made forward strides in many, much more social ways.
Oh right, HRW is a propaganda arm of the U.S. government. So they write hagiographies of official U.S. allies that ignore all manner of anti-democratic policies while denouncing official enemies of the U.S. that emphasize all manner of slanderous and largely unfounded accusations.
The point is to make sure the reader gets the right impression.
Saudi Arabia good; Venezuela bad?
Not exactly.
The lesson instead is what the U.S. says, goes.
And the U.S. wants any country that even think of having an anti-capitalist and pro-socialist component to think again.
And HRW is here to help in whatever way it can.
Published by marco on 29. Jan 2015 23:07:26 (GMT-5)
I have not seen American Sniper for the same reason that I have not seen Act of Valor, Zero Dark Thirty or Lone Survivor. I did watch one season of Homeland and lasted that long only because my watchin’ buddy refused to stop mid-season. This type of entertainment is mostly just the U.S. military advertising itself through Hollywood’s mouth. I’d rather read the news and come to my own conclusions without the hagiographies.
I watched Battleship ‘cause it had aliens and The Hurt Locker ‘cause the woman who directed it won an Oscar for it. Funny story: it turned out she won the Oscar because she’d managed to make a movie about American war in just as unquestioning a hoo-rah, patriotic manner as any man could have. So when Bigelow’s next paean Zero Dark Thirty showed up, I was once-bitten-twice-shy.
And now we have another hoo-rah movie over which the Academy has spooged six nominations and in which America onanates about its greatness on-screen, all directed by éminence grise Clint Eastwood, whose extreme rightward swing we’re all supposed to ignore in his oeuvres. That should be no problem: I never understood why Republicans hate George Clooney movies just because they don’t agree with his politics and I certainly don’t avoid Bruce Willis because I think his politics are laughable. Because they are. But he’s still a fun actor.
Anyway, I haven’t seen the movie, but I’ve read some interesting takes on it. The first of these was the article Learning from American Sniper by Rory Fanning (Jacobin), which advises us to learn what we can from the movie, even if you think it crude to claim that a movie about a highly politicized war that only just ended (kind of) is non-political.
As Fanning put it,
“And American Sniper deserves every bit of criticism the Left throws at it. But the film’s racism and enthusiastic support for American empire shouldn’t blind us to its lessons about the sociological and ideological factors that have allowed the US to stay at war for fourteen years with at least the partial support of an all-volunteer military.”
That the movie has broken all records for January and for movies of this kind says a lot. Anyone with a social conscience and a hope for America should take heed: dozens of millions of people loved this movie, not because they wanted to wallow in the shame of having sent a military to a foreign country to indiscriminately slaughter its populace as “animals” and “savages” but because they approve of all of this. U-S-A. Say it with me.
Even if Eastwood and Cooper have managed to bury some critique of the occupation somewhere, most of the people watching do not notice and they do not care. [1] Most went to watch because they read the best-selling novel about a soldier whose only regret was that he could not kill more of the animals. Hoo-rah.
Fanning continues,
“To simply write off Kyle as a monster would be to ignore the people, institutions, and history that helped create him. […] Eastwood also does a masterful job showing us how a soldier’s view of the world can be narrowed to the size of a rifle scope, of showing us how bonds between soldiers are formed: in combat, it seems the only people in the world are those standing to your left and right, keeping you alive. For someone like Kyle, all he sees beyond his fellow soldiers are wolves. After combat, particularly if a soldier loses a buddy, the racism that is used as a killing and survival tool can be hard to discard.”
Fanning here possibly elicits more nuance from the film than was probably intended, but still it’s a point worth noting: from the soldier’s perspective, the treatment of other people in this way is completely justified. But we should absolutely not inherit the perspective of the most traumatized and damaged among us. While it’s understandable that they feel like that, in the situation that they’re in, with the training they’re given, but that doesn’t mean it’s the right way to feel about it. Soldiers “in the shit” will always slaughter everything around them to save their own skins and those of their bodies. It’s been that way in every war or conflict since time immemorial. Instead of getting sucked in to that mindset, people should think about not putting soldiers in such terrible situations for literally no reason. The innocent civilians of every other country would thank you.
While I agree that the movie could be understood to be teaching a lesson about hegemony, blood-lust, alienation of the other and colonization, that lesson will go unseen, ignored and unlearned by almost every single viewer. Most are going to sympathize with Kyle, reaching out with their whole hearts in sympathy with his regret that he just couldn’t kill enough Iraqi animals. This is wrong, horribly, horribly wrong.
However, for anyone who does see the well-hidden lessons in a film like this, there is work to do. It’s time to point it out to others, let them know what you’re seeing if they can’t see it for themselves. Make movies like this—because there will be more—do some work for good instead of letting it serve purely as propaganda for further, future military interventions. It’s an uphill battle, fighting against decades of propaganda and brainwashing about militarism and nationalism.
Fanning again,
“American Sniper can help antiwar activists understand what continues to drive many American teenagers to the military. […] But it is important to say more about the film than the obvious. We can start by asking why it is so successful and why it is appealing to large veteran organizations. […] As Vietnam taught us, if we want to build a successful antiwar movement, we have to engage the soldiers fighting the wars. American Sniper, if we take it seriously, might help us do just that.”
There seems to be less regret about the latest U.S. wars than Vietnam. There are a lot of soldiers and former soldiers whose attitude is no longer nearly as hoo-rah as it once was. The shine is off that apple, but there aren’t nearly enough resisting because the U.S. military still has enough soldiers to keep doing what it’s been doing for dozens if not hundreds of years.
Another review that is more nuanced than the standard “it’s awesome—hoo-rah!” or “it’s imperialistic trash!” is “American Sniper” and the culture wars: Why the movie’s not what you think it is by Andrew O'Hehir (Salon), which discusses how the source material is abhorrent but the quality of the cast and director carry the film to unexpected places—again, as noted above, once if you’re willing to look hard, though.
““American Sniper,” the movie, is a character study about a guy who sees himself as fundamentally honorable and decent, but whose simplistic moral code turns out to be exceptionally poor preparation for the real world and real warfare. How well Eastwood accomplishes that goal, whether or not it’s worth doing and how much that may or may not reflect the real story of Chris Kyle are all matters for debate.”
The movie seems to conveniently skip a lot of information about the third Iraq War [2]: it doesn’t prepare the viewer at all, instead dropping him or her into an ongoing conflict, the origins of which are not questioned, in veracity or morality.
A final take on this film worth reading is the article I Served in Iraq, and American Sniper Gets It Right. But It’s Still Not the War Film We Need. by Brian Turner (Vulture), written by a former soldier and which says that a lot of what’s in the film jibes with reality. That is, if the movie is a racist, hoo-rah, unquestioning, propagandistic pile of shit according to any right-thinking or even partially moral individual, that’s because that’s exactly what the war in Iraq is. The movie gets it right; the problem is the audience. Instead of being appalled by what they see, they scream “America! Fuck, yeah!” and queue up to watch it again. That the movie is being feted to the high heavens by actual supporters is a judgment of our decayed culture.
In the reviewer’s words,
“Those scenes dredged up memories of Mosul and Baghdad, where I once heard the words You are authorized to shoot children come crackling over the radio. I also remember watching soldiers in my own platoon lob plastic water bottles filled with their own urine at village children who would run to us as we drove by — thirsty children who motioned with their thumbs to their mouths in a gesture pleading for water. There is truth in American Sniper, whether you think the film is crass jingoism or a portrait of a hero. (Emphasis added.)”
While the author is “grateful that Eastwood chose to visually elide Kyle’s own tragic death”, I’ve read in other places [3] that this elision allows the further canonization of guns. The film can be seen as a paean to the gun, whose overwhelming power to solve any situation for good could be the overarching message of this film. Again, that could be taken both ways: Guns help America gets its message of democracy and freedom across and that’s awesome…and, well, the same message, but with that conclusion being oxymoronic and not awesome at all. Guns are one of America’s big problems domestically and America’s guns are everybody’s problems internationally. But Kyle was killed by a gun wielded by a PTSD’d fellow veteran, but this murder was crucially off-screen, so we don’t get to see a gun doing anything that even avid supporters of Kyle in all that he does would consider to be definitely bad.
I’m going to quote Turner at length, because he writes quite well,
“This isn’t the defining film of the Iraq War. After nearly a quarter century of war and occupation in Iraq [4], we still haven’t seen that film. I’m beginning to think we’re incapable as a nation of producing a film of that magnitude, one that would explore the civilian experience of war, one that might begin to approach so vast and profound a repository of knowledge. I’m more and more certain that, if such a film film ever arrives, it’ll be made by Iraqi filmmakers a decade or more from now, and it’ll be little known or viewed, if at all, on our shores. The children of Iraq have far more to teach me about the war I fought in than any film I’ve yet seen — and I hope some of those children have the courage and opportunity to share their lessons onscreen. If this film I can only vaguely imagine is ever made, it certainly won’t gross $100 million on its opening weekend.”
Chris Hedges saw the movie as well and his reaction is predictable: nuanced and probably mostly right, but very predictable. He also cites the scene where Kyle’s father teaches him about wolves who “prey on people” while at the same time menacing his children with the business end of his belt. The tells of a film that depicts a culture utterly unaware that cheering a film that depicts “the belief that we have an innate right as a “Christian” nation to exterminate the “lesser breeds” of the earth”—quoted bits are from the movie dialogue—may reflect poorly on the viewer, or at least reveal rather more than the viewer may have wanted, much as a rebel-flag belt-buckle would.
Hedges also writes well, so I’ll cite him at length, on the anti-intellectualism, the insularity of American thought, the depth of brainwashing:
“There is no shortage of simpletons whose minds are warped by this belief system. We elected one of them, George W. Bush, as president. They populate the armed forces and the Christian right. They watch Fox News and believe it. They have little understanding or curiosity about the world outside their insular communities. They are proud of their ignorance and anti-intellectualism. […] And when they get into power—they already control the Congress, the corporate world, most of the media and the war machine—their binary vision of good and evil and their myopic self-adulation cause severe trouble for their country. “American Sniper,” like the big-budget feature films pumped out in Germany during the Nazi era to exalt deformed values of militarism, racial self-glorification and state violence, is a piece of propaganda, a tawdry commercial for the crimes of empire. That it made a record-breaking $105.3 million over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday long weekend is a symptom of the United States’ dark malaise.”
Where Hedges and some others he interviews about the movie were made “physically ill with its twisted, totally one-sided distortions of wartime combat ethics”, they should be careful not to miss the point that this might be a very accurate portrayal (as noted by Turner above). Apocalypse Now was a visceral, horrifying movie but it was accurate. So was Full Metal Jacket. It’s more horrifying because it’s true. American Sniper may turn out to be that movie, whether it intended to be or not. [5]
That is, the 9-figure opening weekend means that almost no-one else seemed to mind the one-sidedness of it and most probably no-one even noticed it as such. Even the pairing of Iraq with 9–11 in a causal chain is, while factually wrong, correct in the context of the film. Most of America still believes that Iraq sponsored the attacks; most think we found WMDs. Most of the soldiers do too. Their simple mythology is undisturbed by reality. This movie is for them and, for the rest of us, it shows us what we’re dealing with when we try to right this heavily listing ship of state. It’s a lesson we would do well not to ignore.
Hedges quotes at length from the book that inspired the film—and the text is clearly much, much worse than the movie could be. Truly hateful, small-minded stuff. And, yet, this man is a hero. Again, do not look away; learn from it.
Published by marco on 21. Jan 2015 22:51:09 (GMT-5)
After a few days of coverage, the Charlie Hebdo attack had already started to resonate with the same vibrant religious fervor in France as the 9–11 attacks quickly did in America. Through the entire (mainstream and largely fringe) spectrum, though, there was an utter lack of awareness that what happened at those offices was just another normal day in the many places where the West exerts its influence.
Just how sympathetic do the French suppose an average Libyan would be to Parisian wails over these unwarranted and unprecedented attacks? By that I mean the Libyans that recall the hundreds of days on which they could see French jet fighters soaring overhead, dropping bombs indiscriminately, sending them back to the stone age and delivering whole swaths of the country over to warlords. [1]
The shock, the awe, at the Hebdo attack seems—as Noam Chomsky described the similar reaction to the 9–11 attacks—to be due to “guns being pointed in the other direction, for once”. When the West wipes out entire families and villages, it’s not newsworthy. When Western journalists are murdered in their own offices on a quiet street in a Parisian arrondissement, “the world has changed.”
That France is in large part responsible for the destruction and unrest and warlordism of North Africa in no way excuses the attack on Charlie Hebdo’s offices. Only an idiot in search of a straw man would infer that. But acknowledging the context of the attack might help explain it. It will help us perhaps conclude that the attack was perpetrated by angry madmen rather than the usual claptrap: that it was a mad religion or entire culture that was behind it (and which must, with heavy heart, be eradicated for if not its, then at least our, own good).
Context and logic will be, of course and as usual, ignore. Tragedy will be utilized to entrench existing power. It will be high time for revenge-taking.
One of the first reactions I read was the article The Blame for the Charlie Hebdo Murders by George Packer (The New Yorker). I was struck by the innocence and utter tone-deafness of the following paragraph,
“They are only the latest blows delivered by an ideology that has sought to achieve power through terror for decades. […] The ideology that murdered three thousand people in the U.S. on September 11, 2001. […] The one that has brought mass rape and slaughter to the cities and deserts of Syria and Iraq. That massacred a hundred and thirty-two children and thirteen adults in a school in Peshawar last month. That regularly kills so many Nigerians, especially young ones, that hardly anyone pays attention.”
Mr. Packer expect every single one of his readers to guess that the ideology to which he is referring is Islamofascism. But a more astute and less rigidly brainwashed student of history would guess whatever you would call the ideology promulgated by the West. Capitalism? Globalism? Economic Colonialism? Every one of the statements in the citation above applies ten-fold to the United States, or to NATO. The ideology of the perpetrators of the recent murders in Paris was clearly the target of Packer’s prose. But that ideology is a positive piker when compared to the sheer destructive power of that of the U.S., spreading democracy and opening private markets everywhere its businesses need them.
Is that just a stupid question? (Spoiler: it’s mostly a stupid question.)
The post Long Live Formal Freedom! by Justin Erik Halldór Smith discusses the stupidity of saying that racist cartoons should not be protected by free speech—which is where many arguments quickly ended up, whether they meant to or not.
“At the same time, I feel light-years away, politically, from the ignorant ‘social justice warrior’ version of politics, mostly coming out of North America, which says, basically: “I’m sad people died and everything, but, um, racist satire is not OK.” As if there were no problem of who is going to be in a position to offer the final verdict on the OK/not-OK question. The state? Death squads?”
This is not at all the argument I am making. People can make crass and at-times funny but also at-times silly and stupid cartoons—everyone’s jokes fall flat sometimes. No-one should die for doing so.
What happened in Paris was a major crime. Just not more major because it happened in France, to Westerners. All of the other times—where the victims were far less classically photogenic in Europe—were crimes of just as great import.
But no-one really gives a shit until it happens here, in the West. And then it must be stopped and stamped out immediately and, of course, taken absolutely seriously and given the highest priority. And talked about and discussed and analyzed endlessly.
And solidarity with people otherwise considered wholly obnoxious and unpalatable must be evinced throughout the political spectrum. It’s bad but no worse than many, many other events. To make this much noise about Charlie Hebdo says quite a bit more about you than you think it might. Smith disagrees, though, to a large degree. I’ll cite him at length,
“We are living in such an image-critically illiterate age that jihadists in France and professors in American universities alike are entirely unable to interpret the Charlie Hebdo cartoons beyond a dull, clerical registering of the content of the images. There has been virtually no effort to make sense of their context, nor indeed of their success or failure as instances of the art of caricature. The attackers say “These images are an insult to the Prophet and they must be avenged,” and the social-media activists say, “Um, these images are racist, and that’s not OK,” but the critical skills at work in both cases are roughly the same. I certainly will not defend all of them, though I do think many are works of true inspiration. They have little in common with the hack work in the Danish newspapers (to which the great Art Spiegelman gave generally low grades) that set off this brutal campaign against cartoonists some years ago.”
Smith finds the cartoons to be high art in many cases, saying that one must make an “effort to make sense of their context, nor indeed of their success or failure as instances of the art of caricature.” Well, you don’t have to. But you have to not be so offended by it that you want to kill someone. That I can totally get behind. Mad Magazine also had/has some brilliant and cutting satire/parody, but it’d be hard to label anyone who didn’t find them funny as a Philistine.
I personally think that Hebdo is pulling everyone’s leg and even Smith’s normal vigilance has been covered in wool. Charlie Hebdo received 1 million euros from the French government to boost their first printing after the attacks to 7 million (from a regular circulation of about 40,000). They printed a cartoon of Mohammed with not one, but two poorly disguised dick-and-balls on his head. Hilarious. Absolutely the height of art and provocation and political statement. That’s about on the same level as A Million Ways to Die in the West and yet nobody’s calling that high art.
Smith veers a bit too close for comfort to the argument that anyone who thinks Hebdo too crass for their taste has tastes utterly lacking in nuance and sophistication. If you don’t think Mohammed with a Jewish star in his ass is funny, then you should learn French and French culture, enlighten yourself and then you’ll see what’s so funny. Or not. It’s the classic it’s-not-bad-art-you-just-don’t-get-it argument, which works to a degree and can be based on noted sources—Smith cites éminence grise Art Spiegelman—but it’s a hard argument to float effectively when you’re going for mass appeal and the masses just refuse to agree.
Uphill battles can be worth it, but you should pick them wisely. [2] Smith also may be suffering a bit from what typically happens when you’re deep enough in a foreign culture and language to get the jokes, but not deep enough to notice the deeper nuance. You’re just so happy that you fit in somewhere other than home that you end up liking cruder humor than you would in your home culture or mother tongue.
Smith concludes by drawing interesting parallels between offensive and noxious material produced as advertisement for a corporation versus the same produced to promulgate a personal or political opinion.
“We are now entirely unable to understand that a rag that specializes in satirical caricatures has different rules governing its representations than those governing, say, a glossy brochure issued by a political party, or, what is nearly the same thing, an advertisement for some corporate product. Charlie Hebdo wasn’t in that business, and it’s that business that stands to gain most from the elimination of satire as a viable form of opposition.”
It’s an interesting point, but I read it differently than I think Smith intended. If you’re trying to sell something, He argues that there is a lower bound for crassness, one that shouldn’t be there for political statements. I argue the opposite: there is no lower-bound for crassness for corporate work, but it’s the crassness with which our whole culture is imbued, that is like the air we breathe and so, we don’t notice it.
Even highly morally questionable ad campaigns—that seek to draw the poor into even deeper debt—don’t draw any fire. But a cartoon mocking religion—or even mocking other races—is too evil to allow to exist. The advertising you see every day that forces a nearly morality-free lifestyle down your throat draws no similar ire. And why would it? No-one ever told us that there was something wrong with that. It is, in fact, the right thing to do. Drawing a prophet’s face out of penises and testicles? That’s way over the line. Because genitals are bad.
We will see later that Charlie Hebdo was careful to attack the powerless. And the powerless attacked the equally powerless Charlie Hebdo (their circulation of 40,000 was laughable, no?) And the powerful sit back and chuckle while everyone buys all of their crap and centers
In Smith’s post, he references the article On Charlie Hebdo by Richard Seymour (Jacobin), citing it as an example of exactly the kind of craven liberal kowtowing to moral relativism that he hates so very much. He writes,
“I think it’s despicable. I think blasphemous, insolent satire is a fundamental freedom, and that it is a feature of French political culture –a ‘value of the Republic’– worth defending, not uncritically or jingoistically, and not in a way that serves as a pretext for xenophobia and bigotry, but still in a way that doesn’t concede an inch.”
But reading the article, one sees that it says nearly exactly the same thing that Smith himself wrote, though he painted it as nearly diametrically opposed. Smith is normally much more careful than this and I can only imagine that he, despite his protestations to the contrary, is swept up in this same Je suis Charlie bullshit peddled by lesser and even more careless intellects.
For example, the Jacobin article writes
“Now, I think there’s a critical difference between solidarity with the journalists who were attacked, refusing to concede anything to the idea that journalists are somehow “legitimate targets,” and solidarity with what is frankly a racist publication.”
In its lead, it warns that “we should fear the coming Islamophobic backlash.” I don’t see this as anything other than a warning to those who will get so swept up in their support (of freedom of the press) that they end up in opposition of a target (Islam) they did not themselves choose. This is sage advice, and advice that it appears Mr. Smith needs to consider, though I have a feeling that he pushed publish a bit too quickly on his article, as seems to be nearly everyone’s wont these days.
Jacobin is not the only one making the following argument; it seems to actually be a given that Charlie Hebdo often crossed the line, not in its viewpoint or its opinions, but often in its representation.
“I will not waste time arguing over this point here: I simply take it as read that — irrespective of whatever else it does, and whatever valid comment it makes — the way in which that publication represents Islam is racist. If you need to be convinced of this, then I suggest you do your research, beginning with reading Edward Said’s Orientalism, as well as some basic introductory texts on Islamophobia, and then come back to the conversation.”
The article In Solidarity With A Free Press: Some More Blasphemous Cartoons by Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept) analyzes the main tenet of free-speech activism.
“Central to free speech activism has always been the distinction between defending the right to disseminate Idea X and agreeing with Idea X, one which only the most simple-minded among us are incapable of comprehending. One defends the right to express repellent ideas while being able to condemn the idea itself. There is no remote contradiction in that: the ACLU vigorously defends the right of neo-Nazis to march through a community filled with Holocaust survivors in Skokie, Illinois, but does not join the march; they instead vocally condemn the targeted ideas as grotesque while defending the right to express them.”
This seems clear enough, no? You can interpret “Je suis Charlie” as expressing support for the idea of free speech and freedom of expression without supporting their at-times racist drawings. As Jacobin stated above: there isn’t really any doubt that many of the drawings were racist. Greenwald agrees, and tells us why they not only got away with it—in a country where even a tiny whiff of anti-Semitism is crushed mercilessly and without a care in the world for freedom of expression (as we’ll see below)—but are now lionized in death for their great contribution to culture.
“[…] it is simply not the case that Charlie Hebdo “were equal opportunity offenders.” Like Bill Maher, Sam Harris and other anti-Islam obsessives, mocking Judaism, Jews and/or Israel is something they will rarely (if ever) do. […] the vast bulk of their attacks are reserved for Islam and Muslims, not Judaism and Jews. Parody, free speech and secular atheism are the pretexts; anti-Muslim messaging is the primary goal and the outcome. And this messaging – this special affection for offensive anti-Islam speech – just so happens to coincide with, to feed, the militaristic foreign policy agenda of their governments and culture.”
The article What everyone gets wrong about Charlie Hebdo and racism by Max Fisher (VOX) presents the argument that Hebdo is lauded now because it didn’t speak truth to power, but acted more or less as an organ of power.
“Within the French culture war, Charlie Hebdo stands solidly with the privileged majority and against the under-privileged minorities. Yes, sometimes it also criticizes Catholicism, but it is best known for its broadsides against France’s most vulnerable populations. Put aside the question of racist intent: the effect of this is to exacerbate a culture of hostility, one in which religion and race are also associated with status and privilege, or lack thereof.”
The article France Arrests a Comedian For His Facebook Comments, Showing the Sham of the West’s “Free Speech” Celebration by Glenn Greenwald (First Look) discusses the way in which France expresses its support for freedom of speech mostly for anti-Muslim points of view.
“Since that glorious “free speech” march, […] “France ordered prosecutors around the country to crack down on hate speech, anti-Semitism and glorifying terrorism.” […] Vanishingly few of this week’s bold free expression mavens have ever uttered a peep of protest about any of those cases […] where Muslims have been prosecuted and even imprisoned for their political speech. That’s because “free speech,” […] actually means: it is vital that the ideas I like be protected, and the right to offend groups I dislike be cherished; anything else is fair game.”
In a just world, Dieudonné’s comments on Facebook should be just as vigorously defended as the genital-laden drawings of Charlie Hebdo, [3] “That’s true even if he were murdered for his ideas rather than “merely” arrested and prosecuted for them.”
Jacobin finished its article by chiding that,
“The argument will be that for the sake of “good taste” we need “a decent interval” before we start criticizing Charlie Hebdo.”
On the other hand, we don’t need to wait a decent interval for (what counts for) justice in the more enlightened countries of the West these days. The three alleged gunmen have passed Go without collecting two-hundred dollars and been dispatched to meet their maker without a charge, an arrest, a trial, a conviction, a sentence or the involvement of the involvement of any members of the judiciary. It was purportedly a three-day manhunt and shootout that ended in the tragedy of all terrorists dead.
And we swallow this story whole … why exactly? At the same time that protests erupt in every corner of America about police brutality against minorities and illegal tactics and illegal arrests, we believe wholeheartedly that French police would never, ever be capable of such a thing. The U.S. might lie all the time, but if France says it caught and killed the guys, then that’s how it went down.
And almost no-one will see anything wrong with that. In fact, I’d wager that even to point this out is tantamount to sympathizing with journalist-killing extremists—because we like to keep things super-simple.
Why is it so hard to arrest people these days? Wouldn’t we rather bring them to trial, so that they can answer our questions about their horrific crimes? Aren’t we worried about having gotten the wrong guys? Should they have been killed? France does not have the death penalty, so it wasn’t legally a just punishment. Hell, were the guys they killed even the perpetrators? Why did they do it? Only speculation from here on out because they will never say a word about it. How many were there? Who actually did the killing? No-one cares.
When a much more horrific act is perpetrated on utter children—Brejvik’s 70+ murders in Norway a few years back—the perpetrator is brought to trial and questioned about his motives. In this case, the world is satisfied with a quickly tied knot on the “case”.
Speaking of simple, as detailed in Who is Marching Anywhere to Honor Those Killed in Baga? by John V. Whitbeck (CounterPunch),
“Bibi Netanyahu, […] has lectured Western leaders that “the terror of Hamas, Hezbollah, ISIS and Al-Qaida” won’t end “unless the West fights it physically, rather than fighting its false arguments””
This from Netanyahu, whose leadership of Israel included presiding over indiscriminate killing of thousands of Palestinians, among them more than a few journalists, whom Israeli soldiers would mistakenly kill despite their being emblazoned with a giant “Press” tag.
It didn’t take long for England to jump on board, taking advantage of the opening provided by the attack. Here’s David Cameron, cited in the article UK prime minister wants backdoors into messaging apps or he’ll ban them (Ars Technica)
“The attacks in Paris demonstrated the scale of the threat that we face and the need to have robust powers through our intelligence and security agencies in order to keep our people safe, […]”
Of course, David. It’s clear that the problem is that England doesn’t have enough control over its citizens. Can anyone even imagine how much George Orwell would be drinking should he catch a glimpse of 21st-century England?
The article Striking Fear in Paris by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch) points out what should be obvious—that the drastic overreaction by France was certainly a gigantic reward for anyone desperate or disturbed enough to think that their viewpoint was worth losing their own lives.
“By committing two attacks (quite ordinary ones by Israeli standards) they spread panic throughout France, brought millions of people onto the streets, gathered more than 40 heads of states in Paris. They changed the landscape of the French capital and other French cities by mobilizing thousands of soldiers and police officers to guard Jewish and other potential targets. For several days they dominated the news throughout the world.
“Three terrorists, probably acting alone. Three!!!
“For other potential Islamic terrorists throughout Europe and America, this must look like a huge achievement.”
And not just Islamic terrorists: preening narcissists everywhere will be paying very close attention. Although the main result of these acts will be for the West to double down on what most likely caused them in the first place because “we won’t be cowed by terrorists.” So for every one of “ours” that “they” get, we’ll take out thousands of theirs. And make no mistake, this most-likely result is obvious to the leaders of the free world. They get to collect even more power for themselves while blaming Muslims. At the worst, people they do not know or care about will die.
Avnery goes on to chastise the organizers of the march because they refuse to try to figure out how to really solve the problem of people killing each other for stupid reasons. [4]
“To conduct an effective fight, one has to put oneself first into the shoes of the fanatics and try to understand the dynamic that pushes young local-born Muslims to commit such acts. Who are they? What do they think? What are their feelings? In what circumstances did they grow up? What can be done to change them?”
The article goes on to provide a fascinating analysis of Israeli involvement in this current chapter—Netanyahu invited himself!—and the history of Jewish and Muslim movements in former French colonies like Algeria (North-African Jews almost all sided with the colonial power).
The article Are the worst really full of passionate intensity? by Slavoj Ži(z)ek (New Statesman) takes a typically contrarian view but provides a truly fascinating lens through which to view the whole affair. It has everything you would expect from a Ži(z)ek article:
The only thing missing was a reference to Lacan.
I kid. It was quite a strong article; I had a hard time picking only a few citations and had to cut drastically. I strongly recommend reading it in its entirety at the link above.
Ži(z)ek starts off with the boilerplate condemnation of violence etc. etc.
“Now, when we are all in a state of shock after the killing spree in the Charlie Hebdo offices, it is the right moment to gather the courage to think. We should, of course, unambiguously condemn the killings as an attack on the very substance our freedoms, and condemn them without any hidden caveats (in the style of “Charlie Hebdo was nonetheless provoking and humiliating the Muslims too much”). But such pathos of universal solidarity is not enough – we should think further. (Emphasis added.)”
Žižek advises as Avnery does: “Of course we should not overreact, if by this is meant succumbing to blind Islamophobia – but we should ruthlessly analyse this pattern.” That is, we should not ignore the act, but neither should we enter the moment in history as a pivotal one. Ži(z)ek goes on to describe the dialectic as it is presented to us.
“We in the West are the Nietzschean Last Men, immersed in stupid daily pleasures, while the Muslim radicals are ready to risk everything, engaged in the struggle up to their self-destruction. William Butler Yeats’ “Second Coming” seems perfectly to render our present predicament: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.””
We in the West are decadent and too lazy to defend ourselves whereas the Muslim radical is full of revolutionary vigor, following a single-minded purpose. And therefore—here it comes—we need our Colonel Jessup on that wall, doing our dirty work, protecting us from a universe bent on our destruction and, most importantly, allowing us to continue to live in our dream world. A demand that we yield more rights that we aren’t using and more money for the military quickly follows.
Žižek goes on to psychoanalyze the fundamentalist terrorist (as presented to us).
“However, do the terrorist fundamentalists really fit this description? What they obviously lack is a feature [of] authentic fundamentalists, […] the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? […] In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. (Emphasis added.)”
I would be more precise here: fundamentalists fight to defend a lifestyle that they want to lead and that they want everyone in their group to continue leading. But they acknowledge—at least somewhere deep down—that this lifestyle is very rigorous, at-times brutal and simplistic, especially when compared with the Western lifestyle, which appears on the surface to be all sunshine and rainbows.
Western society is also rigorous, at-times brutal and simplistic—especially in the U.S.—but it hides it much better. It sells it much better. But the idea of a small group of extremists deluding the rest of society into working against their interests—does that ring a bell? In the West’s case, in capitalism’s case, it’s the 1% or 0.1% hauling around everyone else by the nose. Instead of a promise of heavenly reward, the carrot is reward in this lifetime—just as elusive and fictive. The fundamentalist is afraid that the support system for his lifestyle will jump ship. And without a support staff, nobody’s cooking dinner for them.
“How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a weekly satirical newspaper? The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilization. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior.
“The problem is not cultural difference […] but the opposite fact [sic] that the fundamentalists […] have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them. Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true ‘racist’ conviction of their own superiority. (Emphasis added.)”
It is important to remember that this is probably true of all fundamentalists—the Islamists we’re meant to condemn as well as those running our world for us. And I think that there’s more than a bit of fear mixed in—fear that their scam will be found out. That is always the fear, no? The slave driver on a galley is utterly aware that he stays in power through conviction alone. Were his slaves to rise up, they could easily overwhelm him. [5] In the same way, the 0.1% know that the best defense is a good offense. The mullahs as well. Keep your minions on the back foot, keep them bobbing and weaving, keep them distracted, keep them producing for you—else they might just start thinking.
The fundamentalism of our own dear leaders in the West is more dangerous because (A) it is largely invisible because it’s part of the background, so (B) they have already won. As Žižek himself says in his film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, the underlying ideology is more fundamentalist and deep-rooted than its comparatively minor and much more obvious enemies. These disposable enemies are used to keep people distracted from the control the overarching ideology has over every aspect of their lives. They are allowed to direct all of their hate there where it suits the prevailing powers the most, expending their revolutionary effort without damaging the existing power structure.
But that power structure is just as fundamentalist and perpetually scared. It knows that it can only maintain control as long as it continues driving forward, pointing to innumerable versions of Emmanuel Goldstein.
“What Max Horkheimer had said about Fascism and capitalism already back in 1930s − those who do not want to talk critically about capitalism should also keep quiet about Fascism − should also be applied to today’s fundamentalism: those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.”
The article France Under the Influence by Diane Johnstone (CounterPunch) discusses this in more detail.
“French leaders need to take a hard look at their own totally incoherent foreign policy […] By taking the symbolic lead in the regime change war in Libya, France turned that country into a black hole of Islamic extremists. France collaborated in the murder of Gaddafi […] The NATO destruction of Gaddafi’s Libya brought France into war in Mali, in pursuit of an elusive enemy that Gaddafi had managed to control.”
]]>tl;dr: Michael Brenner makes the point that the West—especially America—simplifies foreign policy to the detriment of all. He argues that they should stop doing this. I heartily... [More]
Published by marco on 4. Jan 2015 16:53:17 (GMT-5)
A few month ago, a friend sent a link to this article, The Islamic State Panic by Michael Brenner (Huffington Post). I found this response in my inbox.
tl;dr: Michael Brenner makes the point that the West—especially America—simplifies foreign policy to the detriment of all. He argues that they should stop doing this. I heartily concur and feel that they should, in fact, stop blowing things up entirely.
HuffPo? Really? Ok, fine. Ignore stupid chain of articles littering the right-hand side. Avoid long diatribe about our inevitable slide toward a worldwide Idiocracy. Avoid digression.
Decent article. Well-written. You know I’m a sucker for this kind of thing:
“The ensuing storm of static in our public space is invasive. It destroys the ability to reflect, to assess, to ponder, to imagine. We have come to ‘think’ in sound bites as well as to talk in sound bites.”
He chose a decidedly different conclusion than I would have. The evidence he amassed points to a pile of fools in the West who are not only occasionally wrong, but almost pathologically so.
In that case, I would have argued more strongly that all of these people are exactly not the ones who should be making decisions about what kind of military action to take in foreign countries.
The notion that there is a such a thing as a humanitarian military intervention is still very much accepted, even by Mr. Brenner, who is, at least, possessed of an otherwise laudable skepticism.
Rather than concluding that empty-headed leaders and medal-bespeckled commanders should keep their traps shut for once—ostensibly to let the diplomats do their work—he should have strengthened his argument to conclude that we in the West are perhaps the last ones who should be poking our noses in the affairs of others.
Especially if we continue to fly the flag of the moral high-ground rather than admit that everything we do is in our basest interests that makes us not at all any different from those we claim are the enemy. That we dress it up in a base capitalism that we’ve all but convinced the world is intrinsic to human society doesn’t make it any better.
Published by marco on 11. Dec 2014 22:39:27 (GMT-5)
I’d heard that the article In Conversation: Chris Rock by Frank Rich (Vulture) including some groundbreaking statements on race by Chris Rock. I like Chris Rock and I like his standup. He’s a comedian, though, so while his niggers vs. black people bit was funny at the time, in retrospect, it’s a savage attack on the poor and uneducated. Still, admittedly funny at the time.
Seeing that Frank Rich of the New York Times had interviewed him was not encouraging. So let’s see what Rock has to say. It starts off … suspiciously. Frank asks about “the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims”. How the hell is it appropriate to classify Maher’s material as a “riff” on Muslims? He is an adamant and unapologetic Islamophobe. He doesn’t riff on them; he basically advocates eradicating them as an otherwise unsolvable problem. And he’s been doing it long enough in non-comedic settings that we have to assume he means it.
Maher changed roles from comedian to political analyst quite a while ago. In neither role is he very good, in my opinion, but that’s neither here nor there. But it’s easy to see that Rock has a weird—though quintessentially American—definition of “left” when he later in the interview classifies “Maher [as] on the left”. Maher is in fact a self-described, fanatical libertarian who thinks Muslims are evil. That is in no way a leftist attitude. So take Rock’s political opinions with a grain of salt: he seems relatively well-indoctrinated, unfortunately. I say “seems” because Rock is a comedian and he generally tries to make people laugh, not to provide trenchant analysis.
Rock responds to the question about Maher’s “ban” from Berkeley [1] that he too “stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.” That’s his answer. Instead of distancing himself from Maher and his poisonous racism, he sympathizes with him, noting that kids these days are too intolerant.
There is evidence that this newest generation is considerably more sensitive to discrimination issues, that they feel more entitled to not hearing opinions that they consider unsavory. That this sensitivity leads to an aversion to Maher is not a bad thing. In addition, anyone who picks Berkeley to represent colleges in general is out of touch. I can’t imagine that Berkeley and Texas A&M are at all on the same wavelength as far as racism-sensitivity goes. Calling a college like Berkeley conservative is just baiting contrarianism. Rock’s just trying to get the interviewer to double-take. Classifying kids who don’t want their school to pay a racist for his hate speech as conservative is not correct, and is even unfair.
I don’t agree with banning racists, by the way. I prefer to hear the racist or the islamophobe—give him or her enough rope to hang him- or herself. Will some people cheer him or her on? Sure, and they will self-identify as well as people desperately in need of guidance or avoidance, depending on how far gone they are.
But how many times do we have to hear someone’s unaccepting schtick before we stop giving that person a stage? Have we heard enough from Rush Limbaugh now to form an opinion? Can we stop listening now? Are we sure that he doesn’t have something useful to contribute to the conversation? Does Rock still listen to Limbaugh? You know, just to be sure he isn’t missing something? Probably not. And the rest of us have stopped listening to Maher.
We all have a limited amount of time to spend on things. Maher isn’t worth it, in my opinion. I understand that it’s highly unlikely that this is Berkeley didn’t host him—to help people avoid wasting time. They probably did it for the petty, closed-minded reason that Rock cited. Should Berkeley have booked him and paid him, but let all of its campus groups encourage no-one to show up? Pay him to play an empty room—there, that’ll show him? That sounds kinda stupid, too. Where a lovely guy like Maher’s involved, it’s damned if you do and damned if you dont’.
Rock definitely has a point about comedians. Comedians are often not even representing their own opinions in their material and their act. They’re just being funny. Bill Burr is a classic example. Some of his material is jarring, but when you hear him banter with another comedian, you realize he’s a more even-handed guy than his on-stage persona. He has a pretty big audience, some of whom probably take him seriously, but what can you do?
And you can’t make people want to listen to stuff that makes them uncomfortable. Does it possibly expand your horizons? I think that it does. But it’s not for everyone. Most people don’t have the ironic background to let them process things that aren’t true and still glean something from the experience. I like Bill Hicks. I like Doug Stanhope. But I’m not surprised if Stanhope has trouble booking a gig at Berkeley.
Rich keeps asking Rock policy questions, but it’s unclear whether Rock is answering as a comedian or as a policy analyst. Most of his metaphors sound like bits, so it’s hard to take it seriously. He seems to be uncomfortably apologetic about Obama, which isn’t too surprising since he probably thinks Obama’s a goody-two-shoes leftist who’s trying his best.
His take on race relations is spot-on, though:
“Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.”
I have nothing to add there.
The following statement from Rock seems right, doesn’t it?
“[…] to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years.”
Is it, though? Can we first agree on what we call progress? Or that we don’t all think of progress in the same way? Rock and I—I will venture—consider progress to be a society that is capable of electing the best leader regardless of skin color. That is, a society that can choose a leader based on qualities salient to the job rather than non-relevant ones is more advanced than one that cannot. At the very least, that society will have leaders more likely to fulfill the needs of a larger proportion of the population. [2]
Is that what happened, though? Is it that these “[qualified] black people” that Rock mentions simply kept on keepin’ on and white America finally noticed and elected one? Or is it more that these intelligent black people figured out how to make themselves more appealing to the entrenched system?
Obama is not Martin Luther King. Before we pat ourselves on the back for having elected a black man, we should consider what kind of man he is. He is policy-wise no different than Bush. He’s arguably worse. [3] He’s like Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas—all very powerful black people. However, the reason they’re allowed to be powerful is because they promulgate the white agenda. They play nice. They’re not Django; they’re Stephen. So I don’t think it’s progress in the way that Rock characterizes it.
Where Rock does hit a proper note is that the newer generations are objectively better at ignoring race than previous ones. It is not clear that we are moving toward the goal of being an actually “advanced” society, as defined above. Perhaps we have to wait for a few more generations to die off first.
So we’re still not great at it, but as Rock puts it,
“The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.”
Indeed. I can back that 100%. [4]
Published by marco on 9. Dec 2014 22:13:45 (GMT-5)
I haven’t really weighed in on this topic because I’m still digesting it. There are so many interlocking parts and so many reasons for why things are not right that an off-the-cuff article just doesn’t do the topic justice. A lot of what you read gives the impression that the fact that people are rioting in one town in the Midwest is a good excuse for trotting out more unsavory opinions in the guise of chastening those thugs and hoodlums who can’t abide by the rule of law.
If you assumed that with “thugs and hoodlums who can’t abide by the rule of law”, I was referring to the folks on the streets in Ferguson, then you might want to count down from ten before you contribute anything to a discussion on race. If you wondered to yourself whether I meant those in power—represented by cops these days—instead of the knee-jerk target, then you’re in the right frame of mind for thinking about social policy in a U.S. in a way that might lead to solutions rather than a further cementing of existing disparities.
The article Now Eric Garner by James Howard Kunstler is one such unsavory opinion. He’s wildly off base when he writes,
“Worse, the decision only muddied the public’s view of several events in recent years involving black people, police, and standards of behavior so that now a general opinion prevails that all black people are always treated badly for no reason. That was the same week, by the way, that a white Bosnian immigrant named Zemir Begic was bludgeoned to death by three black teenagers wielding hammers who were out beating on stopped cars on a St Louis street — a crime that was barely covered in the news media, and went unprotested outside the immigrant neighborhood where it occurred.”
I’ve followed Kunstler for years and have noticed the warping already in his discussions of Israel and Palestine, but this is almost too unpalatable to keep reading.
Why is that?
This is poorly veiled code for: black people sure seem to be committing a lot of crime. And now they’re whining about getting shot once in a while? Because cops notice that blacks commit crime? What kind of a messed-up country are we? By bringing Zemir Begic into it, Kunstler is comparing apples to oranges and is, honestly, not even trying to understand what is going on outside of his unfortunately warped lens.
I want to emphasize that this is a guy who can contribute in nuanced way to many discussions, but here he just seems tone-deaf. He falls into the same trap that the less-informed do: they come to statistically and experimentally untenable conclusions. For example, dozens of studies will tell you that the various racial groups in the U.S. tend to commit about the same percentage of crimes in the various categories in direct relation to their proportion of the population.
Where the racism comes in, is in the arrest rates. If only blacks are arrested for doing crack, we can conclude that only they are doing crack. Unless we also know from anonymous studies that everyone does crack, but the cops only seem to catch black people doing it. The theory that black people do more drugs is belied by the data. The next theory is that there is a racist component to the arrest rates. Science is really not that hard.
People are not pissed because they are being treated slightly unfairly. They are pissed because they know that the whole system is tipped against them and now on top of having unutterably shitty lives of mostly silently suffering desperation they’re being murdered in increasing numbers and in ways that are sanctioned by the state. They have understandably moved to a game plan that is based on a realization that once they can just execute you with impunity, you don’t have very much more to lose and you just about have to fight back.
And this is not just a black thing. It’s very much a class thing, with homeless and poor of all races being treated poorly across the board. The incarceration numbers—percentages and sentence lengths—speak for themselves: the American justice system is extremely racist from top to bottom. No study bears out the theory that “black people commit more crime.” Poor and desperate people do commit more crimes.
That’s small stuff, though, Rich people do much more harm with their crimes. But we don’t care about those. Instead, we suck the poor dry, like vampire mosquitos, with fines and penalties and late fees and exorbitant interest rates. We have a society that drives them to crime, just to survive, and then we hammer them for it all the more, exclaiming exasperatedly that “these people just won’t learn”.
Oh, I think they’ve learned quite well the lesson that society has taught them. And just like many of us have learned the lesson our experiences in society have taught us: that nothing really bad can happen to us, no matter what, they’ve also learned their lesson: no matter what you do, you’re fucked.
To get back to Kunstler’s article, the difference between Begic’s murder and the murder of Michael Brown is that suspects were arrested in the former case whereas in the latter the perpetrator was let go without a trial.
The difference is that when the powerless prey on the powerless, arrests are made. When the powerful prey on the powerless, nothing happens.
And that’s why people are protesting.
People have been arrested for Begic’s murder and his family will likely get justice. Eric Garner was choked to death by several police and the country chuckles to itself that it was his own fault for being so fucking fat.
Disgusting.
While we’re on the subject of tone-deafness and “not helping”, the article When Whites Just Don’t Get It by Nicholas Kristof (New York Times) ends up exhorting whites to ask themselves “what’s in it for me?”
The article seemed promising at first, despite the byline, which is ordinarily a warning to keep away. I’d gotten a reference from a reliable source and the citations were also encouraging.
For example,
“The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data.”
That is truly staggering. There are more equally staggering facts, all of them showing a massive disparity, based pretty much solely on skin color. Blacks are far more likely to go to jail, they get paid less—and the income and wealth disparities have only gotten worse, not better.
For once, Kristof’s heart seems to be in the right place—he writes that the feeling that racism is dead is a “smug white delusion”.
Unfortunately, it seems to be impossible for Kristof to write further about this topic without his standard veil of disingenuousness. For example, in the following citation, he take the “we’re all in this together” attitude, appealing to his mostly white readers with a message not of basic morality but of self-interest. As usual.
“All these constitute not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem. When so much talent is underemployed and overincarcerated, the entire country suffers.”
Yeah, but blacks suffer just a bit more than whites. It’s like a husband telling him wife after he’s beaten her bloody one more time: “we’re both suffering, honey. Look—my knuckles are all skinned. And…and, I get nightmares.”
And here, while he’s able to correctly point out that mass incarceration is one of the chief weapons employed, he’s incapable of calling it for what it is: a deliberate means of unfairly keeping the black man in line.
“Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed”
It’s not exactly a tipping point for America today, but the world is looking on with an ever-more-appalled look on its face. Things have however been this bad—and worse—before, so we shouldn’t flatter ourselves into thinking that this time it will be different. Instead, we should examine our knee-jerk reactions to these killings and make sure we have some facts before spouting off 19th-century opinions about the “mind of the negro”.
We should all try to be better, try not to be so swayed by lazy, stupid arguments that end up in cul de sacs rather than in workable solutions. If you think you have the solution to America’s problems, think your idea through to the end and see if it wouldn’t eventually lead to internment camps or curfews or perhaps a quick little “cleansing”. If it does, back away slowly, and let the grown-ups do the talking for a while.
The friend wondered whether the following was a good idea. They thought it might be, but asked if I could confirm.
]]>“[…] adults 18 to 50 years old with no children and who are able to work... [More]”
Published by marco on 15. Nov 2014 23:12:47 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 16. Nov 2014 23:14:35 (GMT-5)
I received the post Maine Just Changed Their Food-Stamp Policy… Every State Should Do This (Conservative Tribune) from a friend.
The friend wondered whether the following was a good idea. They thought it might be, but asked if I could confirm.
“[…] adults 18 to 50 years old with no children and who are able to work must do so or volunteer for 20 hours each week. Otherwise, their benefits will be limited to three months over a three-year period”
This is one of those superficially seductive ideas that keeps coming up. Basically, should the U.S. privatize and marketize the remaining social components of its safety net? Should it remove the last vestiges of mercy from its society?
This idea assumes that people on welfare are lazy. That their inability to support themselves and their families and subsequent desperation is purely their own fault. That they deserve their fate.
But—and I think this is the most important part of all—if we believe that those on welfare deserve to be treated poorly, then those of us not on welfare are free to believe that we earned our much better lives.
There is no mercy in such a system, no acknowledgment that the system treats some much worse than others. That luck plays a large role in the lives of both the most disadvantaged and the most advantaged.
There are so many factors dooming people to poverty in America. Programs like this, that force their participants to dance for their supper, are a cruel joke. They make those of us who will never have to be part of one of these programs feel vindicated, but that feeling comes from a petty, stupid and cruel place.
Given this presupposition, it of course makes sense to punish others for being poor, to extract what we can from them instead of supporting these parasites.
There are so many reasons other than laziness that people can’t get jobs:
Instead of giving the poor help to get them back on their feet, we give them what amount to jobs. I suppose this sounds good to some. There’s a lot of work to do and not enough people to do it.
If they don’t comply, they no longer get the benefit of the doubt. If they don’t comply, they get their super-generous benefits of a few hundred dollars per month for only three months and then nothing for thirty-three more months.
If you can’t find a job of your own—or are unwilling to do so—you have to do the job you’re given by the state. This is just a transformation of the unemployment program, though. Instead of making you seek out jobs in your area of expertise, these new programs just give you a job.
And what do you get paid for this job? The article says “or volunteer 20 hours each week”. If you have to do the work to get benefits, then it is, by definition, not volunteering. But what they mean by “volunteer” is that you’re doing the job for no salary, other than the benefits (which you used to get for free).
Welfare benefits are notoriously meager. Most recipients are scraping the bottom of the barrel by the third week of the month, no matter how well they stretch them. This is not a luxurious lifestyle.
So, even if you do get paid for your work, the salary is almost certainly far below minimum wage.
Under such a system, people will have a job of sorts, but far less chance to get control back over their lives.
If you spend 20 hours per week working at this shitty, super-low-paid job, do you have time to find a better one? No, you probably do not. Do you have time for your continuing education program? No to that too. What about your kids? Who takes care of them while you work? Hire a babysitter. It’s good for the economy.
It’s hard to imagine that society that converts its welfare program to something like this will pay a living wage. And you can forget about benefits or any thought for how a life is supposed to work under this regime. That’s not the taxpayer’s problem because they’re already being generous enough by throwing a few dollars and a job the recipient’s way. [1]
Don’t like it? Don’t take the extravagant benefits, you lazy bastard.
And stop whining about your kids.
You shouldn’t have had them if you can’t take care of them.
Freeloader.
And your kids are future freeloaders.
These programs are not new. Back in the 90s, the “workfare” program was the brainchild of Bill Clinton (yep, the so-called progressive). Mayor Rudolph Guiliani implemented it in NYC by making welfare recipients work in the park system.
What happened? Their salaries were on the order of a dollar or two per hour and so they were much cheaper to hire than the current park staff. The current staff was let go and replaced with much–lower-paid unskilled labor. A win all around, right? The skilled and trained labor lost their good jobs.
Taxpayers win because they also don’t have to pay for benefits or pensions or anything. Awesome, right? Because nobody who mattered knew anyone with a good job in the park system, so the park workers might as well not even exist.
So what happens with all of those people who just lost their jobs? No problem. They go on welfare and can go right back to work in the park, but at 1/10 of their former salary without benefits or a pension. Sweet.
This kind of program gets rid of good jobs and makes everyone race to the bottom, working harder for less. It’s capitalism at its finest.
No more unions, no more pensions, no more benefits. Not for the poor. They don’t deserve it. If they did, wouldn’t they already have it?
The problem with this workfare kind of thinking is that it demonizes those out of work or down on their luck. It takes the few that are really lazy, makes anecdotes out of them to convince people that everyone is like that, and then making slaves out of them, more or less.
You can’t say, as the governor of Maine did, that you’re doing “all that you can to eliminate generational poverty and get people back to work” if you haven’t actually created real jobs and real job training. If the only jobs around are life-draining and crappy—and you have to get two of them to survive—are we surprised that people don’t want to do them?
Do some take advantage? Sure, they do. Do we doom the majority that actually need welfare programs and could benefit from them just to punish the few that ruin it for everyone? Do we have to do it? Is it that we can’t afford it? Or that we spend money on everything but the poor?
This program will drive people off of welfare—not because they don’t want to work, but because they don’t want to get trapped into the forced-work program of the state. They want dignity and control over their own lives, even though they’re poor. Can’t we afford to give them that?
If we need to spend billions and trillions to deploy to Iraq or to build the next generation of super-weapons or to start giant new agencies—like Homeland Security and the TSA—ostensibly to fight terrorism, no one says a thing.
Spend a few millions on the poor without them somehow paying us back and we’re up in arms.
We have no sense of proportion. We are not very nice.
And we are cruel to those less fortunate. Because ill fortune is mostly why people are poor: they aren’t lucky enough to have been rewarded for the right behavior. Life has taught them that it’s not even worth trying anymore. They’re not necessarily inherently stupid or lazy; they have just learned the lesson that their lives taught them.
We continue to try because our experience has trained us that if we work hard, we achieve. How many years would you continue to work hard if you never achieved? If you were never rewarded, not even once? If life swatted you down? Every. Single. Time. Would you really keep getting back up?
Would you work as hard as you do if you were paid $150 a week after taxes? Would you keep looking for that job with the same energy after the first year of joblessness? At what point do you say “yes” to something criminal just to get some cash to feed yourself or your family?
And then you’re going to jail. Because you’re a criminal and deserve it. Because being poor pretty much is a crime.
We find it so easy to judge people about whom we know nothing. And it’s easy to lump all the poor together because most of us don’t know any of them or don’t have to sympathize with them. Or we hear stories about them from TV. Stories written by people who also probably don’t know any poor people. Or from cops, who have an adversarial relationship to them, granted them by the state. It goes on and on.
We don’t know them but we feel perfectly comfortable judging them. Only a society without empathy could make a so-called welfare system life this.
He is Barack Hussein Obama,
44th—and first black—President of the United States of America.
Nobel Peace-prize winner.
So-called leader of the free world. [2]
O-bomber.
The Drone Ranger.
Mr. Guántanamo.
Mr. extraordinary rendition.
Mr. N.S.A.
The... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 13. Nov 2014 22:55:53 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 13. Nov 2014 23:10:35 (GMT-5)
“What do you think of Obama? [1]”
He is Barack Hussein Obama,
44th—and first black—President of the United States of America.
Nobel Peace-prize winner.
So-called leader of the free world. [2]
O-bomber.
The Drone Ranger.
Mr. Guántanamo.
Mr. extraordinary rendition.
Mr. N.S.A.
The whistle-blower hunter. [3]
Defender of the 0.1%.
The question above is posed in different ways, in different tones. It depends on the person posing it. If the person hates Obama—for any of a variety of reasons, into which I may go later, then the question is accompanied by a conspiratorial leer. The leer extends a hopeful olive branch, anticipating an enjoyable evening of exchanging highly questionable information about Obama and his purported policies.
If the person likes Obama, they usually hope that you don’t mention torture, the financial bailout, drones, Guantánamo, Israel or any of another host of issues on which Obama is decidedly not progressive. Even the ACA—called “Obamacare” by nearly everyone—which he would likely deem to be the major part of his legacy, crumples under more progressive scrutiny.
Heaven forfend you mention any of Obama’s campaign promises—from 2008 or 2012—because his failure to have accomplished any of them in the manner he’d promised is—according to these people—most definitely not his fault. It is the fault of the Republicans.
So, his detractors oppose everything he stands for and his supporters acknowledge that he sucks but it’s not his fault.
The short answer? The system sucks and good luck changing it.
That many high-ranking Republicans seem hell-bent on policies that benefit only themselves and their friends to the detriment of all others is abundantly clear. That this group also includes many Democrats is also clear. Just because only 93% of Democrats are assholes versus 95% of Republicans doesn’t make much difference to the casual observer. [4] The natural conclusion to which to come is that they’re all assholes and you won’t be off by much. Assuming this will equip you well for dealing with them all. At the least, not trusting any of them is a good start. But I digress.
Of course, if their policies benefit you, then you’ll think they’re a swell bunch of guys—and they are still, mostly, guys. But you’re in a small minority. The vast majority of people in the U.S. and the world have nearly nothing in common with their representatives, be they in the U.S. or Iran or Russia or China … or any of dozens of other countries that happily count themselves in the OECD. There are a few where the government seems to work for the people instead of the other way around—e.g. Switzerland and a handful of Scandinavian countries, perhaps—but not many of us are lucky enough to live there.
The U.S.. is definitely in the other category, where the people pretty much work for the government, but let’s not forget: the government, in turn, works for its own masters. But those masters are not us. [5]
Corporations are people, in the U.S. at least. Those are the real masters of the 21st century. It is they—and their ultra-exclusive owners—who wield the real power. They call themselves the masters of the universe and have yet to be proven wrong.
Which brings us back to Obama. He’s incredibly far removed from any one of us. He can very eloquently express viewpoints that sound as if they sympathize and even echo our own. But he’s lying. We’ll leave it to history to decide for sure whether he himself knows he’s lying—but I’m going to come out and write that anyone that smart is at least self-aware enough to know that what he says and what he does almost never line up.
I’m sure it’s frustrating to constantly have to say things that you don’t mean in order to get things done that you really want. Such is the life of a politician. It’s not easy convincing people to do things against their own best interests—or against basic morality. Which is why you have to lie to them so much.
Is Obama a dupe? No, I don’t think so. That’s giving him too much credit. It’s so easy to buy the story that he’s desperately trying to enact a progressive program in America while presiding over one of the greatest regressive swings in history. Do people think that he’s the Mr. Magoo of politics? That he accidentally swings the economy in the favor of the bankers and Wall Street while really, honestly and desperately trying to do the right thing for the vast majority of Americans? How bloody hopeful and simple-minded could you possibly be to believe that? Believing this fairy tale ensures only that Obama—or someone very much like him—will hoodwink you again.
But we can substitute the name “Obama” with the name of any politician. I want to emphasize that I don’t think he’s special, or especially bad. He’s just the current president. He’s the same—more or less and for all practical purposes—as all the rest. He starts wars, he runs a drone-based, extra-judicial assassination program that is demonstrably criminal and evil, he lowers taxes, he gives gobs of money to large corporations (hello, health-insurance industry), he glorifies the military and showers it with endless cash and weapons programs, he allows torture while redefining it otherwise semantically, he embargoes and fights economic wars against helpless nations, he ignores climate change, expands fossil-fuel subsidies and he promulgates an arrogant trade program that is a finger in the eye of every nation in the world.
It goes on and on. Business as usual. What the hell is so different about this model versus the last one, objectively speaking?
Why hate Obama? Many seem to hate him because he is black. This can be the only reason because it’s literally the only thing that they objectively don’t like about him. This single reason is overwhelmingly influential in how people form an opinion of him that they ignore a veritable slew of reasons that they should like him, all political and policy-oriented in nature. Reasons that should, by all rights, be much more important to a person than his skin color, but there you have it—man is a frail creature and a fallen one. [7]
Yes, they should! He’s done absolutely everything he could to make them love him.
Bankers like Obama; he does everything they like. Republicans hate him, but he does almost everything like a Republican. He funnels tons of cash to the richest in our land and neglects everything that would benefit the poor. During his entire administration (and part of Bush’s) all of the income increase has been captured by the top 1%. Everyone else went backward. Is this the mark of a progressive? Only in a country as broken as the U.S., perhaps.
Even the ACA is a sop to insurance companies—the far more progressive single-payer model was swept off the table by the Obama administration even before negotiations started. People don’t remember that he didn’t even fight for it; he never wanted it.
Obama has the sweetest gig in politics: everything he wants, the Republicans want the exact opposite with a religious zeal. So he can say he wants the most outlandishly progressive things and he is nearly assured that the Republicans will deliver America the exact opposite. He looks like he’s trying to save humanity, and the Republicans deliver the regressive program he actually wanted.
His recent support of net neutrality is a good example. What are the odds that the Internet will be regulated as a utility with the Republicans in charge for the next two years? Vanishingly small. What are the odds that it will happen if Obama wants it to happen? Zero percent.
The exact same goes for the much-ballyhooed climate agreement with China. More smoke and mirrors that looks progressive, but is all about meeting voluntary targets. China will probably actually meet theirs. The U.S.? With a Republican-controlled Congress and Senate? Not a fucking chance by Peter Lee (CounterPunch). But Obama gets the progressive praise for “trying”. [8]
So why does Obama support these things now, when he was all wishy-washy about it before? Hard to say.
I would like to think that it’s because Obama has found a backbone and realized that he has nothing to lose by finally standing up for what he believes in. I’ve always said that he should have been doing exactly that, that he could at least stand for what he believes in rather than compromising all the time and getting nothing out of it.
But if you have a hint of cynicism in you, you’ll be gut-laughing at my naiveté right now. Hell, I’m laughing at me for even having written it. This is the story that Obama is selling. Do not buy it.
I think that it’s much more likely that this is yet another example of something that Obama doesn’t really believe in but that he thinks he has to say in order to seal his legacy as a progressive president—because history has little do with reality, and American history even less so.
Or maybe he really is just manipulating the Republicans into doing what they all really want: the further privatization of America and the world, the promulgation of the single-minded and simplistic breed of capitalism that we seem to be stuck with.
Is he ineffective because he’s stupid? Or too smart? Too principled? His opposition is too evil? Is he actually effective?
Who knows? Who cares?
How many more years do we have to waste thinking about this?
What matters is that he is not part of the solution for the real problems that we have. That’s all you need to know, I think.
Published by marco on 12. Nov 2014 20:54:13 (GMT-5)
Congress may be at an ineffective standstill and the next two years are a legislative wasteland stretching before America and the world. The state legislatures, though, aren’t sitting still. Instead, they’re filled with the crème de la crème that America has to offer: from mildly racist to super-racist, from batshit crazy to crazier than a shithouse rat.
After introducing many of the lunatic creatures that will have an inordinate effect on ordinary citizens’ lives, Oliver notes that they are all running unopposed and concludes:
“We look forward to you wielding a terrifying amount of power over the next several years, safe in the knowledge that no one is paying attention.”
]]>“[…] the IMF signed off on the first loan ever to a side engaged in a civil war, not to mention rife with insider capital flight and a... [More]”
Published by marco on 27. Oct 2014 22:26:15 (GMT-5)
The article The IMF’s New Cold War Loan to Ukraine by Michael Hudson (CounterPunch) provides some interesting insight into the IMF’s machinations on behalf of its masters in Europe and the U.S.
“[…] the IMF signed off on the first loan ever to a side engaged in a civil war, not to mention rife with insider capital flight and a collapsing balance of payments.”
The IMF has hard and fast rules for loaning money and is famous the world over for being an exceedingly unforgiving creditor…unless the creditor is the European continent’s newest democracy, the propping up of which is an opportunity to provoke the Russian bear that is just too good to pass up.
“Based on fictitiously trouble-free projections of the ability to pay, the loan supported Ukraine’s hernia currency long enough to enable the oligarchs’ banks to move their money quickly into Western hard-currency accounts before the hernia plunged further and was worth even fewer euros and dollars.”
Not only does propping up Ukraine’s currency help keep that civil war alive—and keep Russia occupied—but it also—and this is purely coincidental, mind you—provides enough cash for all of the usual exceedingly rich suspects to continue being exceedingly rich. This by the usual mechanism of roping the collective taxpayers of the world into paying for said rich individuals’ bad investments by their respective governments, most of which are also comprised of rich people or those who would like to be rich people or who are otherwise beholden to them.
“In practice, the IMF simply advances however much a government needs to bail out its bankers and bondholders, pretending that more austerity enhances the ability to pay, not worsen it.”
As the rulers of the world have realized that people are much more interested in bad housewives, cute cat pictures and an explosion of inanity on social media (first-world version) or are utterly distracted by the sheer misery that is every waking hour of their lives (third-world version), they make less and less of an effort to hide how they’re ripping everyone off.
“Ukraine looks like a replay of the Greek situation with an exclamation mark! One official last year called its Debt Sustainability Analysis, “‘a joke,’ a [European] commission official described it ‘a fairy tale to put children to sleep’ and a Greek finance ministry official said it was ‘scientifically ridiculous.’””
I mean, why even bother to expend any effort hiding what’s going on when (A) very few are paying any attention at all and (B) no-one can really do anything about it. And the analysis that we do get on issues of merit are skewed by the authors’ paymasters. Here, Hudson describes the obvious and reprehensible cherry-picking of history that an ostensibly serious analysis engaged in when she tried to declare some debt as “odious”.
“The double standard here is that instead of labeling Ukraine’s entire series of post-1991 kleptocratic governments odious, she singles out only Yanukovich, as if his predecessors and successors are not equally venal. But an even greater danger in trying to declare Ukraine’s debt “odious”: It may backfire on the United States, given its own support for military dictatorships and kleptocracies.”
The designation “odious debt” carries with it a freight of baggage. As Hudson points out, the U.S. has instilled no small amount of such debt in its various puppets over the decades. This is, however, an argument that concerns Hudson, but not the original author he attempts to chastise. As they say, “if you have no taste, you can do anything”. A useful corollary for today would be: “If you don’t care about consistency or hypocrisy on your own part, you can write throw as many stones as you like”.
The article Gaza and the Threat of World War by John Pilger (CounterPunch) contained another likely futile attempt to point out the parallels to even very recent debacles of failed diplomacy and deceitful motives: the most recent invasion of Iraq. Though the U.S. media has seemingly formed a diamond of fact out of the coal dust of rumors of Russian invasions and troop involvements, there are others who are a bit more gun-shy.
“What matters is a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine that seems difficult to prove beyond familiar satellite images that evoke Colin Powell’s fictional presentation to the United Nations “proving” that Saddam Hussein had WMD. “You need to know that accusations of a major Russian ‘invasion’ of Ukraine appear not to be supported by reliable intelligence,” wrote a group of former senior US intelligence officials and analysts, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. “Rather, the ‘intelligence’ seems to be of the same dubious, politically ‘fixed’ kind used 12 years ago to ‘justify’ the U.S.-led attack on Iraq.””
But what of those who are perhaps not so stupid, who make what, on the surface, seem to be cogent arguments in support of a free Ukraine and a liberated Russian people, free from the yoke of Putin? The article Back to Yalta? Stephen Cohen and the Ukrainian crisis by Nikolay Koposov (Eurozine) is one such article. In this article, Koposov takes on Stephen Cohen, painted as a Putin-lover but who I’ve found to be relatively balanced and coherent in the few interviews I’ve heard. Anyway, let’s let Koposov describe his thesis,
“For his part, Cohen presents himself as a “political realist” and an American patriot whose concern is the security of the United States, which according to him has been consistently undermined by US policymakers and experts whose incompetence and “Putinophobic follies” have deprived the United States of “the best potential partner we had anywhere in the world to pursue our national security”.”
I fail so far to see the problem with Cohen’s positions as described in this article. The conclusion implied by the tone is unsupported by the evidence provided. That the tone is so snide, disparaging and dismissive indicates strongly that the author will not be as even-handed as one might hope or as his introduction suggests. He seems to see everything as black and white, with poor Stephen Cohen seemingly incapable of doing anything right.
If you don’t support the U.S. in its crusade, you’re a Putin supporter. The fact is that the U.S. has provably been a force for evil in the world—for pretty much everyone other than a small handful of the privileged. It has been an overall detriment for the people it bombs and for its own citizens, who are constantly short-changed by its policies. The changes proposed by the U.S. have come to tears for many other countries, Iraq being only the most recent and prominent victim. Afghanistan, Libya and Palestine may also have something to add about the effectiveness of U.S. policy for improving their countries.
Should the U.S. get its way in Ukraine, there is every reason to believe—simply by looking at the history books, which are clear—that conditions will be worse for Russians than even the awfulness of the reality of today’s kleptocracy. Said state of affairs being something for which the U.S. and its allies are largely responsible. It’s not a coincidence that the rich and powerful did so well in the post-Glasnost years.
“Cohen blames Bill Clinton for beginning “NATO’s eastward expansion”, which hurt Russia. Is he suggesting Clinton’s only legitimate concern should have been Russia’s security, as opposed to say Estonia’s? Did Russians occupy Estonia in 1940, or did Estonians occupy Russia? Who has better grounds for feeling insecure? Or is it the case that only nuclear giants may have legitimate concerns about their national security? ”
Now I’m thinking that this guy is a facile idiot who seems to honestly believe that NATO has Estonia’s concerns at heart. It’s not that only nuclear giants can express their concerns, but that for the last twenty years we have heard only one voice: that of the U.S. Even when Estonia talks, it’s either the U.S. or—hardly better—the EU that makes its mouth move. The U.S. and the EU have shown themselves to be self-interested to the core. They have every interest in portraying Russia as an intractable enemy and giving it the Libya treatment, if possible.
That is the dream, anyway. If they could finally topple the Russian empire, Europe would finally have its resource problem under control, or would at least have cozier terms with a Russian territory under U.S. control. Let’s not lie to ourselves, this is the dream. The U.S. doesn’t give two shits for democracy in Estonia. It wants to build missile bases ever closer to its age-old enemy, the only country capable of resisting it with nukes. China would be logically next.
Don’t think that this is not the official policy of the U.S. It’s probably even written down in no uncertain terms somewhere. NATO is a tool to be used to enact this vision; it is not there to protect European countries. To believe so is utter foolishness.
Even the Yeltsin years, during which Russians had hope, despite the torrent of capital and power rushing out of their country at the time, would likely be a paradise compared to what is to come, should the U.S. get its way. But hope dies last, as the Germans like to say, and the author is eminently hopeful to lend the U.S. support in the hopes that this time it will be different.
“For all Yeltsin’s imperfections, Russia had a moment of relative freedom (especially freedom of expression) in the 1990s, which did not end until the formation of Putin’s regime. In a similar way, conflicts between Yeltsin’s Russia and its eastern European partners over the interpretation of history were rare.”
Bullshit. There was never a democracy in anything but name in Russia. No more so than the purported democracy the U.S. enjoys in this, the second gilded age, the age of plutocrats. The Russian government was allowed to play at democracy like a little girl with her teddy bears plays tea party. Meanwhile, the country was stolen out from under the Russian people by rapacious so-called free-market capitalists, who differed in no way from the Huns or Ghengis Khan in their ruthlessness. With the approval of a handful of Apparatchiks who also benefitted, armies of lawyers and financiers dismantled the Soviet Union rather more efficiently than an invading army could have.
The Russians went from a totalitarian occupation to an economic one. As mentioned at the top of this essay, the IMF is moving full steam ahead to do the same for Ukraine.
Koposov goes on to describe the evils of Russian policy,
“The program of cultural conservatism includes a quest for stability and hatred of change, especially revolutions; an emphasis on traditional values and an alliance with the Orthodox Church; the revival of a Soviet-style anti-intellectualism and a crusade against “deviant behaviour” (including what is called “non-traditional” sexual behaviour). This politics is complemented by repression and new legislation that has considerably increased police control over Russian society.”
Is he writing about the U.S. or Russia here? Do people like the author have no sense of irony? No self-reflection whatsoever? Do they really see things only from one side, without any notion that their depiction of the world as black and white might be a touch simplistic? Anti-intellectualism, repression, gulags—doesn’t that remind you of anything? How can you piss on Russia when Guantánamo is still open? They’re both bad. But to promote the lily-white U.S. vision over the obviously evil Russian one is to lack all nuance and perspective.
This lack of perspective colors everything. Even something relatively glaringly obvious like Crimea is described thusly:
“In a very profound sense, the annexation of Crimea is also an expression of cultural conservatism, with its pre-modern land-hunger and predilection for tangible symbols of power.”
How can he fail to mention or address Sebastopol, one of Russia’s largest naval bases. Can he not even bring himself to mention that this might be the most obvious reason that Russia would want to secure Crimea? It’s not an honorable reason, but one understandable by the realities of a war-suffused world with belligerent entities crawling the earth, looking to pick a fight.
Even in describing the Ukrainian culture, he given the current ruling party the benefit of a doubt that they have not earned, not even if we ignore all of the accusations of fascism and anti-Semitism.
“What has for decades been crucial about Ukraine is that most Ukrainians acknowledged their differences, but wanted to live together. This was a structural foundation of Ukrainian democracy (and one that made Ukraine so different from “monocentric” Russia but similar to countries such as Canada and the UK, among others).”
If most Ukrainians share these feelings of commonality, why do they put up with a new parliament whose first act was to vote to outlaw the Russian language for official purposes? When more than half of the country speaks that language as their primary language? Is this the kind of democratic inclusiveness that he’s talking about? Did this fool of an author really just compare the the newborn civil-war–torn hemi-democracy/hemi-putsch–governed Ukraine to Canada? How can anyone take this seriously?
And then Koposov trots out the old saw that he’s simply trying to get Russia to help itself by trying to keep some friends rather than making everyone an enemy.
“Let me ask Cohen: is it in Russia’s best interests to be a country without friends, except for a couple of other dictatorships?”
In honesty, Russia has friends, but they lie to the east and south rather than the west and north. With the U.S. bending all of its might—both miltary and fiscal—to ensure this outcome, what can Russia realistically do? It can strengthen its ties in Asia, I suppose, for which it will also be castigated. The only solution that will satisfy is a complete capitulation to western desires.
“However, Russia has to accept the right of eastern European countries to be suspicious of it and avoid making them choose between Russia and the West. Whatever other countries’ misdeeds may be, Russia bears the lion’s share of historical responsibility for the issues it has with its neighbours, simply because they were ruled from Moscow, and Russia was not ruled from Kiev, Tallinn or Warsaw. Russia has an obligation to take the lead in peacefully overcoming these issues. I think this would be the only democratic way of defining Russia’s national interests “on its own borders”. President Yeltsin’s policy was at least for a while based upon this understanding. (Emphasis added.) ”
While he’s right that the only thing Russia can do is work with what it’s got, that little emphasized sentence absolves the U.S. and Britain and others of their entire involvement at the geopolitical level, in general, and in Russia and Eastern Europe, in particular.
Russia should, in effect, do what its armed-to-the-teeth NATO neighbors want. Make nice, in other words, do what the U.S. wants—expressed through its proxies.
“Stephen Cohen complains: “If Russia under Yeltsin was presented [by US media] as having legitimate […] national interests, we are now made to believe that Putin’s Russia has none at all.” But this is fairly normal: democracies often cannot accept as legitimate what an authoritarian regime views as its rights.”
What is wrong with that complaint, if one doesn’t accept a priori that Putin is evil incarnate? Or that Cohen is a shill for a new totalitarianism? That even Putin should get the same treatment as other leaders of his country is the heart of diplomacy. But diplomacy is a lost art.
Putin’s concerns cannot, by definition, be legitimate because he’s a dictator—and not one of the good ones because he doesn’t agree with the U.S. unilaterally. It has always been this way: we only keep the ones we like and we only like the ones who suck up. It’s Putin’s own fault for being so intractable. If, however, the Russians choose a different president, they better not choose one that does anything for them, else he’ll follow in the footsteps of Mossadegh or Lumumba or those poor fools in Palestine who voted Hamas into power in a democratic election. Better to choose a manipulable puppet and see if you can get something for yourself.
And to cap things off,
“Russian aggression against Ukraine has betrayed the general expectation of the major powers to pursue a responsible and, therefore, predictable politics, such that the world is spared major military conflicts. This is why the current crisis, no matter what its outcome may be, has already created a new international situation. (Emphasis added.)”
That first sentence is utterly blind to U.S.—and possibly British—actions in the last half-century. It’s utterly flabbergasting. How could anyone with a passing knowledge of history say that we have been “spared military conflicts”? Oh, I suppose he means that war no longer takes place on western soil. That it is waged by western powers seemingly everywhere else doesn’t enter into it. And the subtlety of economic warfare is something not even worth raising, if this guy can’t even see the bullets and bombs that are literally everywhere.
Instead, this fool heaps his entire opprobrium on Putin’s shoulders, putting a halo on the rest of the world and white-washing history to a degree that makes me think he’s suffered a serious head injury.
From that sentence alone, there is no need to take this guy seriously. A pity he put it all the way at the end of the article or I could have saved myself some time, I suppose.
She tells of Cecily McMillan, who was beaten into a seizure by police offers and who two years later stands trial for assaulting a police officer, facing seven years in prison. The officer’s... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 1. Apr 2014 22:55:22 (GMT-5)
The article Theater of Justice by Molly Crabapple (VICE) is an article by an artist who also occasionally does courtroom sketches.
She tells of Cecily McMillan, who was beaten into a seizure by police offers and who two years later stands trial for assaulting a police officer, facing seven years in prison. The officer’s record of having beaten other suspects was deemed inadmissable.
Or there is the other recent case of a black woman who tried to stand her ground, as others have successfully done. She fired a warning shot into the air, killing no one, not even wounding anyone. These were the actions of “Marissa Alexander, a PhD and mom who [wanted to] stop her husband from beating her,” That’s not a good reason, is it? Are we even sure that her husband isn’t allowed to beat her in that state? And that’s not nearly as good a reason as the guy had who killed a boy in the back-seat of his SUV for playing music too loud. Not guilty! But Marissa’s going to go away for a long time for her transgression.
“[She] was offered three years as a plea deal for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. She refused, knowing herself innocent. The judge sentenced her to 20 years. Now, she’s appealing. If she loses, the prosecutor wants to lock her up for 60.
“This is a “trial tax” you pay if you annoy the courts by insisting you are innocent.”
Who does this uppity woman think she is? Does she think she’s white? Rich? A citizen? A human being? Do not speak of justice in a system that produces hypocrisy on this scale. And the system does everything it can to make being poor or disadvantaged increase chances of prosecution dramatically.
We still have jury trials in the States; this means that non-professional, easily misled and nigh-constantly deluded undereducated head-cases are deciding your fate. Those are your peers. They can’t string two logical sentences together; what are the odds that they can wend their way through the facts of the case to come to a just conclusion? Nearly zero. What are the odds that they will decide your fate based on how you dress or act rather than evidence? Nearly certain.
“The poor, the brown, the trans – to juries, they’re guilty unless proven otherwise. Innocence is the absence of guilt. It is near impossible to prove a negative. […] If you’re too poor to afford bail, you arrive in court in chains. If you have no family to bring you a suit, you wear your prison jumpsuit.”
And people who haven’t yet been convicted are made to suffer beforehand. The unconvicted are left to stew behind bars because they can’t afford ridiculous bail. The homeless guy who was recently broiled to death in Riker’s Island because he couldn’t pay $2500 for bail on his charge of loitering was in jail for this reason. He was luckier than the homeless guy in the SouthWest U.S. who was executed by police officers for the same crime. Sure, those are anecdotes, but that doesn’t change the fact that “[…] the average defendant [is] a person of colour charged with a drug crime.” And more and more prisoners are going away for longer sentences; more and more people are taking years before they get their trial.
“Because the entire system would implode if everyone demanded a trial, prosecutors push plea bargains like restaurants hawking early bird specials. But instead of money, they’re haggling over life. If you’re too poor for a lawyer or have already spent months in jail because you can’t make bail, plea bargains can be irresistible. They account for 95 percent of felony convictions.”
As mentioned above, 95% just take the plea bargain in order to get some form of a life back. This is a life with a felony record and drastically reduced chances of making anything of yourself in a society that hates its ex-cons.
“Most trials resemble not grand dramas but factory farms. The raw material is a person. The product is a prisoner. Trials are deliberately dull. They move glacially, on state time rather than human time. If you hire your own lawyers – a necessity to have a chance of winning – you’ll blow through your life savings. As the cop cliché goes, “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.””
If you don’t plea out, you lose your life savings and may still go to jail. If you do plea out, you lose all chance of ever making decent money again. You see? In America, you still have the freedom to choose.
Published by marco on 31. Mar 2014 20:36:02 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 31. Mar 2014 23:22:03 (GMT-5)
I am so tired of hearing of scintillatingly smart people who can’t seem to ever say anything that is even tangentially well-informed. We knew that the Bush administration was a booby-hatch full of cantankerous old farts who hadn’t been right about anything or even had an original thought since before it became illegal to beat your wife and black people, not necessarily in that order. That doesn’t excuse them in any way at all, but they didn’t even really have a veneer of intelligentsia to them.
And now we have a new administration full of supposed young guns, ready to take on the 21st century. Not only is the Obama administration a moral and ethical failure throughout the whole spectrum but this supposedly technically savvy and hyper-informed and educated pile of Rhodes and Constitutional scholars can’t even seem to grasp the basics of human interaction beyond that which you would find in any neighborhood sandbox. They are a bunch of kindergartners who don’t know enough to shut up and let the grownups handle things.
They are so seduced by what they continue to cling to as U.S. hegemony and power that they coast along, not even bothering to make up a story that even halfway jibes with reality. We end up with policy that is not only criminally stupid and dishonest and offensive to anyone with half a brain and half an education who’s read half a history book or even half-paid attention to current events, but it will drag the hubris-laden vessel of the U.S.—and likely a lot of the rest of world with it—to very murky depths before they’re through.
There is no need for diplomacy when you can just stamp your foot and scream and make up all of your own history and facts and information and have the sails of your stupidity belled out by the hot air blown in vast and steaming amounts by a slavish corporate media intent on selling lies that will buoy their bottom lines for the next quarter. And to hell with the rest of it. I got mine, jack.
Obama stood in front of an assembly in Bruges and dribbled out the most spectacularly uninformed and nuance-free drivel you could imagine, all but starting World War III with seemingly nary a thought that others on the planet may not have the global domination of the U.S. as a core guiding principle.
His advisors and helpmeets are no better, with the bevy of women he’s appointed to relatively high office doing absolutely nothing to provide evidence to support the theory that if women ruled the world, we’d have less violence. To the contrary, Samantha “boom-boom” Power nearly fell on her Russian counterpart with savage blows before she got herself under control.
There is a severe problem when the lunatics run the asylum. It is even worse when they forget where reality ends and their own propaganda begins.
John Kerry is another such laughable idiot—a buffoon if there ever was one—who doesn’t waste a single second trying to convince anyone of anything—instead averring with such a self-assured knowledge that he is telling the gospel truth that it is hard to believe that he could even tell the difference anymore.
All of these fools steamroll right past the ironies, hypocrisies and shocking double-standards that abound in all of their argumentation, assuming that we are so much stupider than they. It may well be that most people will simply go along with what these scholars say because they feel that such smart people could not possibly be deluded on so grandiose a scale.
Those believers are sadly mistaken. This is not the first time that the lunatics are at the helm. It is arguable that it has always been thus. That does not in any way make it more palatable.
Perhaps these leading lights of the U.S. State Department are justified in their cynicism. But I simply want it noted that people who are purportedly intelligent but spend all of their time grubbing for power and saying the most mind-bogglingly inane and provably false things should not be heeded. Their original intelligence does not matter because they are not employing it. At all. That they know better but are cynically manipulating the world for their personal gain is not even cold comfort. Far better if we could just get them to leave us alone.
And don’t think that this vapidity is confined to the administration and its hangers-on. The Republican love of Putin is a pure knee-jerk reaction against the Obama administration, nothing more. They are not handling this any better nor are they exhibiting any greater level of intelligence than does a plant when it leans toward the sun.
Putin is not a grand guy but he is rational, he can be eminently reasonable and he seems to have the best interests of his country at heart. He has also exhibited absolutely no designs on taking over other countries. Crimea was not a takeover. The situation was forced on him by any logical reading of the events. That the U.S. paints this in any other way is so disingenuous and cynical that it’s nearly warping the space-time continuum. Be that as it may, all of the things listed above could be used as levers by diplomats worth their name in order to come to an agreement with Russia. But an agreement is not what is sought.
What is sought instead by the U.S. is utter domination and degradation and capitulation on the part of any other country that has a whit of power remaining. Countries like Russia and Chine will not bow so easily—nor do they have any reason to, when one looks at the facts and the reality rather than the mythic world of American exceptionalism. The Idiocracy that is America is shooting itself in the foot time and again, thinking that it can create history and bend reality and facts to its whims. The rest of the world tires of these spoiled-child antics and just wishes the U.S. would go away.
Kerry leaps to support the rebels in Venezuela—but it is a rebellion of the rich against the poor, throwing a temper tantrum because they want their country back in the hands of a few oligarchic families. But the OAS was recently asked by the U.S. to vote for intervention and overthrow of Maduro in Venezuela. The U.S. received a resounding NO, with only Canada and Panama voting in favor. Everyone else in the OAS told the U.S. (and Canada) to go f&%*k themselves. And rightly so. Because only an immoral jackass would support a “revolution” promulgated by the upper class against the poor. When put that way, it makes sense that Kerry was for it.
When Honduras was overthrown by an extreme right-wing party, the Obama administration fell all over itself to validate the revolution and welcome the new rulers into the international community—constitutionality be damned. It was the same in Venezuela during the 24-hour coup of Chavez. It was the same in Libya. It was the same in Kosovo. It was the same in Ukraine, where the U.S. once again cheerfully supports a fascist government—as long as they accept U.S. (NATO) missiles on their border with Russia. Shooting distance to Iran is also not a bad consolation prize.
The lunatics are running the asylum and we’re all along for the ride. The media doesn’t care. They love the simple story told by the administration. Or is it that the administration loves the simple story told by the media? It’s so hard to tell who’s the dog and who’s the tail and who’s doing the wagging.
The danger that the rest of the world sees is that these kindergarten-level administrators and diplomats and officials have a ton of power and weapons and influence still to burn. And they have a craven and willing media at their back, which is eager to sell a ton of advertising for their Cold War Redux coverage.
We can only hope that Putin remains reasonable and picks his battles and doesn’t get drawn into the idiocy. He has been reassuringly stable and grounded so far. It is an utter shame that we have to hope for this cypher of a man to prevent the gaggle of idiots at the helms of other countries (Angela Merkel has toned down the rhetoric considerably of late, in fairness) from plunging us all into a nuclear winter.
If you’ve got so much time on your hands to poke the Russian bear, why don’t you expend some energy on doing something about climate change? You know, instead of just pretending the problem doesn’t exist because it’s politically difficult in an election year. Every other year in the States is an election year. It’s an excuse to never have to engage your giant brain and actually do something. And your giant brain has deluded you into thinking that no one else could possibly be as smart as you and therefore you should get all the toys and cupcakes. This is laziness and intellectual dishonesty at its core. Talk about entitlement.
And pro tip: Just because someone speaks English with an accent doesn’t make them stupid. Nor does it make them smart—I’m looking at you, Henry Kissinger. You are the original proponent of the take-all-the-toys-stick-your-fingers-in-your-ears-and-coast-on-your-reputation-for-smarts strategy. You and Bob Mcnamara, who admitted his oopsie only after millions of Vietnamese had died. Good timing. Lots of other people smarter than you knew that what you were doing was wrong before you even started doing it. Nobody listened to them. Just like no one is listening now, instead leaving the reins in the hands of the utter children currently in charge of the U.S.
In conclusion, stop listening to people who you’ve been told are smart but who never seem to say anything smart or reasonable or well-informed. They are going to lead us down the primrose path of destruction and make life a lot worse for everyone.
I didn’t include any citations or references in the main text although there are many good ones and they all pretty much say the same thing: the mainstream media/U.S. version of events is pure mendacity. This example from the article Obama’s Sleepwalk Toward War by Paul Craig Roberts (CounterPunch) is as good an example as any.
“The extraordinary transparent lie that Russia sent an army into Ukraine and annexed Crimea is now accepted as fact everywhere in the West, even among critics of US policy toward Russia.
“Obama, whose government overthrew the democratically elected government in Ukraine and appointed a stooge government that has threatened the Russian provinces of Ukraine, falsely accuses Putin of “invading and annexing” Crimea.”
Paul Craig Roberts continues to report well and honestly. Tariq Ali also described the hypocrisy as breathtaking, Pepe Escobar is always informative. Diane Johnstone also wrote eloquently and well on the topic and drew parallels to NATO and the U.S. in Yugoslavia. Israel Shamir continues to provide good background. And not all members of the EU are equally deluded: Gregor Gysi gave a good and impassioned speech to the German Bundestag. James Howard Kunstler notes that “In [his] lifetime, there has never been a more pointless and unnecessary international crisis than the current rumble over Ukraine, and it’s pretty much all our doing” before returning to his reporting on the ongoing global financial collapse, suggesting that this might be more important (I chose climate change above).
Even the text of Vladimir Putin’s speech to the Kremlin after accepting Crimea back into the fold, is very good and historically informative reading (and is not without humor; see emphasis).
“First, we had to help create conditions so that the residents of Crimea for the first time in history were able to peacefully express their free will regarding their own future. However, what do we hear from our colleagues in Western Europe and North America? They say we are violating norms of international law. Firstly, it’s a good thing that they at least remember that there exists such a thing as international law – better late than never. (Emphasis added)”
Published by marco on 12. Mar 2014 22:44:51 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 12. Nov 2023 14:35:48 (GMT-5)
As you can well imagine, this is an exhaustive topic. Trying to get a handle on it is like drinking from a firehose. My style of research involved a lot of reading, evaluation and collection of interesting tidbits, some of which are contradictory to previous bits. Interesting for me does not mean “believable” or “true” but that it was well-written, intriguing or contributed to my knowledge. This piece will start with an attempt at an overview with some interwoven notes, followed by a lot of citations and references with less individual analysis.
The article Ukraine: who to read, what to believe? by Chris Bertram (Crooked Timber) captures perfectly the thought that everyone should have before pretending to even have a clue as to what’s going on over there.
This goes double for anyone who was dead certain on what would/should happen in Libya or Egypt or Afghanistan or Iraq. I have been muddling through innumerable articles and opinions and views and historical recaps—of both the deep and shallow past in the region—and think I may perhaps finally have some decent idea of what I might think about the turmoil in which Ukrainians find themselves. [1]
As ever, most of such research is about discarding information that is not useful and letting that which is useful bubble up. In this, you can rely on some personalities who never fail to be wrong or disingenuous. Using such lighthouses or ignorance and self-serving venality, it is much easier to avoid the dangerous, swirling shoals in which you might otherwise disappear. John Kerry, I’m totally looking at you.
On the other hand, as I’ve read through tons of material, I’ve distilled a few reasonable authors from the mix, like Robert Parry, Israel Shamir, Andre Vlitchik, Paul Craig Roberts, William Boardman and the editors of n+1 magazine. Essayists to avoid are David Remnick, Thomas Snyder and pretty much all of the usual suspects in the Western mainstream media. As illustrated in a few links below, even some ordinarily more alert sources like Glenn Greenwald and Abby Martin have been deluded into reporting within the parameters of false assumptions.
A good rule of thumb is to trust only sources that consider themselves to be uncertain (because the situation is far from clear) and which are willing to admit mistakes and correct their picture of the situation as new data arrives. These are pretty much the usual rules for consuming media, but all the more important in this case because of the high stakes and also because many historically less-biased sources have already gone completely off the rails in their anti-Russic and anti-Putin inclinations, which is neither constructive nor likely to result in a useful picture of the situation.
The standards of Western propaganda are in place: every leader you don’t like is a “dictator”. For good measure, call them “communist” as well, even though the term doesn’t even begin to apply. Yanukovich was elected three years ago. Call him a deposed dictator. That makes the putsch much more palatable. Putin is also an elected leader. Call him a dictator as well. And a communist. And crazy, don’t forget crazy. Irrational and unpredictable. Liable to do anything. A perfect justification for preëmptive military action. Hillary Clinton already played the Godwin card (Wikipedia), in utter ignorance of history. [2]
The US media and US think-tank denizens are actively detrimental to trying to figure out what’s going on. They are distracting clowns. They make up details from whole cloth and then use those to present a simplistic and straightforward interpretation that can only end in Putin’s Russia being purest evil and the US and Europe pure goodness, once more reluctantly gearing up for war. These people pose behind auspicious-sounding organizations that lend gravitas to their statements in the ears of those desperate for clarity and uncertain of their own understanding. And perhaps too lazy to look further but unwilling to abandon their quest to gain knowledge empty-handed.
For example, the Daily Show hosted a woman who writes for Foreign Policy (I’m not even going to bother looking up her name), who presented an utterly simplistic view of the situation. She made historically inaccurate statements throughout, utterly ignoring even the high points of foreign policy of the last two decades, ostensibly her milieu. If someone purporting to be an authority in this area doesn’t even acknowledge that the accusation of Western hypocrisy must at least be addressed, then their opinion is worth nothing (to me, at least). They should at least do us the honor of trying to explain why Crimea isn’t at all like Ukraine without being stupid. Or like Kosovo. Or like the fledgling 13 colonies of nearly 250 years ago.
The Colbert Report didn’t do its viewers much service either. The guy from Foreign Policy vastly oversimplified things, depicting the Ukrainian plight as a choice between the evil, Russian bear and the welcoming arms of liberty in Europe, which is utter horseshit. He also utterly failed to even hint that the opinion of the actual people living in Ukraine should be consulted in any way.
It’s insane and sickening. That’s the only appropriate description for the misinformation feeding frenzy. Did you see the picture of the Russian tank rolling on Crimea? You can be pretty sure it was a tank, but was it in Crimea? Was it even Russian? Was it even footage from this decade?
On the Internet, everything is fake unless proven otherwise. Enjoy it if you like, even if part of your enjoyment is that you think it’s real, but don’t actually believe it’s real without proof. Since journalism no longer really exists, we have only volunteer reporters in the form of social-media rumors, inundating Twitter and Facebook in a tsunami of truthiness. Even the major news organizations use stock footage all the time. Is Anderson Cooper really in Crimea? Right in the middle of Sebastopol? No, he is not. He’s in front of a green screen. This is, somehow, legal.
The other day, I saw a short clip that was strongly implied to represent modern-day Switzerland on the Daily Show. The plane taking off said “Swiss Air” on the side. It hasn’t been called that for over a dozen years. Footage is recycled. Photos are recycled. They don’t have to be real to prove a point. And even if the photo hasn’t been doctored, it doesn’t mean that it represents what they say it does.
It would be nice to be able to trust such sources, but we clearly cannot. Even when they are not being deliberately mendacious or at least very slippery with their presentation, the thoroughness of most sources has proven catastrophically bad. That is, even if “reporters” earnestly believe that what they are presenting is true, there are good odds that they themselves have been fooled or manipulated.
The remainder of this article will consist of links to other articles and citations mixed in with notes of my own. I tried to roughly group them but YMMV.
And what about the snipers? One side says it was definitely the Ukrainian police—Yanukovich’s shock troops—who, while not disinclined to beating protesters, seemed otherwise averse to outright killing them. In fact, many of them defected during the uprising.
Others say that it’s not clear that the snipers weren’t affiliated with the opposition, which is acknowledged by all sides to be a patchwork of ideologies and groups, united in their desire to gain control of the Ukraine. Some of them might even have had the interests of the people at heart. Were they all above sniping their own citizens in order to cement hatred of the police, who would be blamed? I can’t rule that out.
Were they CIA operatives, fine-tuning a revolution to push it in the direction desired by the US? Building “facts on the ground”, as it were, in order to provide fodder for the good vs. evil narrative so earnestly desired by the West? Lord knows we can’t rule that out. It wouldn’t be the first time. Or even the tenth. We can wait 30 years for those records to be released under the FOIA and maybe then we’ll know for sure. When it no longer matters. [3]
Russian troops are descending on Crimea, right? But weren’t they already stationed there? Don’t they already have a large military presence there? We can discuss the legitimacy of a foreign nation establishing military bases in sovereign nations, but simply sending more troops to a base that already exists is not justification for DEFCON 1. No more than the US sending more troops to its burgeoning bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Okinawa, Germany or Korea would be.
The US Played Hardball Against Ukraine…and the EU by Peter Lee (CounterPunch)
“Since this new government is flat-busted, needs somewhere north of $30 billion in fresh loans to make it through the year, one might think the West didn’t get much of a bargain. However, it seems that everybody in the new government is gung-ho on accepting an IMF package through which, I suppose, the Ukraine will be comfortably chained in debt vassalage to the West for the foreseeable future and incapable of returning to the welcoming arms of Russia.”
“It will also be interesting to see if Russia yields to its spiteful feelings and neglects to pony up the $15 billion it had originally promised in order to prop up Yanukovich. (Interesting thought: was all this US-encouraged upheaval timed for the Sochi Olympics with the thinking that Putin wouldn’t dare intervene forcefully while his precious games were underway? Hmmm.)”
What Happened in Ukraine Was a Presidential Coup, Pure and Simple by Robert Parry (AlterNet)
“All of which set the stage for Ukraine. The issue at hand was whether Yanukovych should accept a closer relationship with the European Union, which was demanding substantial economic “reforms,” including an austerity plan dictated by the International Monetary Fund. Yanukovych balked at the harsh terms and turned to Ukraine’s neighbor Russia, which was offering a $15 billion loan and was keeping Ukraine’s economy afloat with discounted natural gas.”
The article The Ukraine Economic Crisis by Jack Rasmus (CounterPunch) goes into clinical detail on the current state of the Ukraine economy, which is anything but good.
“The immediate crisis is not only associated with declining real GDP and falling average incomes. The crisis is most evident short term in the rapid collapse of the Ukrainian currency and the even more rapid depletion of its foreign currency reserves that are critical to financing its trade, to paying its already significantly high foreign debt load, and for its central bank to intervene to stem the collapse of its currency. If currency collapses and there are little foreign exchange reserves available, the crisis escalates rapidly. And the Ukraine is desperately close to that point at present.”
Ukraine needs help in order to even get through the year. Where to turn? Europe’s offer is meager—it has more than enough troubles of its own as well any number of already-crashing economies in its basket—and would funnel all aid through the IMF, a notoriously harsh and inept organization that has historically done far more for its oligarchic rulers than the people in the countries that it “assists”. Ideology has, for decades, trumped reality in that organization. And compassion and actual assistance doesn’t enter into it. It is public-relations ploy to cover a mechanism by which maximum returns on failed Western investment—private and government—are extracted.
“The IMF has initially indicated it would provide $27 billion, but that would be doled out over 7 years in delivery. As in typical IMF deals, most of that $27 billion would go to cover payments to western bankers first, to ensure they’re protected and covered. Little would be left to stimulate the Ukrainian economy or to relieve the average Ukrainian household. Moreover, the ‘terms’ of the IMF deal (as any IMF deal has shown) would prove disastrous to the real economy. Already IMF officials are making it clear the rescue package would be available only with the proviso that the Ukraine cut government spending and jobs, pensions, and especially the large subsidies now provided to Ukrainian families to offset the high gas and oil costs to households.”
“The preceding analysis is not an apology for the economic mal-performance of the Yanukovich regime. Rather it is an effort to look behind the obvious ideological and political motives of those who argue in the west today that the protestors on Maidan Square are there because of the corruption of the regime; or that they are there because of the ineptness or personal thievery of the Ukraine’s Treasury by Yanukovich. That is a political analysis wrapped in ideological trappings of a bad economic analysis.
“Clearly the Ukraine’s economic problems are deeper, much deeper. And if current economic problems have been caused longer term by western capitalism’s economic crash of 2008 and subsequent policy shifts, one should perhaps think twice whether any long term (let alone short term) solution to Ukraine’s economic crisis will result from the same source, the western economies.”
Why Joining Russia Might Be Crimea’s Most Reasonable Option by Robert Parry (AlterNet)
“If you were living in Crimea, would you prefer to remain part of Ukraine with its coup-installed government — with neo-Nazis running four ministries including the Ministry of Defense — or would you want to become part of Russia, which has had ties to Crimea going back to Catherine the Great in the 1700s?
“Granted, it’s not the greatest choice in the world, but it’s the practical one facing you. For all its faults, Russia has a functioning economy while Ukraine really doesn’t. Russia surely has its share of political and financial corruption but some of that has been brought under control.
“Not so in Ukraine where a moveable feast of some 10 “oligarchs” mostly runs the show in shifting alliances, buying up media outlets and politicians, while the vast majority of the population faces a bleak future, which now includes more European-demanded “austerity,” i.e. slashed pensions and further reductions in already sparse social services.”
The US Played Hardball Against Ukraine…and the EU by Peter Lee (CounterPunch)
“It is doubtful that heightened PRC vigilance will translate into anything near the democratic liberalization which the West ostensibly craves for China’s benighted citizens. Instead, the regime will land on dissidents early and like a ton of bricks.
“It is rather ironic that Barack Obama, the progressive paragon, took a few hits from the Dick Cheney regime-change crack pipe, and now apparently finds it irresistible.”
I’ve read some seriously differing opinions. The right-wing is controlling it, the left is triumphant, Putin is happy, Putin is sad, Putin did it, the US did, Europe provoked it, Europe is happy, Europe is sad. My $0.02? Probably most Ukrainians are gonna not notice in the short term, but a democratically elected government was just *couped*, so that’s gonna leave a mark. No matter what you think of the former president, at least half of the country might just be a bit f’in surprised that the president they elected about 3 years ago just got thrown the fuck out. There’s also the little matter of the Ukraine being seriously strapped for cash (30B just this year). Putin promised 15 of it but it remains to be seen whether Russia feels beholden to a country without an elected government. Of course, they could go to Europe and the IMF. That always turns out well for the debtor country.
Was the Ukraine Coup America’s Main Event at the Sochi Olympics? by Peter Lee (CounterPunch)
“And Putin might have the last laugh, withholding Russia’s promised contribution of $15 billion while the EU scrambles to come up with the $30 billion Ukraine needs to get through the year (amazingly, the US has to date made no commitment to provide financial aid, something the EU is probably noticing; and thinking Thanks a Billion! Not! Vicky Nuland, since the aggressive US strategy blew up the transitional government negotiated by the EU that might have kept Russia in the game and on the hook).
“A year from now it might be Vladimir Putin who’s saying Thanks! Victoria Nuland. Thanks to you I was spared the cost and trouble of propping up a dysfunctional pro-Russian government in the Ukraine. I saved $15 billion bucks…turned a nice profit since I could drop concessional pricing in the new gas contracts…and I picked up east and south Ukraine as new Russian provinces for free!”
The US Played Hardball Against Ukraine…and the EU by Peter Lee (CounterPunch)
“So, by a less-than-generous view, it might be suspected that the United States encouraged demonstrators to break the truce, with the expectation that violence would occur and Yanukovich’s equivocal fat cat backers, such as Akhmetov, would jump ship because the US had already informed them that their assets in the West would be at risk under US and EU sanctions.
“If this is the case, the EU perhaps has additional reason to feel sore and resentful at the US. By blowing up the truce and the transition deal, Nuland got Yanukovich out and “Yats”—the preferred US proxy, Arseniy Yatsenyuk—in, but at the cost of terminally alienating the Ukraine’s pro-Russian segment—a segment, it might be pointed out, was actually able to elect Yanukovich in a free and fair election a while back.”
What Happened in Ukraine Was a Presidential Coup, Pure and Simple by Robert Parry (AlterNet)
“In the upside-down world that has become the U.S. news media, the democratically elected president was a dictator and the coup makers who overthrew the popularly chosen leader were “pro-democracy” activists.”
Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda by Chris Floyd (CounterPunch)
“Yanukovych, already unpopular before the deal, would have almost certainly been ousted from office by democratic means in national elections scheduled for 2015. But the outpouring of displeasure at this policy decision grew into a call for the removal of the government. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Washington was maneuvering to put their preferred candidate, Arseniy Yatseniuk, in charge of the Ukrainian government, as a leaked tape of a conversation between Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state, and Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, clearly showed. It is worth noting that when Yanukovych was finally ousted from power — after the opposition reneged on an EU-brokered deal for an interim unity government and new elections in December — Arseniy Yatseniuk duly took charge of the Ukrainian government, as planned.”
“American policy is based upon — dependent upon — a raging, willful, arrogant ignorance of other peoples, other cultures, history in general, and even the recent history of U.S. policy itself. The historical and cultural relationships between Ukraine and Russia are highly complex. Russia takes its national identity from the culture that grew up around what is now Kyiv; indeed, in many respects, Kyiv is where “Russia” was born.”
“Ukrainians favoring the Westward tilt, having idealized the E.U., appear to assume they are to evolve into some system roughly between the Scandinavians and Germany, as East Europeans earlier anticipated. They will thus find the I.M.F.’s deal shocking indeed. It will be bitter, after all the treacherous, carefully couched promises. (citing Patrick Smith)”
Dangerous ‘We-Hate-Putin’ Groupthink Among U.S. Political-Elite Threatens World Security by Robert Parry (AlterNet)
“Yet, despite the new evidence suggesting that the coup-makers may have been responsible for instigating the violence, the mainstream U.S. press continues to revise the preferred narrative by putting white hats on the coup-makers and black hats on the Yanukovych government. For instance, the New York Times has stopped reporting that more than a dozen police officers were among the 80 or so people killed as protests in Kiev turned violent. The typical new version in the U.S. press is simply that Yanukovych’s police opened fire on peaceful demonstrators, killing 80 of them.”
“And to take a contradictory view of this conventional wisdom marks you as “crazy.” When Yanukovych and Putin raised questions about who actually opened fire, the U.S. news media dismissed their suspicions as “conspiracy theories” and proof of “delusional” thinking. It is now a virtual consensus across the U.S. news media that Putin is “unstable” and “disconnected from reality.””
“The Washington Post called Putin’s Tuesday news conference “rambling.” However, if you read the transcript (VoltaireNet), it is anything but “rambling” or “delusional.” Putin comes across as quite coherent, expressing a detailed understanding of the Ukraine crisis and the legal issues involved.
“Putin begins his response to reporters’ questions by puzzling over the reasons for the violent overthrow of Yanukovych, especially after the Ukrainian president agreed to European terms for surrendering much of his power, moving up elections and ordering police to withdraw. But that Feb. 21 agreement lasted only two hours, ended by neo-Nazi extremists seizing control of government buildings and forcing Yanukovych to flee for his life.”
I highly recommend reading the entire transcript. I cannot verify the accuracy of the translation, but the original version in Russian is also available.
Ukraine Through the Fog of the Presstitutes by Paul Craig Roberts (CounterPunch)
“For example, Martin’s denunciation of Russia for “invading” Ukraine is based on Western propaganda that Russia sent 16,000 troops to occupy Crimea. The fact of the matter is that those 16,000 Russian troops have been in Crimea since the 1990s. Under the Russian-Ukrainian agreement, Russia has the right to base 25,000 troops in Crimea.”
U.S. Provokes Russia, Acts Surprised to Get Nasty Reaction by William Boardman (AlterNet)
“Russia’s history of maintaining a military presence in Crimea is older than United States history. The Russian Black Sea Fleet [4] has been based in Sevastopol in Crimea continuously since 1783. For the Russians, this is a crucial warm water port, currently leased from Ukraine till 2042.
“To understand what this means to the Russians, it probably matters more to them than the United States would care if the Cubans decided to threaten the Naval Base at Guantanamo, and we know that wouldn’t have a happy ending.”
“Now Yanukovych has been deposed, perhaps justly, but by an unjust process spearheaded by a street mob and a disenthralled parliament. The parliament has appointed an acting president and Yanukovych is in asylum in Russia. It’s not clear that Ukraine now has a legitimate government of any sort.”
Yanukovich was placating NATO but that clearly wasn’t going to be good enough. But isn’t the NATO presence right on Russia’s borders pretty much the only thing that has reliably caused them to bristle?
“In other words, the “pro-Russian” Yanukovych was contributing to NATO, albeit in a small way that might even have been part of a balancing act reflecting Ukraine’s unfortunate but inescapable geographic location bordering both Russia and NATO members [10] Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland. As far as the NATO allies were concerned, Ukraine’s effort to be a buffer state with good relations with all its hostile neighbors was not enough. Both NATO and the European Union were pressuring Ukraine to choose sides, NATO’s side. How did they honestly expect Russia to react, sooner or later?”
Boardman gave David Remnick of the New York Times much more credit than I would have, but he also pointed out that Remnick is definitely in the camp of the “presstitutes” as outlined by Paul Craig Roberts above.
“Writing with a Cold War approach that denigrates or omits anything that makes sense of Russian behavior, Remnick compares the Russian deployment in Crimea to Georgia in 2008, Afghanistan in 1979, Checkoslovakia in 1968. He omits any mention of Sevastop[ol or NATO. He argues instead that this is all about Putin’s psyche.”
The article goes on to provide a much more even-handed and reality-based listing of Putin’s actual crimes—things for which he should actually be denigrated—rather than the cartoonish Lucifer-like image that the Western press is much more comfortable with.
“But here we are, headed into another media wonderland where the actual context of putting missiles near another country’s borders is expected to elicit a reaction different from the one the Russians would get if they tried to finagle Mexico into a military alliance or base missiles in Canada.”
The article Ukraine, Putin, and the West (n+1) provides an excellent and extremely evenly and well-written article describing the history of the revolution—to the degree possible from disparate sources—from late last year until the present day.
For example, they discuss how the more media-savvy elements of the opposition tried to ensure that the situation would be reported in a black-and-white way conducive to their goals.
“As the protests stretched on, despite the freezing cold, some supporters of the protests began to worry that talk of right-wing groups was giving Maidan a bad name. A group of Ukrainian, Russian, and Western scholars circulated a strange petition urging Western media outlets to stop talking about the right-wing groups. In the US this campaign was taken up by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. In a series of articles and posts in the New York Review of Books, Snyder insisted, misleadingly, that the right-wing groups had nothing but a marginal presence at the protests, and that to say otherwise was to toe the party line being issued from the Kremlin, which was, it’s true, filling the national airwaves with talk of Ukrainian fascists. Snyder was answered by Stephen Cohen of the Nation, who argued that the American media was simply taking its usual anti-Russia line, regardless of the content of the protests. As usual, Cohen went too far, suggesting that rather criticize Vladimir Putin, the US should be grateful to him for all he’s done. Snyder answered that Cohen, a noted historian of the anti-Stalin opposition, was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. And on it went.”
Before I’d read this, I’d already discarded Snyder as a reliable source simply because he wrote as if he was writing a film script—his prose is lovely but whitewashed and indistinguishable from propaganda. Similarly, Stephen Cohen was one of the earlier interviews I’d read and, though he struck me as reasonable, he seemed also too sure of himself and too pro-Russia in the sense that he was also too willing to depict the situation as black and white, this time holding Russia utterly blameless, which is also not true.
As with other sources interested in getting to the heart of the unrest in Ukraine and the possible reasons why Russia wasn’t so interested in retaining it or why Europe was only willing to take it on if it could get Ukraine for free, n+1 examined the underlying economic situation.
“Instead, Ukraine, a country which in 1991 had hope that, left to its own devices, it could flourish—with its highly educated workforce, its proximity to Europe in the West and the Black Sea to the south, and the many industrial enterprises inherited from the USSR—has instead lagged miserably behind its neighbors. Its per capita GDP is one half of Russia’s, one fifth that of the US. Its economic performance lags behind that of its authoritarian neighbors Kazakhstan and Belarus. It is a country about as poor as El Salvador. And the poorest regions are in the west, which sends many undocumented migrant workers further west, to Europe, and north to Russia. It is the disjuncture between Ukraine’s solid democratic performance and its miserable economic one that provided the protests with much of their pathos and durability. (Emphasis added.)”
There were fascists among the protesters and they were a driving force behind the ultimate takeover—but the throngs that showed up to protest in the freezing cold were not all fascists. Nor were they proponents of Western democracy. No, they were mostly people who were intensely interested in where their meals would be coming from in the ensuing years and were strongly convinced that a Ukraine with Yakunkovich at the helm wasn’t going to provide them with the stability that they craved.
Once things turned shitty, though, a lot of those people melted away. They were frustrated and wanted their voices to push the revolution forward to get the reforms they wanted, but they weren’t fighters. The increasing chaos distilled the fighters from the throng.
“The determination of the protesters hardened. What had once been a crowd with iPhones had been transformed into men in battle fatigues, balaclavas, orange construction helmets, welder goggles, knee pads, shin pads, greaves, metal shields, and all sorts of improvised weaponry—two-by-fours, Molotov cocktails, flails, the occasional hunting rifle, sticks, and rocks. They looked like some army of the damned, out to fight zombies—but in fact they were facing down their own police.”
Let us imagine how many dead there would be in the US were there to be similarly equipped protestor shock-troops in the streets of an American city, say New York. I think that 80-100 dead in total would be a relatively low number in that case. This is not to argue that everyone acted splendidly, do not misunderstand, but that a death tool in the low triple digits is ridiculously low for the overthrow of a government in a country of 50 million people. The revolution was about as bloodless as could be expected. It could have been even more so as expressed by a mystified Putin in a press conference (see below), where he detailed that Yanukovitch had already signed over all power and capitulated to all demands before the protestors kicked the violence into high gear.
While the editors of N+1 acknowledged that the troops referenced by Western sources were drawn from those already stationed in Sebastopol, they also noted that the Russian military there didn’t stay on base, as they always had before.
“Less than a week later, in gross violation of the conditions of their longstanding lease on Crimean territory, Russian troops left their bases in the Crimea and began to take up positions around the peninsula, disarming Ukrainian troops where they could.”
It’s also interesting to muse on the value of the propaganda coming from both sides. The Western propaganda is objectively more insidious in that it deviates much farther from the actual facts and is also clearly designed to influence decisions in ways that are grossly pro-Europe and pro-U.S. What about the various media sources that parrot this information, though?
“It’s hard to know how much of what gets written in various places leads to American policies in actual fact. Does it matter what’s in the Nation? What about the New York Review of Books? The New Yorker? It’s impossible to say. And the media or publishing game has its own rules, irrespective of politics. Evil Putin is just going to get more airtime than Complicated Putin or Putin Who is Running a Country in a Complex Geopolitical Situation.”
Problems in Ukraine? Blame Russia! by Peter Lee (CounterPunch)
“Unless Russia can be prevailed upon to pony up the remaining $12 billion of the $15 billion it promised Yanyukovich, the new government is going to have to turn to the EU for the Western financial shovels that, hopefully, will dig the Ukraine out of its hole instead of digging it deeper.
“Apparently, the standard recipe for a country that can’t pay its bills (Ukraine is looking at a couple of likely bond defaults this summer) is an IMF rescue package contingent on implementation of austerity measures.”
“What will be particularly interesting will be the effort to try to get Russia to bring a few billions to the table to help with the bailout, while at the same time berating Russia for fostering dissatisfaction with the current government. Heroic efforts by the Guardian and the rest of Western prestige media will be needed to keep that particular ball rolling.”
Whither Ukraine? by Marilyn Vogt-Downey (CounterPunch)
What Yanukovich should have done/said:
“His refusal to sign this Agreement on November 21, 2013 has been called the “spark” that led to the current crisis and his overthrow. However, if, for example, he had summarized the terms of only one part of it–the Agreement’s “Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area”–and explained what it would mean to the Ukrainian people, he would have severely dampened enthusiasm for this Agreement. This Free Trade section alone–removing tariff barriers and export duties–would convert Ukraine into one big “free trade zone,” where the anti-environment, anti-labor, and pro-business laws would prevail.
“This is what “European integration” and “joining” the glamorized “West” would really mean to Ukraine’s massive working-class population of 46 million. It would create the economic devastation of the type that NAFTA has created in Mexico.
““You want a free, independent Ukraine?” Yanukovych could have asked, were he a man of integrity. “Well, so do I! That is why I cannot–in good conscience–sign this Agreement.””
“The IMF loans will require in Ukraine, as they do everywhere, that the government undertake broad-scale privatization of resources and basic public services, cut government spending on education, health care, pensions, housing, and benefits for the needy, as well as laws that hinder the accumulation and free movement of capitalist profits. And that’s just for starters. All this will further lower the wages and standard of living of the mass of the population of Ukraine, which are already lower than the European average.”
“This man, like everyone present, claimed to support an independent Ukraine. Yet he was promoting what amounted to the negation of this independence. Europe, like the rest of the capitalist world is in a deep-going crisis. Did he want Ukraine to end up like Greece, Italy, and Spain?”
The article Ukraine: The Haze of Propaganda by Timothy Snyder (New York Review of Books) has no compunctions about spreading its own haze:
“Struggling to pay his debts last year, the Ukrainian leader had two options. The first was to begin trade cooperation with the European Union. No doubt an association agreement with the EU would have opened the way for loans. But it also would have meant the risk of the application of the rule of law within Ukraine. The other alternative was to take money from another authoritarian regime, the great neighbor to the east, the Russian Federation.”
This telling of the story places the entire blame squarely on Yanukovich and makes the EU deal look much sweeter than any other source I’ve read. It is unlikely to be true. Just as it is unlikely that Yanukovitch is solely responsible for the $30 Billion hole in the Ukraine budget, as Snyder also intimates, if not outright alleges (“If a leader steals so much from the people that the state goes bankrupt, then his power is diminished. Yanukovych actually faced this problem last year.”). The rest of Snyder’s telling educes much more clarity than the situation warrants, finding a “a lonely, courageous Ukrainian rebel”—otherwise largely unmentioned in other sources—to imbue this revolution with the proper Hollywood backdrop. “When protesters followed, they were shot by snipers who had taken up positions on rooftops.” Who were the snipers? Snyder does not say. We are left to assume that they were police or supporters of the regime. It makes for a better story, anyway, and the pacing of the article is much more like a movie script than journalism. Ukraine under its new leadership (usurpers, recall) is portrayed as a paradise of thought and openness.
“The grotesque residences of Yanukovych are visited by tourists, but they are not looted. The main one is now being used as a base for archival research by investigative journalists. […] The speaker of the parliament and the acting president is a Baptist preacher from southeastern Ukraine. All of the power ministries, where of course any coup-plotter would plant his own people, were led by professionals and Russian speakers. The acting minister of internal affairs was half Armenian and half Russian. The acting minister of defense was of Roma origin.”
Young women were observed in squares across the country, placing early crocuses stem-first into the barrels of rifles. Tears rolled down scarred cheeks behind scarred faceshields.
Snyder sees far more leftists involved in this coup than other accounts I’ve read. It would be somewhat unusual for the left to be so strong in the Ukraine, when anti-communist purges lay so recently in the past. And when Europe is so lacking in anything approaching a useful left at all. It’s possible that the Ukrainians are worlds ahead of countries like France and Switzerland, which have of late been so reactionary, but it’s hard to believe.
Snyder ends with a plea:
“Insofar as we wish for peace and democracy, we are going to have to begin by getting the story right.”
I fear that the word “story” here will come back to haunt him.
“The New York Times coverage of the Ukrainian events is in sharp contrast, for example, to its coverage of the far more pervasive violence by the US-backed military government in Egypt, which has arrested and killed 100 times more protesters in recent months. Both are awful, but it is the contrast in coverage that is being emphasized here.”
“What would Dick Cheney have done if Russian NGOs sponsored separatist movements in Texas, California or New England? How would US police have reacted against armed revolutionaries seizing the armory and throwing Molotov cocktails and bombs at public buildings, killing police, painting swastikas on Jewish houses and claiming vigilante justice?”
Masking Tragedy in Ukraine by Chris Floyd (CounterPunch)
“Take his astonishing attack on Vladimir Putin for “interfering” in Ukraine. That Obama could make this charge with a straight face — days after his own agents had been exposed (in the infamous “Fuck the EU” tape) nakedly interfering in Ukraine, trying to overthrow a democratically elected government and place their own favorites in charge — was brazen enough. But in accusing Putin of doing exactly what the Americans were doing in Ukraine, Obama also fabricated yet another alternate world.
“Obama unilaterally declared that Ukraine should overturn the results of the 2010 election (which most observers said was generally “fair and free” — more so than elections in, say, the US, where losing candidates are sometimes wont to take power anyway, and where whole states dispossess or actively discourage millions of free citizens from voting). Instead, the Ukrainians should install an unelected “transitional government” in Kiev. Why? Because, says Obama, now channeling all Ukrainians in his own person, “the people obviously have a very different view and vision for their country” from the government they democratically elected.” And what is their vision, according to Obama the Ukrainian Avatar? To enjoy “freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, fair and free elections.” Something you might think they had enjoyed by having free elections 2010, and exercising freedom of speech and assembly to such a degree that a vast opposition force has occupied much of the central government district for months.”
“And the fact is, not a single one of the Western governments now denouncing Ukraine for its repression would have tolerated a similar situation. Try to imagine thousands of Tea Partiers, say, having declared that the elected government of Barack Obama was too corrupt and illegitimate to stand, setting up an armed camp in the middle of Washington, occupying the Treasury Building and Justice Department for months on end, while meeting with Chinese and Russian leaders, who then begin demanding a ‘transitional government’ be installed in the White House. What would be the government’s reaction? There is no doubt that it would make even Yanukovych’s brutal assault this week look like a Sunday School picnic.”
What Happened in Ukraine was a Presidential Coup, Pure and Simple by Robert Parry (AlterNet)
“In these cases, it is typical for the mainstream U.S. news media to obsess over perceived flaws in the ousted leaders. On Wednesday, for instance, the New York Times made much of an unfinished presidential palace [4] in Ukraine, calling it “a fugitive leader’s folly.” The idea seems to be to cement in the minds of impressionable Americans that it is okay for the U.S. government to support the overthrow of democratically elected presidents if they have flaws.
“The outcomes for the people of these countries that are “saved” from their imperfect leaders, however, often tend to be quite ugly. Usually, they experience long periods of brutal repression at the hands of dictators, but that typically happens outside the frame of the U.S. news media’s focus or interest.”
The Brown Revolution in Ukraine by Israel Shamir (CounterPunch)
“While foreign ministers of EC countries and their allies crowded Kiev, Putin sent Vladimir Lukin, a human rights emissary, an elder low-level politician of very little clout, to deal with the Ukrainian crisis. The Russian Ambassador Mr Zurabov, another non-entity, completely disappeared from public view. (Now he was recalled to Moscow). Putin made not a single public statement on the Ukraine, treating it as though it were Libya or Mali, not a neighbouring country quite close to the Russian hinterland.”
“Yanuk’s electorate, the Russian-speaking people of the Ukraine (and they are a majority in the land, like English-speaking Scots are majority in Scotland) were disappointed with him because he did not give them the right to speak Russian and teach their children in Russian. The followers of Julia Timoshenko disliked him for jailing their leader. (She richly deserved it: she hired assassins, stole billions of Ukrainian state money in cahoots with a former prime minister, made a crooked deal with Gazprom at the expense of Ukrainian consumers, and what not.) Extreme nationalists hated him for not eradicating the Russian language.”
The Ukrainian Pendulum by Israel Shamir (CounterPunch)
“American and Russian troops entered Ukrainian territory, both under cover.
“The American soldiers are “military advisors”, ostensibly members of Blackwater private army (renamed Academi); a few hundred of them patrol Kiev while others try to suppress the revolt in Donetsk. Officially, they were invited by the new West-installed regime. They are the spearhead of the US invasion attempting to prop up the regime and break down all resistance. They have already bloodied their hands in Donetsk.
“Besides, the Pentagon has doubled the number of US fighter jets on a NATO air patrol mission in the Baltics; the US air carrier entered the Black Sea, some US Marines reportedly landed in Lvov “as a part of pre-planned manoeuvres”.
“The Russian soldiers ostensibly belong to the Russian Fleet, legally stationed in Crimea. They were in Crimea before the coup, in accordance with the Russian-Ukrainian treaty (like the US 5th fleet in Kuwait), but their presence was probably beefed up. Additional Russian troops were invited in by deposed but legitimately elected President Yanukovych (compare this with the US landing on Haiti in support of the deposed President Aristide ). They help the local pro-Russian militia maintain order, and no one gets killed in the process. In addition, Russia brought its troops on alert and returned a few warships to the Black Sea.
“It is only the Russian presence which is described as an “invasion” by the Western media, while the American one is hardly mentioned.”
“Members of Parliament were manhandled, and in some cases their children were taken hostage to ensure their vote, as their houses were visited by gunmen. The putsch was completed. The West recognised the new government; Russia refused to recognise it, but continued to deal with it on a day -to-day basis.”
“ The Kiev regime banned the Communist Party and the Regions’ Party (the biggest party of the country, mainly supported by the Russian-speaking workers). The regime’s first decree banned the Russian language from schools, radio and TV, and forbade all official use of Russian. The Minister of Culture called Russian-speakers “imbeciles” and proposed to jail them for using the banned tongue in public places. Another decree threatened every holder of dual Russian/Ukrainian nationality with a ten-years jail sentence, unless he gives up the Russian one right away.”
“But Putin is not a Russian nationalist, not a man of Imperial designs. Though he would like the Ukraine to be friendly to Russia, annexing it, in whole or in part, has never been his ambition. It would be too expensive even for wealthy Russia: the average income in the Ukraine is just half of the Russian one, and tits infrastructure is in a shambles. (Compare to the very costly West German takeover of the GDR.)”
“President Yanukovych will be historically viewed as a weak, tragic figure, and he deserves a better pen with a more leisured pace than mine. He tried his best to avoid casualties, though he faced a full-scale revolt led by very violent Brown storm-troopers. And still he was blamed for killing some eighty people, protesters and policemen.”
Ukrainian Hangovers by Jeffrey Sommers and Michael Hudson (CounterPunch)
“Russia today has watched covert attempts from the US State Department to the National Endowment for Democracy and other NGOs to break up their country as part of what is becoming a triumphalist global pattern. This threatens to remake their “near abroad” into a neoliberal periphery. Today’s confrontation has taken on an existential character for Russia since it saw NATO’s moves toward Georgia as cutting too close to the bone.”
Let’s You and Him Fight by James Howard Kunstler (Clusterfuck Nation)
“So, now we are threatening to start World War Three because Russia is trying to control the chaos in a failed state on its border — a state that our own government spooks provoked into failure? The last time I checked, there was a list of countries that the USA had sent troops, armed ships, and aircraft into recently, and for reasons similar to Russia’s in Crimea: the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, none of them even anywhere close to American soil. I don’t remember Russia threatening confrontations with the USA over these adventures.”
“The Russians, on the other hand, have every right to protect their interests along their own border, to protect the persons and property of Russian-speaking Ukrainians who, not long ago, were citizens of a greater Russia […]”
The analysis in Why the Crisis in Ukraine Isn’t the Start of a New Cold War by Zack Beauchamp (AlterNet) comes to what is probably the right conclusion but for the wrong reasons. It does, however, examine more closely the issue of Sevastapol in Crimea—and the vital importance of the Russian naval base there. But when it states that Russia “can’t make progress towards bending the world to its will using the sort of strategies it has tried to date”, it smacks a bit too much of trying to re-awaken the cold war.
This especially because, as Ukraine: One ‘Regime Change’ Too Many? by Ray McGovern (AntiWar.com) and many other articles state,
“Putin has many other cards to play and time to play them. These include sitting back and doing nothing, cutting off Russia’s subsidies to Ukraine, making it ever more difficult for Yanukovich’s successors to cope with the harsh realities. And Moscow has ways to remind the rest of Europe of its dependence on Russian oil and gas.”
Why Obama Shouldn’t Fall for Putin’s Ukrainian Folly by Anatol Lieven (Zocalo Public Square)
“During George W. Bush’s second term as president, the U.S., Britain, and other NATO countries made a morally criminal attempt to force this choice by the offer of a NATO Membership Action Plan for Ukraine (despite the fact that repeated opinion polls had shown around two-thirds of Ukrainians opposed to NATO membership).”
“Russia attempted to draw Ukraine into the Eurasian Customs Union by offering a massive financial bailout and heavily subsidized gas supplies. The European Union then tried to block this by offering an association agreement, though (initially) with no major financial aid attached. Neither Russia nor the EU made any serious effort to talk to each other about whether a compromise might be reached that would allow Ukraine somehow to combine the two agreements, to avoid having to choose sides.”
This seems to directly contradict what Stephen Cohen (see below) said.
“But Western governments, too, have put themselves in an extremely dangerous position. They have acquiesced to the overthrow of an elected government by ultra-nationalist militias, which have also chased away a large part of the elected parliament. This has provided a perfect precedent for Russian-backed militias in turn to seize power in the east and south of the country.”
“The EU has allowed the demonstrators in Kiev to believe that their actions have brought Ukraine closer to EU membership—but, if anything, this is now even further away than it was before the revolution.”
“The issue here is not Crimea. From the moment when the Yanukovych government in Kiev was overthrown, it was obvious that Crimea was effectively lost to Ukraine. Russia is in full military control of the peninsula with the support of a large majority of its population, and only a Western military invasion can expel it.”
This is a much stronger point than I’ve seen made elsewhere.
“As it proved in August 2008, if Russia sees its vital interests in the former USSR as under attack, Russia will fight. NATO will not. War in Ukraine would therefore also be a shattering blow to the prestige of NATO and the European Union from which these organizations might never recover either.”
Rumors of NATO’s death are greatly exaggerated. Almost a quarter of a century after it lost its entire reason for being, it is larger than ever and has had any number of military adventures in the meantime.
The Anti-Empire Report #126 by William Blum
“Since the end of the Cold War the United States has been surrounding Russia, building one base after another, ceaselessly looking for new ones, including in Ukraine; one missile site after another, with Moscow in range; NATO has grabbed one former Soviet Republic after another. The White House, and the unquestioning American mainstream media, have assured us that such operations have nothing to do with Russia. And Russia has been told the same, much to Moscow’s continuous skepticism. “Look,” said Russian president Vladimir Putin about NATO some years ago, “is this is a military organization? Yes, it’s military. … Is it moving towards our border? It’s moving towards our border. Why?””
Crimea, This Time by Andrew Levine (CounterPunch)
“We know, for instance, that the United States has been playing picador with Russia at least since Ronald Reagan lied to Mikhail Gorbachev about how America had no intention of bringing NATO right up to Russia’s borders.
“Why wouldn’t Gorbachev believe him? Without a Soviet adversary, NATO had no reason for being.
“But the military-industrial complex and the Cold War establishment were not about to give it up, and Bush the Father was not hard to convince. With its Security Council vetoes and Third World member nations, the UN was all but useless for endorsing projections of American power. NATO gives the U.S. a free hand.
“We know too that in the War on Terror, the CIA has taken over many missions that would formerly have been the military’s – targeting and deploying Obama’s drones, for example. And we know that when the job calls for creating chaos abroad, the State Department is the new CIA.
“It works mainly through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and other ostensibly “non-governmental” organizations. The NED has been all over Ukraine and other former Soviet republics. It even operates in Russia itself.
“What we don’t know yet, for sure, is what role the NED and the others played in instigating the events that started on the streets of Kiev. We know they served as catalysts, but we don’t know how extensive their involvement was.
“We do know, however, that, at the very least, the Americans and Europeans supported a coup against a democratically elected government, ostensibly for democracy’s sake; and we know that, in the process, they reinvigorated the long suppressed demons of the eastern European Right.
“Needless to say, the Ukrainian people had legitimate grievances against their government; it was corrupt and its economic policies were ruinous. The Libyan people had legitimate grievances against their government too, as did the Syrians and the Egyptians, and so on.
“But whether by ineptitude or design, American and EU meddling inevitably makes things worse; usually, much worse.”
Israel and Ukraine by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch)
“[Ukrainians] want to join the West, enjoy independence and democracy. What’s wrong with that? […] Nothing, except that they have dubious bedfellows. Neo-Nazis in their copycat Nazi uniforms, giving the Hitler salute and mouthing anti-Semitic slogans, are not very attractive. The encouragement they receive from Western allies, including the odious neocons, is off-putting. […] On the other side, Vladimir Putin is also not very prepossessing. […] But Putin has some logic on his side. Sevastopol – the scene of heroic sieges both in the Crimean War and in World War II, is essential for his naval forces. The association with Ukraine is an important part of Russian world power aspirations.
“A cold-blooded, calculating operator, of a kind now rare in the world, Putin uses the strong cards he has, but is very careful not to take too many risks. He is managing the crisis astutely, using Russia’s obvious advantages. Europe needs his oil and gas, he needs Europe’s capital and trade. Russia has a leading role in Syria and Iran. The US suddenly looks like a bystander.”
Not to Reason Why: A New Crimean “War”? by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)
“Of all the ways in which Russian President Vladimir Putin will see the revolution in the Ukraine as dangerous to Russian interests, the potential loss of Crimea as a Russian ‘near abroad’ is among the more serious. Crimea was given to the Soviet Socialist Republic of Ukraine by Nikita Krushchev (himself Ukrainian) in the 1950s, but more Russians think they have a claim on Crimea than think they have a claim on Chechnya.”
Crimea by Justin Erik Halldór Smith
“Crimea has a long history as a Russian colony, and when it fell into Ukraine’s hands at the collapse of the Soviet Union this was effectively the transfer of a colony, rather than the consolidation of a historical nation.”
“ To this extent, the re-annexation of Crimea is to be vigorously opposed, not because it fractures a natural unity (as, say, a Russian invasion of Western Ukraine would), but because it marks the renascence of a properly imperial power. Ukraine had simply enjoyed temporary usufruct, by geographical circumstance, of a sliver of that empire.”
But somehow the alternative, that a current imperial power increase its dominion, is assumed even by someone like Smith to be somehow preferable to anything that the Russians could offer. [4] That the region will be left to its own devies by the West is a possibility too ludicrous to even seriously contemplate. Witness the manipulations that went on in Kiev in the vacuum left by Russia’s initial—and mostly continuing—indifference. The underlying benevolence of Western hegemony infects even Justin’s work these days.
“One rises to the position of statesman, under Putin’s regime, by the display of virtues that would not have been out of place a millennium ago: strength, mightiness, ferocity in the field of battle.”
Granted that this is likely very true. But is not the same true of the purported shining knights of Europe or the U.S.? Are we supposed to believe the implication that these are better because they are ‘not Putin’? Have they not proven their evil sufficiently? When assholes like Cheney and Rumsfeld and (Condaleeza) Rice are replaced by morally bankrupt harridans like Samantha Power, Susan Rice and even John Kerry. [5] Far better indeed are these subtle and cold-hearted interventionist warmongers, who are less ostentatious than these gauche Russian barbarians but who rack up so much more carnage.
“The enemy shows force, we show more force in retaliation, and we demonstrate our invincibility by demonstrating our indifference to the loss of innocent lives on either side. The regime acts as force majeure, as a power of nature that can’t be talked down or made to see things differently. We are in the realm of stereotypes here, and there is nothing natural or inevitable about Russia taking up the ancient role of the Scythians. But I am convinced that Putin himself believes in these stereotypes, that playing out these stereotypes is a winning strategy for his political career, and that this does not bode at all well for Russia’s neighbors.”
I am almost astonished to note that Smith thinks he is describing only Putin’s regime in the above citation. Again, let us, for the sake of argument, assume that this characterization of Putin as overarching evil is true (good-guy deeds in Syria and Iran notwithstanding). In the case of Ukraine, however, the Putsch of an elected government was engineered by the West. Charges leveled against Putin are allegations. Those leveled against the West are facts disputed by no one. Why the special animosity for the arguably least-involved party in this dispute to date?
Notes from Far Muscovy by Justin Erik Halldór Smith
“The Circassians were exterminated, or relocated to Turkey. There is still today an active political lobby, based in Turkey, pushing for greater recognition of the Circassian genocide, but its voice is of course muffled by the Olympic juggernaut.”
Oh bullshit. It was almost two-hundred years ago. Nobody cares about the Armenians, the Aztecs, the Mayans and so on. Why should they care about this? Get in line. The Olympic juggernaut is responsible for much, but suppression of the Circassian genocide? That one’s just bad marketing.
“[…] on reflection, no less troubling: a flawless Olympics means, for Putin, the consolidation of symbolic power in a contested part of the Caucasus […]”
Really? No terrorist attack would have been just as bad? The worst thing you can imagine is Putin getting bonus points for the Olympics? How brainwashed did you actually get in the Ukraine? Clearly they are way better than the “grovelling and sycophantic western left”, who also happen to be actively suppressed, utterly powerless and politically insignificant. But go ahead and pile on them and blame the Ukrainian mess on an ineffective Western left-wing movement, I suppose.
“In the west it is impossible to simply be a man in the way Russians such as Putin take for granted, since the gestures or styles in which this would consist are continually being taken up by people who would like to subvert, invert, or at least question the process by which something so minor as gestures or styles could ever constitute something so fundamental as identity.”
Not sure I agree. Again, maybe his ivory tower is a touch too high, as evidenced by his implied pride about being clueless about hockey, despite having spent years in Canada. As a self-styled assimilator of culture and language, Smith is sounding quite out of touch. The statement is patently untrue, at least in most corners of America. Perhaps not at universities.
“Instinctively, though, here more than anywhere else I’ve been, one perceives the police and other officials warily, sensing that protection and service are the furthest thing from their minds. Life as a visible ethnic or sexual minority here would be a life of constant fear.”
Talk about a guy who’s either only experienced white middle-class America or is choosing to only channel that part for this essay. The years where this statement applied to almost any non-WASP in America are not that far in the past.
If You Want to Be Truly Pessimistic about the Ukraine Crisis’s Geopolitical Consequences … by Henry (Crooked Timber)
“Efforts to find a quick and dirty way of escaping dependence on Russian gas are likely to focus on fracking as the obvious low cost alternative, and will ditch regulations that get in the way of hydraulic fracturing a-go-go. This, in turn, will create new and powerful business interests who have an interest in keeping the fossil fuel racket going as long as possible. Which means that Europe will scuttle backwards even more quickly from its global commitments, and from any process that might oblige it to make new ones. And then, basically, goodbye to any hope of tackling global warming in this generation or the the next, since Europe is the only major global actor plausibly willing to push for action.”
The U.S. barely even attempted to hide its involvement, although this may have been mostly due to the new-found ineptness of the young ambassadors in the region, epitomized most recently by “Victoria Nuland, now Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs”:
“More important, recall her amateurish, boorish use of an open telephone to plot regime change in Ukraine with a fellow neocon, U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. Crass U.S. interference in Ukrainian affairs can be seen (actually, better, heard) in an intercepted conversation posted on YouTube on Feb. 4.”
The Brown Revolution in Ukraine by Israel Shamir (CounterPunch)
“The West has no such inhibitions and its representatives were extremely active: the US State Department representative Victoria “Fuck EC’’ Nuland had spent days and weeks in Kiev, feeding the insurgents with cookies, delivering millions of smuggled greenbacks to them, meeting with their leaders, planning and plotting the coup. Kiev is awash with the newest US dollars fresh from its mint (of a kind yet unseen in Moscow, I’ve been told by Russian friends). The US embassy spread money around like a tipsy Texan in a night club. Every able-bodied young man willing to fight received five hundred dollar a week, a qualified fighter – up to a thousand, a platoon commander had two thousand dollars – good money by Ukrainian standards.”
“[…] it was a carnival in the centre of the capital, and it began to attract the masses, as would happen in every city in the known universe. This carnival was paid for by the oligarchs and by the US embassy.”
“The world media, this powerful tool in the hands of Masters of Discourse, decried “Yanukovych massacred children”. The EC and the US slapped on sanctions, foreign diplomats moved in, all claiming they want to protect peaceful demonstrators, while at the same time beefing up the Maidan crowd with armed gunmen and Right Sector fighters.”
“The Spectacle-like unreal quality of Kiev events was emphasized by arrival of the imperial warmonger, the neocon philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy. He came to Maidan like he came to Libya and Bosnia, claiming human rights and threatening sanctions and bombing. Whenever he comes, war is following. I hope I shall be away from every country he plans to visit.”
There’s another bellwether of wrongness: good ol’ BHL himself. Just do the opposite of what he says and you’re generally in good shape.
Obama isn’t much better, effectively doing all but declaring war on Russia if it fails to shut sit down and shut up while Europe and the US dismantle countries on its borders, setting them up at NATO bases.
“By now, Russian President Vladimir Putin is accustomed to Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, National Security Adviser Susan Rice, et al. telling the Kremlin where its interests lie, and I am sure he is appropriately grateful. Putin is likely to read more significance into these words of Obama:
“‘The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine … and we will continue to coordinate closely with our European allies.’”
This despite the fact that Russia was quite instrumental in brokering non-violent resolutions to chemical weapons in Syria (reductions proceed apace and on schedule) and enriched-uranium stockpiles in Iran (reserves dipped below a landmark just last week).
What Happened in Ukraine Was a Presidential Coup, Pure and Simple by Robert Parry (AlterNet)
“That strategy was going swimmingly until Putin helped bring Iran to the negotiating table over guarantees that its nuclear program would not lead to a nuclear weapon. Putin also brokered a deal to avert threatened U.S. air strikes on Syria over disputed evidence regarding who launched a chemical attack on civilians outside Damascus. Putin got the Syrian government to agree to eliminate its chemical weapons arsenal.”
Or perhaps it’s because of these things; who can tell with these homicidal fools? Maybe they’re all just pissed at Putin because he took away their fabricated excuses for making more war. We’re running out of other explanations.
It’s hard to fault the logic in the article Ukraine and the IMF by Norman Pollack (CounterPunch)
“I’m rooting for Putin, Russia, and Crimea, free from any illusions of their impeccable record of democracy and freedom, because arrayed on the other side are world historical forces under US leadership which articulate the policies of repression, waste, intervention, widening class differences, and hegemonic-oriented global military engagement, all more menacing both to domestic society and the global order.”
Everything you know about Ukraine is wrong by Mark Ames (Pando Daily)
“[…] the people who are protesting or supporting the protesters are first and foremost sick of their shitty lives in a shitty country they want to make better—a country where their fates are controlled by a tiny handful of nihilistic oligarchs and Kremlin overlords, and their political frontmen. It’s first and foremost a desire to gain some control over their fate.”
“I’d say the neo-fascsists from Svoboda and Pravy Sektor are probably the vanguard of the movement, the ones who pushed it harder than anyone. Anyone who ignores the role of the neo-fascists (or ultranationalists, take your pick) is lying or ignorant, just as anyone who claims that Yanukovych answered only to Putin doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”
“The point is this: What’s happening in Ukraine is not a battle between pro-fascists and anti-fascists. There are fascists on both sides; the opposition happens to like fascist costume parties more […]”
“The point is this: Ukraine is not Venezuela. This is not a profoundly political or class fight, as it is in Venezuela. Yanukovych represents one faction of oligarchs; the opposition, unwittingly or otherwise, ultimately fronts for other factions. Many of those oligarchs have close business ties with Russia, but assets and bank accounts—and mansions—in Europe. Both forces are happy to work with the neoliberal global institutions. […] In Ukraine, there is no populist left politics, even though the country’s deepest problem is inequality and oligarchy. […] So they wind up switching from one oligarchical faction to another, forming broad popular coalitions that can be easily co-opted by the most politically organized minority factions within—neoliberals, neofascists, or Kremlin tools. All of whom eventually produce more of the same shitty life that leads to the next revolution.”
Problems in Ukraine? Blame Russia! by Peter Lee (CounterPunch)
“The biggest problem for image-makers in the West and in Kiev will be to gloss over the Ukrainian-chauvinist feelings in the central government by celebrating painstaking efforts to set up a “unity” government (while ignoring the sizable contingent of out-and-out Ukrainian fascists who were central to the coup’s success, and embarrassing artifacts like the outlawing of Russian as an official language).”
America’s Staggering Hypocrisy by Robert Parry (Consortium News)
“If Putin is violating international law by sending Russian troops into the Crimea after a violent coup spearheaded by neo-Nazi militias ousted Ukraine’s democratically elected president – and after he requested protection for the ethnic Russians living in the country’s south and east – then why hasn’t the U.S. government turned over George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and indeed John Kerry to the International Criminal Court for their far more criminal invasion of Iraq?”
Is Ukraine’s Opposition a Democratic Movement or a Force of Right-Wing Extremism? by Anton Shekhovtsov & Stephen Cohen
In this interview, Anton Shekhovtsov says that “many people in the West buy into Russian propaganda which is saying that Euromaidan is infiltrated by the neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. And this is completely untrue.” Many other sources disagree with that blanket statement, including professor Stephen Cohen, also in this interview. There’s also this video, Neo-Nazi threat in new Ukraine by BBC (YouTube), originally broadcast on BBC Newsnight, that includes interviews with rebel leaders who are not shy at all about their extreme right-wing/fascist/National Socialist beliefs and affiliations. BBC Newsnight has a relatively good history of factual reporting.
“Who precipitated this crisis? It was the European Union, in this sense. It gave the Ukrainian government, which, by the way, is a democratically elected government — if you overthrow this government, just like they overthrew Morsi in Egypt, you’re dealing a serious blow to democracy. So if the crowd manages to essentially carry out a coup d’état from the streets, that’s what democracy is not about. But here’s what the European Union did back in November. It told the government of Ukraine, “If you want to sign an economic relationship with us, you cannot sign one with Russia.” Why not? Putin has said, “Why don’t the three of us have an arrangement? We’ll help Ukraine. The West will help Ukraine.” The chancellor of Germany, Merkel, at first thought that was a good idea, but she backed down for various political reasons. So, essentially, Ukraine was given an ultimatum: sign the E.U. economic agreement or else.
“Now, what was that agreement? It would have been an economic catastrophe for Ukraine. I’m not talking about the intellectuals or the people who are well placed, about ordinary Ukrainians. The Ukrainian economy is on the brink of a meltdown. It needed billions of dollars. What did the European Union offer them? The same austerity policies that are ravaging Europe, and nothing more — $600 million. It needed billions and billions.
“There’s one other thing. If you read the protocols of the European offer to Ukraine, which has been interpreted in the West as just about civilizational change, escaping Russia, economics, democracy, there is a big clause on military cooperation. In effect, by signing this, Ukraine would have had to abide by NATO’s military policies. What would that mean? That would mean drawing a new Cold War line, which used to be in Berlin, right through the heart of Slavic civilization, on Russia’s borders. So that’s where we’re at to now.”
So Ukraine gets 600 million to become the next Greece, which is a nice consolation prize, I guess. At least some of the rioters are still deluded into thinking that Europe will treat them better than Russia. Many of the others would like to get the hell away from both of them and stand on their own. Not going to be easy at all, though. Ukraine wants be Switzerland.
Europe’s deal included a neat little underhanded clause that requires them to host NATO bases and forces—right on Russia’s doorstep. And Russia’s offer to help the Ukraine was *not* contingent on them refusing help from Europe. Europe’s offer required the Ukraine to turn down Russia. But the big, bad bear will always be the big, bad bear, I guess. That’s how we was raised!
See the article Israel and Ukraine by Uri Avnery (CounterPunch). Avnery is over 90 years old and has managed to avoid the right-wing bias and insular thinking that comes with age. He wrote the following:
“People around the world find it also hard to choose sides. […] The usual Cold-War zealots have it easy – they either hate the Americans or the Russians, out of habit. […] As for me, the more I try to study the situation, the more unsure I become. This is not a black-or-white situation.”
In the article Is Ukraine’s Opposition a Democratic Movement or a Force of Right-Wing Extremism?, Stephen Cohen—professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University—says,
“I think that the vilification of Putin in this country, demonization, is the worst press coverage by the American media of Russia that I’ve seen in my 40 years of studying Russia and contributing to the media. It’s simply almost insane. This idea that he’s a thug — and that explains everything, passes for analysis in America today.”
I found this sentiment echoed in the article Must Putin Save Us Again? by Andrew Levine (CounterPunch) :
“Therefore don’t count on [the liberal media] to understand how, when Obama and his minions blame Putin for all that they have done, how much like the “orphan” throwing himself on the mercy of the court they are. It will be clear as can be to future historians, just as Vietnam and Iraq now are to almost everyone; but, by then, it may be too late.”
The post Dallas Cops Fight For the First Rule of Policing by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) defines that rule as “make it home for dinner”. No matter what else is going on that day or how a given situation develops, the first rule is self-preservation. Everything else—including gunned-down... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 20. Jan 2014 22:43:11 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 20. Jan 2014 22:43:30 (GMT-5)
The post Dallas Cops Fight For the First Rule of Policing by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) defines that rule as “make it home for dinner”. No matter what else is going on that day or how a given situation develops, the first rule is self-preservation. Everything else—including gunned-down innocents—can be handled later and usually papered over with the help of others, both on the force and on the bench.
This post discusses a shooting incident in Dallas, in which a 48-year–old officer was, believe it or not, actually found guilty of using “deadly force […] without fear or justification” and summarily fired. A mere mortal would have been charged with “assault with a deadly weapon” or perhaps even “attempted murder” and would most certainly not be getting even a part of their pension, but let’s not quibble. The termination of employment is enough of a pleasant surprise that we should enjoy it.
The decision leads to an effort to revamp policy to avoid future, similar incidents, which isn’t sitting well with the rest of the Dallas police force. Not being able to shoot people that “surprise” them or aren’t otherwise already lying face-down on the sidewalk in tasered glory is going to seriously impinge on their ability to “get home for dinner”.
Greenfield:
“To the cops, the message is that they are to risk potential death at the hands of a threat rather than shoot first as required by the First Rule.”
It’s understood that a cop’s life is on the line in a way not found in most other jobs. But
“[t]here is a wide berth between certainty of safety and certainty of threat […] Ranging from deafness, to confusion, to frozen in fear, to the mistaken grasp of the nature of the police encounter that good people don’t get shot for no good reason, will cause a person to behave in a way that a cop perceives as having the potential to be threatening […] they want the authority to shoot them anyway. Just in case. And not lose their job if it happens that they just shot an unarmed, harmless fellow […] (Emphasis added.)”
This amounts to the same protections demanded by torturers and their backers in US federal employ. Because they’d like to be able to use torture if they deem it necessary, they also want it to be legal. Such a priori legalization benefits only the person who intends to do harm. Anyone who would wield such power carefully would also be willing to bear the responsibility and blame should something go wrong.
“It appears to elude police officers that the harmless people they shoot, just in case, have children too. But what non-police officers do not have is the First Rule of Policing, and that trumps all other rules when it comes to the job of a cop. Something has to give in ambiguous situations, and it’s not going to be the life or job of a cop.”
Engendering fear of police to this degree is going to cause a backlash that can only end in a death-spiral of violence, one that has arguably already begun quite some time ago.
The post 2d Circuit: Aw, Come On. That Can’t Be True by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) tells the tale of a court that “[did] the unthinkable: reject the government’s allegations as “unreasonable.””
The situation involved an arrested and handcuffed bystander. He was “arrested for being in the vicinity after a fight occurred”, which I didn’t even know was a thing. He allegedly managed to squirrel away drugs into the backseat of a police vehicle. To this, the court found that,
“We cannot say it is an absolute impossibility for a person with his hands securely handcuffed behind his back to extract a substantial quantity of crack cocaine from his person or clothing and wedge it into the space where the quantity was found without leaving a trace of cocaine on his fingers or clothing, but we can say that the possibility of such an occurrence is so exceedingly remote that no jury could reasonably find beyond a reasonable doubt that it happened. (Emphasis added.)”
Nicely put. Greenfield goes on to mention that this case really is noteworthy because, while the conclusion is obvious to we lay-people, it is not a foregone conclusion that upholding the “laws of physics [trumps] the rule of law […] when it comes to contraband”.
The post The Outrage of the Kelly Thomas Cops’ Acquittal by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice) discusses the recent conclusion of the case against two officers who beat a mentally handicapped man named Kelly Thomas to death.
The beating was captured on video (YouTube). After officers antagonized him for just over 15 minutes, Thomas stands up. This is enough for the officers to pull out their nightsticks and go to work on him. For once, the description of a YouTube video includes some useful information:
““Now you see my fists?” Fullerton police officer Manny Ramos asked Thomas while slipping on a pair of latex gloves.
““Yeah, what about them?” Thomas responded.
““They are getting ready to fuck you up,” said Ramos, a burly cop who appears to outweigh Thomas by 100 pounds.”
You can hear him screaming for help and apologizing as the beat continues for about 10 minutes, culminating in his motionless body lying on the sidewalk under a pile of about a half dozen officers. When he was finally taken to the hospital, he looked like he’d been run over by several trucks (Friends For Fullerton's Future) (brace yourself; it’s pretty horrific).
The officers charged for this beating/murder were acquitted by a jury of their peers. As Greenfield put it:
“There is nothing more to say about the Kelly Thomas verdict but that your fellow citizens have spoken.”
This should be the end of the matter. The cops were tried and found not guilty. That’s all we can do in America because of a little thing called the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution. However, “the Thomas family has called for a federal prosecution for the denial of Kelly Thomas’ civil rights”. They can do this under something called “dual sovereignty”, which (sometimes) allows a person to be tried at both the state and the federal level for the same crime. Greenfield provides a lucid, logical and well-written summary:
“The visceral reaction is that this should be the next step, as the acquittal of these cops is such an outrage as to demand redress.
“[…]
“Dual sovereignty is an insidious legal construct designed to circumvent the double jeopardy clause. […] When they fail to get you the first time, they get a chance to nail you again. This is what double jeopardy should prohibit, but for the tricks of law.
“It’s wrong to circumvent double jeopardy when it comes to a non-cop, and that makes it just as wrong when the target is a cop. […] Maintaining intellectual consistency is key to the viability of the law, even when it pains us to do so.
“[…]
“Sometimes the guilty beat the rap. It happens. The integrity of the system must go on, and we must be vigilant not to sacrifice a system just to get some particularly despicable defendants. This is one of those times to be vigilant, as hard as it may be.”
The first couple of panels document the most recent transgressions that the Obama administration has made under the auspices of the NDAA—the National Defense Authorization Act. These include sweeping away constitutionally... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 19. Jan 2014 17:50:35 (GMT-5)
Cartoonist Ted Rall published the following cartoon at the end of 2013:
The first couple of panels document the most recent transgressions that the Obama administration has made under the auspices of the NDAA—the National Defense Authorization Act. These include sweeping away constitutionally guaranteed rights in a manner breathtaking even for citizens who survived eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration.
The final panel shows a soldier wondering how this can be, while another patiently explains.
“Soldier #1: But Obama was a Constitutional law professor.
“Soldier #2: There’s a big difference between liking the Constitution and studying the Constitution. … Mengele studied Jews… (Emphasis in original)”
Here are some comments additional to those embedded in the screenshot:
www.healthcare.gov
to healthcare.gov... [More]
Published by marco on 18. Jan 2014 00:26:05 (GMT-5)
Purely out of morbid curiosity, I visited Healthcare.gov to see what’s going on over there. I’d heard so much.
Here are some comments additional to those embedded in the screenshot:
www.healthcare.gov
to healthcare.gov
. Canonical name is the short one. +1Shutting off stylesheets yields relatively semantic content. There are a few too many icons that could have been moved to the stylesheet instead.
Having all of those repeated sets of icons in the page reduces usability for the disabled, who are actually quite likely to be browsing a government insurance site, actually. Still, it’s better than a lot of other pages in this regard.
Let us soldier on and see what kind of plans there are.
Well, that was pretty straightforward and easy and not at all slow and broken. Thumbs up for the federal government, amirite?
Deep breath. Let’s go see what New York State has to offer. Apparently, it has its own site to handle ACA applications. I’d heard about that. It’s a rich state and state-level trumps federal-level every time, right? This is gonna be good.
And so my journey comes to an abrupt end, my interest wanes and my basic faith in the utter awfulness of all software is restored.
Published by marco on 27. Dec 2013 23:13:15 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 27. Dec 2013 23:25:01 (GMT-5)
The title is a way of saying that building bus lines before four-lane highways for cars is inherently more democratic because more people use the buses. It has less to do with democracy and more to do with social fairness and providing for the basic rights to which civilized peoples are entitles. We are talking about a form of socialism here. Instead of letting the elites bend the will of the market with their gravitational wells of overwhelming buying power, cities should be designed to serve the needs of the people living in them.
Build bike lanes, walking paths, bus lanes and parks before putting in support for elite, individual travel. Perhaps once the city has been built, there will be no need for it. There are many cities in Europe that are slowly widening the circle around their centers where cars are no longer allowed or severely limited.
If the highways are built first, there are two primary deleterious effects: the poorest suffer more vehicular deaths, more health problems due to pollution and spend much more time in commute, all contributing to a miserable lives which are very difficult to improve. It also convinces the poor that the only way out of this situation is to get a car, putting themselves either on the road to ruin or to becoming part of the problem.
Peñalosa did not have time to discuss to what degree he thinks that such situations are entirely deliberate. His talk is representative of the other three here: they all give their talk as if they were pointing out a problem of which no one had previously been aware and that should be eminently solvable now that we all know about it. The problem isn’t that people are no aware of the problem but that the main OECD societies actively fight to keep things this way.
Still, socialists are so inherently optimistic. He managed to awaken a glimmer of hope in me even though I can’t believe that India would step back from the precipice of avarice and hypercapitalism to “have the state buy up all the land around its cities” and build parks and bus lanes.
The next clash will be between cyclists and pedestrians, methinks. Bicycles are already quite fast with the right rider on it (an average of 30+ kph is not unheard of) and more and more people are getting electric bikes, which allow them to achieve similar speeds without the fitness or effort. But should a city get to the point where this is the largest of their problem, then they’re doing quite fine.
He makes an important point, but he does it without mentioning any of the pioneers or sources of this line of thought. The problem I have isn’t that he seems to be taking credit for having thought of the idea of “becoming a market society” but that he doesn’t give his audience a few other names that they could research to get more in-depth information on this very important topic.
His talk boils down to: in our rush to create a society that is simple enough to understand by those taught only to apprehend simple things, we have chosen a very basic capitalist axiom as the “one idea to rule them all”, leaving all other considerations by the wayside, particularly any consideration for what is moral and what is right rather than just what is most cost-efficient.
There is also the problem that we allow the same people who decided that this will be the ground rule to also provide us with the only legitimate metric for it. They will tell us whether it’s working. They’re getting richer, it must be working. You’re not getting richer, you must not be trying hard enough.
That is the essential problem. It’s not that we are marketizing everything. If done in a rigorously scientific manner, that might actually work out better in some semi-utopic way. But we are letting gangsters and con-men (persons?) sell us a set of societal rules that make it easier for them to take advantage of us—and we kick ourselves when we fail.
He points out that there are places where markets are being introduced where they are failing us. But what does failure mean in those cases? That is, is the outcome a failure for all parties? Or did some parties actually benefit despite the ostensible failure? His example of incentivizing education with monetary rewards is an interesting one but the outcome is relatively predictable: the original goal of education is twisted around to maximize profit.
The original goal of providing self-actuating, thinking citizens falls by the wayside. The history of education indicates that this is not a concept that just showed up with Reagan and the 80s. It did not just show up with the No Child Left Behind program. Instead, for at least the last century, it has been the goal of society to provide workers for its employment positions. If the people are smart enough to read a newspaper, that’s a bonus. The Idiocracy is not an unintended consequence; it’s the plan.
Twisted incentives lead to twisted outcomes. He could have chosen the entire financial industry as an example. With that example, he could have more clearly shown what he really means when he says that markets don’t belong everywhere. What he is implicitly saying with that statement is that markets in civic life tends to lead to bad outcomes for almost everyone. When school suck and kids hate education, they are relegated/relegate themselves to the lower echelons of society, ready to serve rather than to agitate and disturb the lofty lives of the elite (I’m picturing the undisturbed surface of an infinity pool here).
There is also the whiff of first-worldism: America is so accustomed to being a first-world nation that when eminently third-world situations arise because of a widening class dividechasm, he speaks of them as if America had invented them. People standing in line for other people because they literally have nothing else to do is not a unique feature of a go-getter society with higher unemployment than it used to. It’s what has always happened when there is a noble class in society.
He makes a very good point about city design in the U.S. being largely crap, except for, you guessed it: Portland. All the hopes of a nation hang on the slumping shoulders of Portland. Instead of emulating Portland’s policies of the last decades in their own cities, people choose to move there, which isn’t really the point that Portland was making. Portland would much rather remain the same size and serve as an example to be followed rather than to serve as a mecca for hipsters too lazy to enact change in their own cities.
He’s very much worth watching, if only for his seemingly indefatigable upbeat nature. He seems to think that we’re still on the uphill side of this problem and can beat it in America. Some of those hurdles are discussed in part above. Others are addressed by an older talk The ghastly tragedy of the suburbs by James Howard Kunstler in 2004 (TED) where he starts off with “[t]he immersive ugliness of our everyday environments in America is entropy made visible” and quickly moves on to describing America’s suburbs as the “greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world”. Where the majority of Americans live are “places not worth caring about”.
Subsequent material by Kunstler, who’s much more of the opinion that America is heading for an imminent societal contraction, which entails smaller communities but built out of necessity and hardship rather than planned by civic designers.
Unfortunately, Speck’s talk is too short to encompass the myriad other societal and philosophical reasons for why America is going to find it impossible to change course without taking significant damage first. There is no way to transform from caterpillar to butterfly without first passing through the near-death of the chrysalis.
Hat tip to Peo for the links.
I’ll let you gather your wits as you recover from your shock.
Also unsurprisingly,... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 23. Dec 2013 23:29:33 (GMT-5)
So there is, apparently, a redneck actor on a fake-reality show called “Duck Dynasty” who turns out to be, in real life, an anti-gay bigot with completely humdrum and bigoted ideas of everyone’s place in society.
I’ll let you gather your wits as you recover from your shock.
Also unsurprisingly, he thinks that white guys with beards, guns and inappropriate sunglasses sit at the top of the heap.
A&E, which broadcasts this paragon to culture, pulled on his leash and suspended him for a little while.
There are good odds that he will be back when the storm of righteous indignation has blown over and everyone who never cared about Duck Dynasty in the first place is no longer paying attention.
You could, however, count the seconds until the social networks exploded with outrage for “taking away” said bigot’s right to free speech.
This is not an accurate synopsis of the situation.
Phil Robertson retains his right to free speech. He lives in a country that shows an inordinate amount of restraint vis à vis moronic opinions like his.
Calling his opinions moronic is also not, in any way, limiting his free speech.
His employer is also not limiting his right to free speech. Said employer has simply decided to take away the megaphone that they had given him. They calculated that they would be better off without him for a while.
No one is entitled to a nationwide platform to disseminate boring, hateful and insipid ideas.
He is free to tell all of his friends and passersby in the street all about his ideas.
None of us, however, has the obligation to listen. Such an obligation on our part is not implied by Robertson’s right to free speech.
We have, in fact, always been a country that allows free speech while at the same time ensuring that no one is really listening to anyone else.
We’ve got that down to a science.
Robertson is a run-of-the-mill Bible-thumper who thinks that his opinions are refined because other people who know even less than he does told him that they were.
He has climbed a molehill of thought and thinks he’s planted a flag on Everest.
He got fooled into thinking that the fancy GQ interview was a good place to let the world see just how awesome and smart he is, how he’s got it all figured out—and how homosexuals are to blame for all that ails us.
Just like the Negros before them.
And the Mexicans.
And the Communists.
And the Jews.
And the Poor.
*Yawn*.
File under: Storm in a Teacup.
Published by marco on 5. Nov 2013 18:43:39 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 6. Nov 2013 15:41:04 (GMT-5)
Whether there is such a thing as truly objective journalism—reporting without any explicit or implicit bias—is the subject of the article Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News? (New York Times). It’s a conversation between Bill Keller—editor of the New York Times—and Glenn Greenwald—currently of the Guardian and, most recently, the driving force behind reporting on NSA spying and distributing Edward Snowden’s revelations.
Greenwald argues quite convincingly that there is only journalism and not-journalism. There is reporting of all of the facts, regardless of whether they support your ideology or not. Facts are unaffected even if a reporter simultaneously states his or her ideology. Keller represents the viewpoint that reporters should be objective—that is, they should definitely not express an ideology—and that other factors must be considered before reporting a fact—primarily national-security concerns—but doesn’t admit that this amounts to an implicit nationalistic bias.
Here’s Greenwald arguing that humans are subjective and that anything that they produce is necessarily also subjective.
“Glenn Greenwald: Worst of all, this [objective journalism] model rests on a false conceit. Human beings are not objectivity-driven machines. We all intrinsically perceive and process the world through subjective prisms. What is the value in pretending otherwise?
“The relevant distinction is not between journalists who have opinions and those who do not, because the latter category is mythical. The relevant distinction is between journalists who honestly disclose their subjective assumptions and political values and those who dishonestly pretend they have none or conceal them from their readers. (Emphasis added.)”
This seems unassailable, but Keller responds later with,
“Bill Keller: […] writers are more likely to manipulate the evidence to support a declared point of view than one that is privately held, because pride is on the line.”
This is demonstrably untrue and is, at best, wild speculation.
Readers won’t expect to get some information from a clearly biased source—one that has openly expressed his or her biases—and hence will not assume that they’ve gotten the whole picture. They are much more likely to seek out other sources in order to get balance.
A source that claims to be unbiased—and convinces readers that this is true—will fool those readers into thinking that they’ve gotten the whole story from that source when, in fact, that source’s implicit and unacknowledged bias has prevented the reader from actually doing so. The reader, however, stops seeking information, assuming that the ostensibly unbiased source would have no reason to withhold or distort information.
Another source of disagreement between the two arises in regard to the proper publication time of national-security–sensitive information. Keller claims that the New York Times carefully decides whether it can publish certain information, while Greenwald argues that it is exactly this vetting process that makes the Times’s reporting so subjective and biased in favor of US nationalism. History bears out Greenwald’s argument: the Times has, again and again, failed to publish information that the public needed to know, published lies and allegations that misleadingly swayed public opinion and otherwise adjusted its formulations to appease the powers-that-be (e.g. consistently writing “enhanced interrogation” rather than “torture”).
When Keller alleges that Wikileaks and also Greenwald tend to publish information recklessly, Greenwald responds,
“Glenn Greenwald: It wasn’t WikiLeaks that laundered false official claims about Saddam’s W.M.D.’s and alliance with Al Qaeda on its front page under the guise of “news” to help start a heinous war. It isn’t WikiLeaks that routinely gives anonymity to U.S. officials to allow them to spread leader-glorifying mythologies or quite toxic smears of government critics without any accountability.
“It isn’t WikiLeaks that prints incredibly incendiary accusations about American whistle-blowers without a shred of evidence. And it wasn’t WikiLeaks that allowed the American people to re-elect George Bush while knowing, but concealing, that he was eavesdropping on them in exactly the way the criminal law prohibited. (Emphasis added.)”
It was, and is, in fact, the New York Times, that does all of those things, despite the allegedly bulletproof and judicious editorial review that Keller claims takes place for all issues of greater sensitivity. There are several possible explanations:
Keller attempts to defend himself, claiming that the Times operates only under the guise of reason (2) above. Here he addresses the emphasized segment of Greenwald’s citation above, that the Times withholding information is likely to have contributed to Bush’s second term.
“Bill Keller: Critics on the left, including you, were indignant to learn that we held the N.S.A. eavesdropping story for more than a year, until I was satisfied that the public interest outweighed any potential damage to national security.”
It’s actually very likely that Keller believes this himself. There is, however, no reason that we should continue to believe him. He and his paper claim a certain credo and continually act in a manner that belies it. Ignore what he says and watch instead what he does. That is what Greenwald does, citing again that instance of the Times having withheld information as a clear bias that, even if implicit, had far more wide-reaching consequences and did much more damage than the explicitly stated biases in Greenwald’s own reporting ever could.
“Glenn Greenwald: My objection is not to that process itself but to specific instances where it leads to the suppression of information that ought to be public. Without intended rancor, I believe that the 2004 decision of The Times to withhold the Risen/Lichtblau N.S.A. story at the request of the Bush White House was one of the most egregious of such instances, but there are plenty of others.”
Keller is naturally not pleased with this accusation and responds that Greenwald seems to be saying that Greenwald—and only Greenwald—knows what the real reasons are for why the mainstream media reports what it does.
“Bill Keller: […] in case after case, […] you are convinced that you, Glenn Greenwald, know what that controlling “set of interests” is. It’s never anything as innocent as a sense of fair play or a determination to let the reader decide; it must be some slavish fealty to powerful political forces.”
Here’s where Keller actually proves Greenwald’s point. Keller seems incapable of seeing—or admitting that he sees—how a reporter who shields his own opinions from his readers is almost certain to be equally adept at shielding them from himself. Someone who isn’t consciously aware of his biases cannot be vigilant against them and won’t notice when he nevertheless (perhaps subtly) expresses them in his writing. Anything that is written is necessarily infused with the author’s opinion. It may be through the subconscious omission of certain information or perhaps the phrasing used to impart that which is included.
This happens even to those to whom we give the benefit of the doubt that it is inadvertent, to say nothing of reporters who are fully aware that they are disseminating propaganda. These subtle signals, sometimes called dog whistles, are picked up and interpreted by even the less savvy reader—in fact, especially by them—and internalized. Examples abound of how properly chosen phrasing can express a plausibly deniable truth.
Greenwald winds up this part of the conversation by explaining how Keller’s belief in objective journalism—which represents the attitude of most of the mainstream media—is eroding the public trust in news.
“Glenn Greenwald: It is, I believe, very hard to argue that the ostensibly “objective” tone required by large media outlets builds public trust, given the very low esteem with which the public regards those media institutions. Far more than concerns about ideological bias, the collapse of media credibility stems from things like helping the U.S. government disseminate falsehoods that led to the Iraq War and, more generally, a glaring subservience to political power: pathologies exacerbated by the reportorial ban on any making clear, declarative statements about the words and actions of political officials out of fear that one will be accused of bias.”
Naturally, the conversation touches on the most egregious punishments meted out by the US government on those from whom it has revoked the title of journalist or whistleblower: Assange, Manning, Snowden, etc. It would seem that these instances prove Greenwald’s point—namely, that the Times has learned well what punishment awaits organizations and reporters that do not appropriately kowtow to the hegemony.
In its own interest and in the interest of self-preservation, the Times adjusts what it reports and how it reports it. All without informing its readers that there are certain things that they will never read because of the risk associated with writing it. Whether this is cowardly is the subject of another discussion. The honest thing to do would be to at least admit the shortcoming so that readers can make informed decisions.
“Glenn Greenwald: It shouldn’t take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.”
The problem with the theory that facts are objective is that it ignores facts that, once accepted, skew reality.
For example, while it’s probably empirically true that 95% of all Swiss use the Internet, the information without context is meaningless. How much do they use it? Does using it once in your life count? Which Swiss are we talking about? Kids? Older people?
Without the context provided by asking when and how often the Internet is used, it’s senseless to actually internalize that fact and foolish to use that information further because it will affect the other opinions you form. It’s easy to imagine such a fact being printed or misinterpreted from a report and then being disseminated until businesses are making decisions based on the “known fact” that almost all Swiss use the Internet.
The skewed starting point ensures that subsequent opinions will be ever more skewed, with each inadequate fact compounding the others until the reader is so far afield as to have opinions that are completely detached from reality.
Likewise, while it’s true that the US welfare budget has increased by 11,000% (as shown on a Fox News segment), it’s again a deliberately propagandist formulation. 110 times larger means the same thing but is a smaller number and less scary. A closer look at the chart where the fact appeared reveals that the increase is from the first year of the program until today, most likely utterly ignoring inflation and using absolute costs rather than a more sensible per-capita or per-recipient formulation.
Once you start to ask questions, the propaganda falls apart. How many more people are using the program now than then? Have the welfare rolls also increased 11,000%? If so, then the program hasn’t actually gotten more wasteful, it’s just expanded and maintained its original efficiency). It’s also quite likely that the program started very small and grew quickly, so it would be more honest to use a figure from after the initial phase—perhaps a few years in—as the starting data point.
Measuring growth over the entire 50-year lifetime of a program without mentioning the timespan, methodology or number of people actually using the program is tantamount to propaganda and anything but objective.
This was from a source that purports to be fair and balanced, so people would accept the chart as fact and stop looking. The New York Times suffers from the same hubris that it is fair and balanced and lulls its readers into accepting its skewed facts sold as objective journalism.
A final example comes from widely reports of a global wine shortage in 2013, as discussed in the article There’s no global wine shortage by Felix Salmon (Reuters). In this case, though, the facts presented are a good deal more manipulated: the chart in the original report omitted the most recent year’s worth of data because it belied the predefined conclusion and also added “300 million [cases that are] Morgan Stanley’s estimate of the annual demand for “non-wine uses” of wine”. The omission of a recent uptick plus the inclusion of a completely fabricated 300-million cases made the lines overlap and TADA! we have a shortage.
While this is a good deal sleazier and more obviously unethical than the other examples [1], it’s a fact that news sources all over the world promulgated news of a shortage to their consumers without even performing the most basic analysis. These are ostensibly objective news sources—they’re just really bad journalists. There is also the implicit bias that reporters (note that I’m no longer calling them journalists) and their editors have that makes them receptive to stories that sell, even if it’s not necessarily the news that people need to hear. So while the wine-shortage story is completely false, it spread like wildfire and has probably become unassailable, established fact in the minds of many readers.
After a relatively civilized and worthwhile exchange, Bill Keller couldn’t resist putting on his avuncular hat and honoring Greenwald with the following gem of wisdom,
“Bill Keller: Humility is as dear as passion. So my advice is: Learn to say, “We were wrong.””
This is undoubtedly good advice, but after a long exchange among equals, it makes him sound like a sanctimonious, condescending ass. [2] Perhaps another lesson would be more appropriate, one that Greenwald has clearly internalized far more than most of the editorial staff of the New York Times: when you stop basing articles on data that is demonstrably wrong, you have to admit you were wrong a lot less.
Once you start looking for this kind of stuff, you’ll notice that it’s everywhere. For example, the chart below comes from the post, The Collapse of Infrastructure in One Chart by Alexander Reed Kelly (TruthDig) and purports to show how government spending on infrastructure has plummeted.
Whereas it’s true that it has dropped off enough for us to take notice, the chart suggests that it’s dropped off to almost nothing. A closer look shows that the baseline has been chosen to encourage this interpretation. Now, how did that happen? It was clearly a bias on the part of the author—i.e. the author wanted readers to read the chart a certain way—but was it implicit or explicit bias?
In response to that hullabaloo, he... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 30. Oct 2013 23:12:00 (GMT-5)
Russell Brand has been in the media of late, the first time because of an acceptance speech at an awards ceremony sponsored by Hugo Boss, during which he reminded everyone from whom their sponsor had gotten his inauspicious start (the S.S. in the 1930s).
In response to that hullabaloo, he responded with the relatively well-written essay Russell Brand and the GQ awards: ‘It’s amazing how absurd it seems’ (Guardian), in which he wrote,
“I could see the room dividing as I spoke. I could hear the laughter of some and louder still silence of others. I realised that for some people this was regarded as an event with import. The magazine, the sponsors and some of those in attendance saw it as a kind of ceremony that warranted respect. In effect, it is a corporate ritual, an alliance between a media organisation, GQ, and a commercial entity, Hugo Boss. What dawned on me as the night went on is that even in apparently frivolous conditions the establishment asserts control, and won’t tolerate having that assertion challenged, even flippantly, by that most beautifully adept tool: comedy.”
This is a theme to which he would return in a more recent essay, an editorial he wrote when at the helm of the New Statesman for a month. The theme being: endemic corporatism, subverted democracy and revolution as a requirement for upending the status quo (i.e. working within the system is a waste of time and energy, a sink that absorbs transformational fervor in its placative, treacly folds).
Brand went on,
“For example, if you can’t criticise Hugo Boss at the GQ awards because they own the event, do you think it is significant that energy companies donate to the Tory party? Will that affect government policy?”
His more recent essay, Russell Brand on revolution: “We no longer have the luxury of tradition” (The New Statesman) expanded on these ideas further, again in a very eloquent and well-informed manner. That is, this man is well worth listening to and a worthy sparring partner in any debate on the matters outlined above. He is to be taken seriously, even if he is very funny. That someone is funny does not mean that they have nothing serious to say (see Louis C.K. citation below). To the contrary, humor is used to attract attention to the more interesting undercurrents of thought. Interesting thoughts presented without humorous baubles tend to be ignored.
“Brand: Like most people I am utterly disenchanted by politics. Like most people I regard politicians as frauds and liars and the current political system as nothing more than a bureaucratic means for furthering the augmentation and advantages of economic elites. Billy Connolly said: “Don’t vote, it encourages them,” and, “The desire to be a politician should bar you for life from ever being one.””
In the video below, Brand elaborated on the reasoning behind encouraging people not to vote in his editorial.
Paxman’s first question set the tone: “what gives you the authority to talk about politics?” What a stupid fucking question. What an arrogant and rude question. In the conversation that would follow, it would quickly become obvious that it was Paxman who had nothing intellectually stimulating or informative to offer, not Brand. Paxman was very dismissive and almost deliberately obtuse – basically, a foil that represents the average idiot. He looked like a fool next to Brand.
“Brand: Here’s what you shouldn’t do: shouldn’t destroy the planet, shouldn’t create massive economic disparity and shouldn’t ignore the needs of the people.”
To this Paxman responds with an utterly simplistic question: “How do you think people get power? […] You get power by being voted in.” It cannot possibly be that Paxman is really this stupid. He cannot possibly believe in a democratic process that functions in so simple a manner. And he certainly can’t believe that he lives in such a society. Nevertheless, he continued to hector Brand about his abdication of democracy in not voting, to which Brand eventually responded,
“Brand: It’s not that I’m not voting out of apathy, I’m not voting out of absolute indifference and weariness and exhaustion from the lies, treachery and deceit of the political class that has been going on for generations and has now reached a fever pitch where we have a disenfranchised, disillusioned, despondent underclass that are not being represented by that political system, so voting for it is tacit complicity with that system.”
Paxman then provocatively—trolling—asked why Brand hates democracy, since he’s so ready for revolution? As if Brand were a quitter who just hadn’t given the current system enough of a chance. Paxman can watch his colleagues take democracy, wipe their arses with it, then hand it back and, when the recipient wrinkles his or her nose and moves to throw it away, says “What? Don’t you like democracy anymore?” For him, it’s the whining losers that are the problem, not the horrifically corrupt winners.
Brand had, by that point, more than adequately expressed his views in a succinct (for him, at least) and clear manner. Instead of refuting Paxman, he simply screamed that “yes, I want revolution!”, but at least unapologetically. It is the only conclusion to which one can come with his views – views with which Paxman concurred, by the way. Paxman is just a comfortable coward who doesn’t care one whit for the common man [1].
Paxman takes another classic tack, asking Brand “what’s the scheme? What’s the plan for revolution?” as one isn’t allowed to notice that something is total shit—the current politico-capitalist dynamic, in this case—before one has a fully evolved and bulletproof system ready to replace it. This is a classic bullshit position to take.
Still, Brand answers with an outline,
“Brand: I think a socialist-egalitarian system based on the massive redistribution of wealth, heavy taxation of corporations and a massive responsibility for energy companies and any company exploiting the environment…I think the very concept of profit should be hugely reduced […]”
…to which Paxman dismissively crosses his arms, seeming as if he’s doing Brand a favor by even deigning to interview him.
As another answer to this question, in his essay in the New Statesman, Brand had cited Buckminster Fuller’s solution to everything,
“By spiritual I mean the acknowledgement that our connection to one another and the planet must be prioritised. Buckminster Fuller outlines what ought be our collective objectives succinctly: “to make the world work for 100 per cent of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous co-operation without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone”. This maxim is the very essence of “easier said than done” as it implies the dismantling of our entire socio-economic machinery. By teatime.”
The point is that a revolution and a redesign/reboot seems like an impossible task, but then so does almost everything worth doing. That in no way means we shouldn’t embark on the journey and gracefully accept a “failure” that has still carried us a good way toward something better than what we have now. The percentage of people who can truly call what we have now “better” is very small. Around 1%, actually. Or even a tenth of that.
We currently have a system where suffering is endemic: without suffering, nothing works at all.
“Brand: I could not wrench the phantom of those [African] children from my mind, in this moment I felt the integration; that the price of this decadence was their degradation. That these are not dislocated ideas but the two extremes are absolutely interdependent. The price of privilege is poverty.”
In order for your pocket of life to flourish, countless others suffer through their beleaguered days on Earth. It’s a zero-sum game, but it doesn’t have to be. However, since the winners wield so much power and they control the democratic process, there is no way a proper solution can realistically arise within the system. About that Brand is 100% correct and the ruling class knows it.
This reminded me of a recent special I’d seen Oh my God by Louis C.K. where he addressed the same issue, with very, very dark humor.
“Of course slavery is the worst thing. Every time it’s happened: black people in America, Jews in Egypt, every time a whole race of people has been enslaved, it’s a terrible…a horrible thing. Of course. … But maybe … maybe every incredible human achievement in history was done with slaves. […] There’s no end to what you can do when you don’t give a fuck about particular people. That’s where human greatness comes from: it’s that we’re shitty people, that we fuck others over. Even today! How do we have this amazing microtechnology? Because the factory where they’re making these, they jump off the fuckin’ roof because it’s a nightmare in there. You really have a choice: you can have candles and horses and be a little kinder to each other or let someone suffer immeasurably, far, far way just so you can leave a mean comment on YouTube while you’re taking a shit.”
This extremely political and highly judgmental point is made—and can be made—because it’s couched in the language of humor, of sarcasm, of “facetiousness”, as Paxman put it. Without the juxtaposition, without the reductio ad absurdum, people do not notice how horrible their system is. They are like fish who don’t know what water is, blissfully unaware of how much goes on around them to keep their little lives afloat.
Paxman is definitely one of these people, too comfortable in the current system, so he exhorts everyone to work within it, even while acknowledging that it’s all but irrevocably broken.
Still, Brand is game and goes on to explain why people shouldn’t vote—not just not bother voting apathetically, but actively resist voting because it’s a placative designed to keep the sheep from looking up. “[…] These little valves, these cozy little valves of recycling and Prius ” only serve to distract us enough so that we never try to change anything that matters.
The system we have now is a malignant tumor, settled into every organ of our collective body. And those that want it to continue aren’t necessarily evil. Some are, there’s no doubt about it. There are some who know exactly what’s going on and do not care one bit. But there are others who—and I feel that Paxman is a perfect example—truly and honestly do not see what the problem is. They know that something is wrong—Paxman admits as much—but they have roped off large parts of the system as untouchable, unchangeable, as sacrosanct and as enduring as the stars in the sky. Plus, the system works for them most handsomely—those for whom it does not work are simply lazy, jealous whiners. And so it goes.
But we have to just ignore our current lords of creation, ignore their mewling and continue with our work, going around them, giving them only as much notice as is due to dangerous and powerful creatures whose time is past.
“Cameron, Osborne, Boris, all of them lot, they went to the same schools and the same universities that have the same decor as the old buildings from which they now govern us. It’s not that they’re malevolent; it’s just that they’re irrelevant. Relics of an old notion, like Old Spice: it’s fine that it exists but no one should actually use it.
“[…] We can’t be led by people who have never struggled, who are a dusty oak-brown echo of a system dreamed up by Whigs and old Dutch racists.”
We have to wipe the slate clean and reëvaluate all of our ideas. We can’t just stick to “quaint, old-fashioned notions like nation, capitalism and consumerism simply because it’s convenient for the tiny, greedy, myopic sliver of the population that those outmoded ideas serve.” It would sometimes be far more comfortable for us to do so—look at the shiny new iPhone! Don’t you want one?! Of course you do. Now kowtow to your boss and the powers-that-be, take that horrible job doing horrible things to powerless people, put your nose to the grindstone and become one of the sheep again. Stop thinking so much.
“Brand: Capitalism is not real; it is an idea. America is not real; it is an idea that someone had ages ago. Britain, Christianity, Islam, karate, Wednesdays are all just ideas that we choose to believe in […] These concepts, though, cannot be served to the detriment of actual reality.”
And, while we’re choosing ideas, we have to acknowledge the horrendous mistakes, the obviously short-sighted choices made in building up the current system. There are certain parts we can keep—democracy should fit in there somewhere—but there are other parts that are so obviously unbalanced and untenable for any society even thinking of calling itself civilized, that they just have to go.
Brand puts forth preservation of the planet as one such idea, an idea to which only lip-service is paid by our current system.
“Brand: The only systems we can afford to employ are those that rationally serve the planet first, then all humanity. Not out of some woolly, bullshit tree-hugging piffle but because we live on it, currently without alternatives.”
That sounds like a good, logical place to start. That even sounds like the nascent beginnings of a plan.
]]>“[…] the student, [20-year–old] Elizabeth Daly, was walking to her car on April 11 at approximately 10:15 p.m. with a box of sparkling water […] when the agents—six men and one woman, all in... [More]”
Published by marco on 15. Jul 2013 01:20:03 (GMT-5)
The article Girl buys water, spends night in jail by Dylan Stableford (Yahoo! News) describes an utterly lunatic crime-stopping scene:
“[…] the student, [20-year–old] Elizabeth Daly, was walking to her car on April 11 at approximately 10:15 p.m. with a box of sparkling water […] when the agents—six men and one woman, all in plainclothes—approached suspecting the box […] to be a 12-pack of beer. One jumped on the hood of her SUV; another pulled out a gun […]”
Seven agents. Tailing and taking down a college student for buying beer 1 year early. That’s what they thought they were doing. They turned out to have been wrong. But even if they weren’t, does our society not have better things to do?
She managed to get into her car and took off, “grazing” one of the agents trying to sprawl across her car to prevent her from absconding with her illicit gains. She was arrested by several other officers with several more vehicles and spent the night in jail before it was reluctantly agreed to drop the charges they filed against her for “two counts of assaulting a law enforcement officer and one count of eluding police”. Her only crime was to run when unidentified and ununiformed people assaulted her in a parking lot.
The article The United States of Crazy: You Can Now Go to Jail for a Sarcastic Facebook Comment by William Boardman (AlterNet) isn’t as exciting but is much worse given how long it’s been allowed to continue—especially considering how many law professionals are involved, any one of whom should know better than to let this travesty continue.
An 18-year–old Texan man wrote “I’m f—ed in the head alright. I think I’ma [sic] shoot up a kindergarten and watch the blood of the innocent rain down and eat the beating heart of one of them.‘” on Facebook. There was no reason whatsoever to believe that he had any intention of actually doing this. The context is not important, but exonerates him even more.
What is important is the police and societal reaction. Someone (a woman from Canada) complained and the full force of American justice swept into action. He was arrested and bail was set at $250,000. He had no prior record. Then they let him sit in jail, unprosecuted, unquestioned, “for almost a month”. In the meantime, his apartment was ransacked and, without any discernible reason or supporting evidence, “[t]he state also asked the court to raise Carter’s bail to $500,000”.
Finally, after almost a month, he was charged with “making a “terroristic threat,” a third degree felony […which] carries a potential penalty of 2-10 years in prison and/or a fine of $10,000”. That’s on top of whatever the Texas prison system was allowed to do to him while he hadn’t even been charged yet. [1] All for a sentence written on the Internet, with no other supporting evidence.
The case is still pending as of the beginning of July. The little reporting that has been done by US media is best represented by NPR, which called the story “[a] painful reminder of how online comments can have real-life consequences”. That would be the bastion of left-liberal opinion in America, utterly failing to make a peep about the War on Terror and state power gone absolutely berserk. Charles Cooke of the National Review was much better, writing that “it is not the place of authority to judge what is and what is not acceptable [speech], and it is certainly not the place of the state to designate casual discussion as ‘terrorism.’”
The U.S. is so starved for cases that “prove” that its prosecution of the War on Terror is good and just and effective that it is willing to sacrifice any detritus and build its case on any lies just to justify continued expenditures and giant budgets. An 18-year–old guy with loose lips living on his own and working a dead-end job is perfect fodder for this machine, the poor bastard.
From the article:
“Without getting into the really nasty details, he’s had concussions, black eyes, moved four times from base for his own protection. He’s been put in solitary confinement, nude, for days on end because he’s depressed. All of this is extremely traumatic to this kid. This is a horrible experience.
“Justin Carter is currently being held in solitary confinement, on suicide watch.”
]]>“So now comes a political philosophy—libertarianism—that says everything is fine, everything is equal, and government should get the hell out of the... [More]”
Published by marco on 14. Jul 2013 22:41:20 (GMT-5)
From the article Rand Paul’s Confederacy Scandal Is Not an Anomaly – Libertarianism Is a ‘Philosophy’ That Papers Over Deep Racism in America by Thom Hartmann (AlterNet),
“So now comes a political philosophy—libertarianism—that says everything is fine, everything is equal, and government should get the hell out of the way. […] Of course, […] most [libertarians] probably don’t see how their “get rid of government” policies prop up institutional bigotry, but the reality is that when you blast government as the root of all evil and neuter its power, you end weakening the one thing that can keep the ruling elite in check. […] And when you do that, the rich and powerful race hangs onto its wealth and power and the poorer minorities lose even more of what little they have.”
And how little do those poor people have?
The articles Whites and African-Americans in America by the numbers by Juan Cole (Informed Comment) and Murderers where the Victim was White are Far more Likely to be Punished in US (Graph) by Juan Cole (Informed Comment) include the following charts illustrating an America that doesn’t look very post-racial at all. The second chart, illustrating median wealth for blacks is only 4% of that for whites (and about 6% for Latinos), is particularly disturbing.
Not only are blacks and Latinos just so much poorer than whites—a trend that, as shown in the charts above, has only increased—they are also incarcerated at much, much higher rates.
With the death penalty still on the menu in so many states, the following chart shows that it is used overwhelmingly to avenge the murder of white people—even though blacks, with only 14% of the population, account for 50% of the murder victims every year.
And how do things look at that other creamy-white and cushy rich end of the spectrum? The article US diplomats cry foul as Obama donors take over top embassy jobs by Dan Roberts (Guardian) offers a hint as to how much political clout blacks have gained with “one of their own” in the White House (as has been so elegantly put by so many pundits).
“Barack Obama has rewarded some of his most active campaign donors with plum jobs in foreign embassies, with the average amount raised by recent or imminent appointees soaring to $1.8m per post, according to a Guardian analysis.”
Obama has never said one word about incarceration rates, but he’s handing out plum government posts like filthy lucre to his biggest donors—donors who gave away more money to a single political campaign than most black families will see in a lifetime (see charts above). Sure, Susan Rice is now Obama’s national security advisor—only one of the many posts she’s had—but she’s richer Croesus and nearly radically right-wing in her policies, so she barely even counts as a very rare exception to the rule. In the history of the U.S. Senate, there have only ever been a paltry handful (Wikpedia) of black Senators. This is including the fifty years after they got their civil rights. Women are also woefully underrepresented (Wikpedia), but not to that same shocking degree.
“The White House insists all its ambassadors are well qualified, regardless of their campaign history. “I am proud that such experienced and committed individuals have agreed to serve the American people in these important roles,” said Obama in a statement issued with Barzun’s appointment.”
And trying to explain away these numbers by pointing out that perhaps blacks and Latinos just commit more crime and are too lazy to earn money or waste it all frivolously when they do earn it—well, that’s not very post-racial reasoning, is it? There is something institutionally corrupt at every level in America and these statistics, gathered over decades, show that not only has there been no improvement—but things have gotten drastically and rapidly worse. Where will the U.S. be in ten more years? Twenty?
Published by marco on 11. Jun 2013 22:24:34 (GMT-5)
Gibney has quite a good string of documentaries behind him, but We Steal Secrets seems to be a good deal shakier. I have not seen it, but it’s a documentary about WikiLeaks that focuses on the personal weaknesses and personality characteristics of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange without having interviewed either one of them, indeed without having interviewed anyone in the WikiLeaks organization. I reserve final judgment until I’ve seen it, but it doesn’t bode well.
Given that background, Gibney’s interview seemed spun a good deal more positively toward Manning and whistleblowing than I expected.
Stephen, though, took his typically roundabout, chess-master/debate-master approach to trapping Gibney into an equivalence that he probably wasn’t comfortable making (or at least agreeing with). It takes a while to get there, but it’s totally worth it.
Stephen: Are you making an equivalency [sic] between the CIA, the official intelligence agency of the United States…and some clown like Julian Assange, and Bradley Manning—a known criminal—who stole these State secrets and leaked them to the world and possibly to our enemies and endangered American lives.
Alex Gibney: Bradley Manning is now being charged with aiding the enemy, which is equivalent to treason. He’s pled guilty to leaking the secrets. And, frankly, the secrets he leaked did a lot of good…
Stephen: (interrupting) Explain to the people, before we get ahead of ourselves, explain to the people who Bradley Manning is and what he did for Julian Assange.
Alex Gibney: Bradley Manning was a [sic] Army private. He was in Iraq, deployed in Iraq, and at some point in 2010, he leaked a video about the Apache gunship that killed …uh…some Reuter’s journalists [1] and also some war logs from Afghanistan and about 250,000 State Department cables. [2] These were leaked to WikiLeaks partnered with the New York Times and the Guardian and…der Spiegel, a German magazine, to publish these all over the world.
Stephen: Are you arguing that he should not be on trial for what he did?
Alex Gibney: He pled guilty to leaking these secrets in what I would call an act of civil disobedience. He may have been somewhat naïve about the extent to which these secrets would be leaked all over the world, but I do think that he had a sense that some very bad stuff was going on in Iraq and Afghanistan that the American public needed to know about and he felt that somebody should publish them. [3]
Stephen: So, he thought he was doing the right thing.
Alex Gibney: Indeed.
Stephen: Oh, Ok, and even though it might be … uh … uh … against the law for him to do it, he had to do that thing because it was the right thing to do.
Alex Gibney: That’s right.
Stephen: And he should pay a price for that.
Alex Gibney: Indeed. And he said … he’s going to pay a price …
Stephen: (interrupting) Ok, so if you think it’s the right thing to do, but it’s against the law, you can still do it and then just pay the price afterward and say that’s the price that I give for my country. The same way the Bush administration knew it was the right thing to do torture people…and now they’ve all gone to jail. (Emphasis added.)
Alex Gibney: No. (grins)
Stephen: No, I’m pretty sure, a fair amount of them…
Alex Gibney: I’m pretty sure that nobody went to jail for that, I’m afraid.
Stephen: Yeah, well, maybe do a documentary about that one. (Emphasis added.)
Boom! Headshot!
Stephen elegantly managed to chastise Gibney for making a take-down documentary of people that they both just agreed are actually heroes, while ignoring the far greater evil of torture in the Bush administration. Gibney’s other documentary Taxi to the Dark Side follows the story of a taxi driver kidnapped in Afghanistan and taken to Guantánamo prison. [4] I have not yet seen it, so again I must reserve judgment as to how well he treated the subject.
Not only were Reuter’s journalists killed—the only reason many in the West cared about the video—but Iraqi civilians were also killed. The worst part of the video was actually that the gunners in the helicopter waited until a civilian truck showed up to pick up the wounded, then killed those civilians as well, laughing and joking the whole time. There were two small children clearly visible in the rescue truck.
In U.S. military parlance, cleaning up the rescue team after an attack is called executing a “double-tap”.
If you watch the video, the fact that two of the victims were Reuter’s journalists is far down the list of things that are offensive and morally repugnant about the movie. Unless you don’t really care about Iraqi civilians.
Published by marco on 9. Jun 2013 16:11:33 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 9. Jun 2013 16:32:29 (GMT-5)
A couple of days ago, Gleen Greenwald, constitutional and civil-rights lawyer, former Salon blogger and current Guardian blogger and columnist, revealed some top-secret U.S. documents that lay out in quite clear terms the degree to which U.S. government agencies are proud to be intercepting data from myriad sources.
Phone records, social-networking sites, large cloud-data providers, chat tools, video-calling software—almost anything you can think of—were mentioned as current and past sources. The agencies claim that they have access to our data, but that they are careful to make use of only that which corresponds to foreigners and suspected terrorists.
While the companies involved have denied their involvement, the formulation of the law also dictates that they do so. Leaders of relevant committees have not denied the breadth of the programs but have instead defended its legality. They claim that these forms of data-collection are necessary tools in the war on terror and accuse us of naiveté for our shock. It’s been going on for years, so why care now?
We have, for years, if not decades, made it exceedingly easy for any organization with enough time, power and money to trace us in this way. Our phone calls, our emails, our chat sessions, our tweets, our status updates, our text messages, our pictures—they all fly through the æther unencrypted, unsigned and open to any intercepting party. Such information is (almost) never transmitted directly from sender to receiver; instead, it makes many hops from intermediate router to backbone to router to switch until it reaches its final destination.
Everything can be intercepted, everything can be read, because we make no effort to prevent it. For anything that could not be intercepted—SSL-encrypted communications, such as you can use for Facebook or Google if you’ve enabled it—or for post-hoc investigation, the U.S. government retrieves extremely richly detailed information from the big data giants directly.
While this is acknowledged, the claim is that nothing bad will happen to anyone who doesn’t deserve it. All of the people involved in these vast projects are upstanding and will only investigate as far as necessary—and no farther.
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. [1]
Trust us.
Just last week, much of the media reaction to Obama’s supposedly scintillating and ground-breaking speech about his desire to stop breaking the law with drone attacks was overwhelmingly positive and positively naïve. Just one short week later, the media is now up in arms to learn that the administration is pumping cell-phone providers via the NSA for huge amounts of information.
Even the Grey Lady has finally lost faith, according to the article Obama Administration Has ‘Lost All Credibility,’ New York Times Admonishes by Peter Scheer (TruthDig).
“Within hours of the disclosure that the federal authorities routinely collect data on phone calls Americans make, regardless of whether they have any bearing on a counterterrorism investigation, the Obama administration issued the same platitude it has offered every time President Obama has been caught overreaching in the use of his powers: Terrorists are a real menace and you should just trust us to deal with them because we have internal mechanisms (that we are not going to tell you about) to make sure we do not violate your rights.”
As we’ll see below, the mainstream media is quite late to the party, as usual. This is not really news, per se. The U.S. government has been doing this for years—very officially since the early years of the first Bush administration under the auspices of the PATRIOT Act.
The only difference is that there is now more evidence as to the breadth and brazenness of the programs that have flourished under that act’s auspices.
One of the original articles detailing the leak was NSA taps in to internet giants’ systems to mine user data, secret files reveal by Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill (The Guardian)
“The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation – classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies – which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the program. The document claims “collection directly from the servers” of major US service providers.”
“It boasts of what it calls “strong growth” in its use of the PRISM program to obtain communications. The document highlights the number of obtained communications increased in 2012 by 248% for Skype – leading the notes to remark there was “exponential growth in Skype reporting; looks like the word is getting out about our capability against Skype”. There was also a 131% increase in requests for Facebook data, and 63% for Google.”
They quickly followed up with another article, Boundless Informant: the NSA’s secret tool to track global surveillance data by Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill (The Guardian), which stated that,
“[t]he National Security Agency has developed a powerful tool for recording and analysing where its intelligence comes from, raising questions about its repeated assurances to Congress that it cannot keep track of all the surveillance it performs on American communications.
“[…] The Boundless Informant documents show the agency collecting almost 3 billion pieces of intelligence from US computer networks over a 30-day period ending in March 2013. ”
The following link is to a video interview, ”A Massive Surveillance State”: Glenn Greenwald Exposes Covert NSA Program Collecting Calls, Emails by Amy Goodman/Glenn Greenwald (Democracy Now!) which includes the following long statement from Greenwald,
“[…] what makes it so extraordinary is that in 2008 the Congress enacted a new law that essentially said that except for conversations involving American citizens talking to one another on U.S. soil, the NSA no longer needs a warrant to grab, eavesdrop on, intercept whatever communications they want. And at the time, when those of us who said that the NSA would be able to obtain whatever they want and abuse that power, the argument was made, “Oh, no, don’t worry. There’s a great check on this. They have to go to the phone companies and go to the Internet companies and ask for whatever it is they want. And that will be a check.” And what this program allows is for them, either because the companies have given over access to their servers, as the NSA claims, or apparently the NSA has simply seized it, as the companies now claim—the NSA is able to go in—anyone at a monitor in an NSA facility can go in at any time and either read messages that are stored in Facebook or in real time surveil conversations and chats that take place on Skype and Gmail and all other forms of communication. It’s an incredibly invasive system of surveillance worldwide that has zero checks of any kind.”
Some members of U.S. intelligence committees have alluded to this, but also been handcuffed by secrecy from being specific. The brief post Sen. Wyden Warned us in 2011 that the Government was Running wild on Surveillance by Juan Cole (Informed Comment) includes the following video:
He starts his presentation from 2011 with:
“I want to deliver a warning this afternoon. When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted the PATRIOT Act, they are going to be stunned and they are going to be angry.”
While Wyden has prevented from going into detail, Julian Assange was not, in the following interview from 2011:
Jump to 1:50 in the video if it doesn’t already go there.
Assange says,
“Facebook, in particular, is the most appalling spying machine that has ever been invented. Here we have the world’s most comprehensive database about people, their relationships, their names, their addresses, their locations, their communications with each other and their relatives. All sitting within the United States, all accessible to U.S. intelligence. Facebook, Google, Yahoo—all these major U.S. organizations have built in interfaces for U.S. intelligence.
“It’s not a matter of serving a subpoena; they have an interface that they have developed for U.S. intelligence to use.”
The articles A Bad Month for Privacy Rights by Laura Finley (CounterPunch) and The Slippery Swab by Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice) both tied in the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision that it is legal for police to collect DNA from anyone arrested for anything, regardless of guilt, innocence or duration of arrest. Citing from Greenfield,
“As Scalia properly notes, DNA is collected from people convicted of crimes regardless of this decision, so they are by definition removed from the people affected by it. That leaves only the people who are arrested but not ultimately convicted as the people in play. The decision is otherwise meaningless.
“Given this universe, and the fact that defendants are presumed innocent until convicted, there can be no question as a matter of law that buccal swabs of DNA are being seized from innocent people.
“[…]
“But if it’s constitutional to collect DNA from innocent people based on mere accusation, and the only impediment is the required opening of the mouth (whether or not our proud founders would have enjoyed a royal swab in there) to take a swab, then the only remaining question is how long before the government can rent-a-scientist to find the part of our DNA that reveals our propensity to behave in a way that displeases it.”
The interesting tie-in with the massive NSA eavesdropping program is that proponents like Feinstein and Clapper claim that it’s legal and vetted to apply only to the guilty or the properly suspected. The extra-judicial and extra-constitutional techniques are only used against the suspected and the guilty. But the U.S. is increasingly a place where everyone is suspected of something, where everyone is guilty.
The eavesdropping is quite extensive. Essentially, if you’re online in the western world, then at least some of your information, your conversations and your shopping and browsing habits have not only been cataloged by the company with which you entrusted the data, but also the NSA. The article Leak: NSA Has Backdoor Access to Google, Apple, Microsoft and More by Peter Scheer (TruthDig) put it well:
“In the last few years, all of the major technology companies have been pushing users to move their data to “the cloud.” Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple have all argued that they can do a better job protecting your photos, documents and communications than you can. Now it seems users have voluntarily transferred their private information into the hands of not just corporations, but the government as well.”
The article U.S. Collects Vast Data Trove by Siobhan Gorman, Evan Perez and Janet Hook (Wall Street Journal) added that your financial data is also included,
“The National Security Agency’s monitoring of Americans includes customer records from the three major phone networks as well as emails and Web searches, and the agency also has cataloged credit-card transactions, said people familiar with the agency’s activities.”
The article NSA sucks in data from 50 companies by Marc Ambinder (The Week) make a somewhat hyperbolic claim, but clarifies that when the NSA says that it doesn’t spy on Americans, what it means is that while it collects data from Americans, it pinkie-swears that it doesn’t use that data.
“From the different types of data, including their credit card purchases, the locations they sign in to the internet from, and even local police arrest logs, the NSA can track people it considers terrorism or espionage suspects in near-real time. An internet geo-location cell is on constant standby to help analysts determine where a subject logs in from. Most of the collection takes place on subjects outside the U.S, but a large chunk of the world’s relevant communication passes through American companies with servers on American soil. So the NSA taps in locally to get at targets globally.”
That all seems quite above board; what could possibly go wrong? I think that suggestions of potential for abuse are totally blown out of proportion. Totally.
The article Don’t Worry About Obama Spying On You—Just Kidding, You Should Worry by David Seaman (DisInfo) draws the extremely appropriate parallel to East Germany:
“The information collected includes call recipients and all location data, meaning where you are physically located whenever you make a call and every single social association you have (the people you call, the people who call you). This is the kind of rich domestic surveillance data the Nazi Gestapo and East German Stasi would have given their right legs to obtain. If this ‘metadata’ is not a violation of our privacy, Obama should release his own ‘metadata’ to the public, and his staff’s – it’d be fascinating to see every phone call they have ever placed, in addition to their locations at all times.”
And it’s not just phone records: it’s everything you do online. According to New leak shows feds can access user accounts for Google, Facebook and more by Cyrus Farivar (Ars Technica) all of them are denying it, but it’s also very likely that they are legally required to do so. The program exists; the documents are real; Glenn Greenwald is a very reliable source.
“Still, Kurt Opsahl, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that these denials may not be very significant.
““Whether they know the code name PRISM, they probably don’t,” he told Ars. “[Code names are] not routinely shared outside the agency. Saying they’ve never heard of PRISM doesn’t mean much. Generally what we’ve seen when there have been revelations is something like: ‘we can’t comment on matters of national security.‘ The tech companies responses are unusual in that they’re not saying ‘we can’t comment.‘ They’re designed to give the impression that they’re not participating in this.””
The article Google, Take a Real Stand by Ted Dziuba points out that FISA eavesdropping requests contain a self-hiding legal mechanism,
“The trouble with FISA orders is that the companies who are served with them are prohibited by law from disclosing their very existence, let alone content.”
The article We Misunderstood Barack: He only wanted the Domestic Surveillance to be Made Legal, not to End It by Juan Cole (Informed Comment) includes the following video clip,
and concludes the following:
“We misunderstood Barack Obama years ago when he slammed the Bush administration for arbitrary intrusion in the privacy of citizens, in the name of the war on terrorism. No more illegal wiretapping of American citizens, he promised. But note that he didn’t say ‘no more wiretapping.’
“Apparently Obama only meant that he would pass laws and issue presidential decrees that allowed the government to violate civil liberties, so that the vast domestic surveillance was legal, in contrast to its illicit character under Bush. It isn’t the surveillance that he was promising to curtail.”
The article Obama defends digital spying: “I think we’ve struck the right balance” by Cyrus Farivar (Ars Technica) cites Obama as saying that,
““I think it’s important to recognize you can’t have 100 percent security and also 100 percent privacy, and also zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society.”
“Inconvenience”? That’s what you call Stasi-level spying on eveyone in the world? “The program does not allow the government to listen in on anyone’s phone calls” … no, the program just lets them know who’s calling who and for how long. Nothing to see here, please move along.
Screw you, dude. We did make choices. They’re in the Constitution. You’re making other choices without consulting us. You are, in fact, making the exact same choices that all of your equally crooked predecessors have made and you’re no different in trying to make it seem like we’re the ones who don’t understand how the world works.
What Obama don’t seem to understand is that we know how the world works; we would like it to work differently. His lying ass is only getting in the way.
Obama is far from alone in this; the article White House: Spying on US citizens “critical” tool for fighting terror by Jon Brodkin (Ars Technica) notes that the
“Senate Intelligence Committee leadership said the phone records collection has been occurring since 2007. “Everyone’s been aware of it for years, every member of the Senate,” said Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) […]”
The Obama administration has been aided and abetted by a legislature that is equally anxious to get all the leverage it can over its subjects. The article An Open Letter to Dianne Feinstein, Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee by Norman Solomon (Antiwar.com) eloquently addresses the issue that this program should be considered highly unconstitutional, if that phrase had any real meaning anymore. This is, of course, quite a hyperbolic statement, but it’s really hard to think that anyone in the U.S. government cares anymore (with the usual exceptions of Bernie Sanders, etc.)
“On Thursday, when you responded to news about massive ongoing surveillance of phone records of people in the United States, you slipped past the meaning of the Fourth Amendment. As the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, you seem to be in the habit of treating the Bill of Rights as merely advisory.
“The Constitution doesn’t get any better than this: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.””
While Dianne Feinstein has not responded to the open letter, she has provided an official statement, in which she seems to be not just baffled at the uproar, but offended by the implication that she would be involved in anything morally reprehensible. She said,
“As far as I know, this is the exact three-month renewal of what has been the case for the past seven years. This renewal is carried out by the FISA court under the business records section of the PATRIOT Act, therefore it is lawful.
“[…] There is nothing new in this program. The fact of the matter is that this was a routine three-month approval, under seal, that was leaked.”
The translation is: we passed a law to screw you all over years ago and you have the temerity to try to call us out on the carpet for it now? Instead of being humbled into trying to repeal repeal ludicrously invasive and unconstitutional laws like the PATRIOT Act, Feinstein wants to hang the source of the leaks / the whistleblowers out to dry because she “think[s] we have become a culture of leaks now.”
Madame Feinstein, your idol in both hairdo and policy is calling you. I strongly recommend you join Ms. Thatcher as soon as possible.
One article is titled Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks by Mark Hosenball (Reuters).
Well, of course they are.
Unsurprisingly, the administration is going to go after the whistleblowers, admonishing any and all that distributed the information that they are helping the terrorists and making the world unsafe for democracy and other such utterly boring Orwellian pablum.
From the Greenwald article by Glenn Greenwald and Ewan MacAskill (The Guardian), we hear that
“[Judith] Emmel, the NSA spokeswoman [said] ‘The continued publication of these allegations about highly classified issues, and other information taken out of context, makes it impossible to conduct a reasonable discussion on the merits of these programs.’”
Boohoo. Really, I feel for you. It must be tragic, to not be able to do your secret job of secretly monitoring, well, whatever the hell you feel like monitoring, without any oversight. And all of these tedious bags of meat over which you have oversight, who should just be grateful that you’re “standing on that wall” [2] instead of whining about accountability, rule-of-law and due process.
The NSA = the right arm of the Obama administration = the supreme executive = shut the f&%k and sit down while the grown-ups are talking.
According to the article U.S. Government: Reports About PRISM Contain “Numerous Inaccuracies” by Frederic Lardinois (TechCrunch), the U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is hopping mad.
“The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans. (Emphasis added.)”
It’s hardly surprising that it’s technically legal. Hell, you can make anything technically legal if you don’t give a shit about people’s rights. Everything that the East German police did was technically legal, too. Clapper’s panties seem to be in quite a bunch here…maybe he’s telling the truth. Nah. I trust Glenn Greenwald’s judgment much more.
As Greenwald said in the Democracy Now! interview from above,
“Well, first of all, the fact that something is lawful doesn’t mean that it isn’t dangerous or tyrannical or wrong. You can enact laws that endorse tyrannical behavior. And there’s no question, if you look at what the government has done, from the PATRIOT Act, the Protect America Act, the Military Commissions Act and the FISA Amendments Act, that’s exactly what the war on terror has been about.”
The FISA courts to which Clapper refers are notoriously lenient—they are the very definition of a rubber-stamp process, in fact. Back in the Bush days, when the current spate of illegal wire-tapping first reared its ugly head, the issue was that, despite almost no refusals for dozens of thousands of wire-tapping warrant requests, the Bush administration—and its justice department—still found the process too tedious. They didn’t comply and thus were illegally wire-tapping Americans, when it would have been very easy to legally do so. [3]
So, while Clapper claims that Obama’s wire-tapping is all above-board (i.e. that warrants have been obtained from the FISA courts for all instance), it’s not a very strong assurance. And he’s probably lying anyway, because the last five years have shown that the Obama administration—including such sterling chaps as Eric Holder—has hardly cared about the rule of law any more than the Bush administration did.
So, to recap: even if what they’re doing is technically legal, there is no way we should let them do it. But they’re probably not even doing it legally. So to hell with them.
Clapper went on in another missive:
“The highest priority of the Intelligence Community is to work within the constraints of law to collect, analyze and understand information related to potential threats to our national security.”
“Within the constraints of the law” indeed. There’s the appeal to reason again, the appeal to our fear for our own safety. It’s worked so well in the past, so many times before. The argument that, as long as something is legal, as long as it’s been declared legal by the same branch of government that needs it to be legal, the American people should stop being so f&$king nosy and just be happy that good ‘ol Colonel Jessup is on that there wall.
Cue citations of Ambrose Bierce, George Santayana, et al. It’s would be boring if it weren’t such a time-bomb waiting to strike so many innocent people. A dragnet of this size cannot help but catch a lot of innocent fish.
Clapper again:
“Discussing programs like this publicly will have an impact on the behavior of our adversaries and make it more difficult for us to understand their intentions. Surveillance programs like this one are consistently subject to safeguards that are designed to strike the appropriate balance between national security interests and civil liberties and privacy concerns.”
The U.S. government is doing all of this for your benefit and your nosiness is putting you—and your children!—in danger. Let the grownups handle this, wee ones.
Christ, Clapper, sack up. Or should we call you a wääääähmbulance?
In response to Clapper’s hysterical threats, the article On whistleblowers and government threats of investigation by Glenn Greenwald (The Guardian) has this to say,
“The way things are supposed to work is that we’re supposed to know virtually everything about what they do: that’s why they’re called public servants. They’re supposed to know virtually nothing about what we do: that’s why we’re called private individuals. (Emphasis in original.)”
That is exactly what all of these government officials seem to have forgotten—or never known—as they chastise us for trying to get them to do their jobs without making us their subjects.
Greenwald continues,
“There seems to be this mentality in Washington that as soon as they stamp TOP SECRET on something they’ve done we’re all supposed to quiver and allow them to do whatever they want without transparency or accountability under its banner.”
Even worse, people like Clapper and all employees of the NSA are entirely unaccountable to us—they’re not even elected. It’s bad enough that Obama and Feinstein think that they can justify any behavior as long as they tell us it’s for our own good. It’s the unelected who cannot be ferreted out by any democratic process who hold such tremendous power over us.
Confirmed: The NSA is Spying on Millions of Americans by Cindy Cohn (EFF)
“Today, the Guardian newspaper confirmed what EFF (and many others) have long claimed: the NSA is conducting widespread, untargeted, domestic surveillance on millions of Americans. This revelation should end, once and for all, the government’s long-discredited secrecy claims about its dragnet domestic surveillance programs. It should spur Congress and the American people to make the President finally tell the truth about the government’s spying on innocent Americans.”
This is highly doubtful. In all likelihood, this revelation will blow over, just as everything else has. The services are too convenient: GMail, Skype, Facebook, phone calls and text messages … it would take a mass revolution, a mass boycott to force the companies to force the government to GTFO.
This is not at all likely to happen.
As the article Seize it all and trust the government to sort it out by Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice) points out
“This is despicable conduct by our government, and tomorrow the uproar will turn to something else and it will all be forgotten. Except by those whose days are spent trying to deal with the detritus of your neglect and transitory interest in liberty. To us, it was always despicable, but nobody else gave a damn. It’s unlikely to change this time around, or the next re-enactment and expansion. Or the one after that.
“You really do trust the government. You just can’t bring yourselves to admit it.”
So, those of us have always cared will continue to care. Everyone else will put their heads back down and continue their slow plod toward enslavement.
This “If you have nothing to fear, you have nothing to hide” line of reasoning has long since been debunked in ever-so-slightly more intellectual and informed discussions. It is not really necessary to debunk it again. If you feel you need to learn more, see Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’ by Daniel J. Solove (Chronicle) which includes several very salient arguments like those about “aggregation”, “exclusion”, “distortion” and “secondary use” all of which can be combined to create utterly Kafkaesque situations in which people in a society without privacy become disadvantaged without even knowing why—or perhaps even being aware that they are even missing something.
Or see Nothing To Hide by Daniel Sieradski, who made a Twitter feed that highlights all of the foolish comments people make in support of a surveillance state (most equating it with increased security).
The following videos were posted while he’s on tour in the British... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 19. May 2013 14:38:09 (GMT-5)
I’ve been following Lee Camp, a stand-up comedian/activist/blogger for several months now. He’s always been quite good, but he’s hit his stride lately. His “Moment of Clarity” videos are short and interesting and often funny.
The following videos were posted while he’s on tour in the British Isles.
Citing from the video description:
“There’s a discussion that most people aren’t having and that our media will never dare mention. If we never have it, we may all end up dead. […] So here it is: capitalism has a lot of problems.”
Citing from the video description:
“For the first time in 3 million years the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide is over 400 parts per million. Scientists say this is well beyond a sustainable level, and it’s increasing every day.”
In this last video, Camp talks about debt and how it’s used to control people at all levels: echoing concepts from John Perkins’s Confessions of an Economic Hitman, he describes how rich countries use debt and international law to lean on poorer countries; at the micro level, all kinds of debt is used to control people and keep them in the rat race: medical debt, mortgages, student debt, payday loans, installment loans, etc.
Published by marco on 1. May 2013 13:22:36 (GMT-5)
Guantánamo is a war crime. It’s illegal by both U.S. and international law. And now, in the article Amid Hunger Strike, Obama Renews Push to Close Cuba Prison (New York Times), we hear that President Obama wants to try closing it again. Does he mean it this time? But what does he mean by close it? And why now? Should we believe his high-minded though glib reasons? Or is cynicism once again more justified than hope?
As even the article states,
“Mr. Obama made his remarks following the arrival at the prison of more than three dozen Navy nurses, corpsmen and specialists to help deal with a mass hunger strike by inmates”
Sadly, it just wasn’t possible to close Guantánamo in the first five years, no political will or support, mumble, mumble, dissemble, dissemble…
The timing suggests that Obama is more worried that Guantánamo will be a black mark on his legacy than that he really cares that America is running a concentration camp. Obama is making noises again not because of concerns for the rights of a handful of invisible Yemenis [1] but because of the stain on his reputation that their grisly treatment and possible deaths would entail.
“‘I don’t want these individuals to die,’ Mr. Obama said.”
No, Mr. President, everyone dies. What you mean is that you don’t want them to die in such a public way, with collateral damage—if you’ll allow the misuse of the term—to your career and your “legacy”. You were much happier when they were suffering and languishing in silence.
Instead of instinctively cheering when Obama says that “The idea that we would still maintain forever a group of individuals who have not been tried […] that is contrary to who we are, contrary to our interests, and it needs to stop,” remember instead that he said pretty much the same thing during his campaign five years ago. And remember that any number of people trot out such pablum whenever they feel the urge to stroke the collective ego of America.
Why can the president muster the support and political will for an illegal attack on Libya—which was made possible within days—but closing a highly illegal prisoner camp where people who haven’t been charged and will never see a trial “reside” takes years?
Why is it so much easier to get involved in wars—witness the renewed push for Syrian action or the continued pressure for escalation in Iran—than it is to be moral? In in a civilized and even slightly ethical society, there should be absolutely no downside to closing a prison camp as illegal and abhorrent as Guantánamo. And yet, here we sit, in a country that can’t muster the political will to do it. Is there any other conclusion to which can come than that, as a nation, we are utter, egotistical bastards?
And, before the absolutely rabid Obama-haters smirk their gruesome smirks and twist their hate-besotted grimaces into triumphant sneers, the indictment above is not specifically of Obama but rather of any political creature who’s managed to gnaw his way through the offal to the top of the political heap in Washington.
It applied just as well to Bush when he was president. Obama is not especially evil in a way that, should we manage to be rid of him, America would revert to its shining moral leadership and the day would dawn on a world of rainbows and butterflies.
No, Obama is simply the immanence of America’s corrupted soul. Bush was the same, a hand-puppet whose movements were predestined by the oblivious mean-spiritedness, coarse ignorance and utter self-interest of the society that elected him.
Where Bush may have implied—or even outright said—that Guantánamo’s inmates should never see the light of day, Obama superficially pretends to care about their plight. Where Americans largely unaffected by these policies see diametric opposites—free markets! vs. socialism! in the contextually and informationally bereft and dumbed-down parlance of the times—the prisoners in Guantánamo experience absolutely no difference at all.
The marketing spin we use to convince ourselves of our righteousness is important only to us, to our consciences; they make no difference to the victims of our policies.
As documented in the article Gitmo Is Killing Me by Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel (New York Times), the place is an abomination.
“During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done correctly or not. […] It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. […] When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding. (Emphasis added.)”
Heartwarming, no? America is, after all, about being able to choose, about freedom.
Samir person has been in American prisons for over 11 years and has never been charged with a crime. He is in indefinite detention—in the Orwellian parlance of the day—and neither a release nor a continuation of his legal process is imminent. His plight is even worse than that of Prometheus, who, while doomed to suffer mortal wounds each day only to be resurrected the next, at least knew what his crime was. Samir endures his punishment with no explanation as to why, no idea as to how to end his suffering.
I can understand the sentiment that people have toward the alleged Boston bomber, with many Americans ready to hang him high. I understand the sentiment, but civilization is about letting cooler heads prevail, about innocent-until-proven-guilty, about constitutional rights, about treating all people as equal before the eyes of the law. Special cases—designating certain people as non-enemy combatants and other such nonsense—are just crude and stupid attempts to put lipstick on the lynch-mob pig.
It is the extreme cases that allow us to prove how dedicated we are to justice. The Norwegians’ treatment of Anders Breyvik shows them to be leaps and bounds ahead of us on the path to a truly moral civilization. They seem to understand our credos so much better than we. Are we not ever ashamed for our inability to quell our bloodlust, for the ease with which we are misled into believing the most simplistic of reasoning, our eagerness to be deluded into extremist and soul-damaging behavior? We seem to value retribution above all else, above even trying to make sure we’re aiming our white-hot hatred at the right targets.
Though I don’t agree with the hot-headed vigilante-justice crowd, I can see where they’re coming from: people died; people were injured; there is strong evidence that the guy they caught did it. He should still get a trial, should still get his rights, but I understand the anger. Where we really part ways is that it’s not just the hotheads who seem unable to control themselves—it’s pretty much everyone, from law enforcement to the media to the average Joe: all agree that exceptions must be made in these dangerous times. But I digress.
Unlike Tsarnaev, the people in Guantánamo haven’t been charged with anything. Hell, we don’t even know what they might have done wrong, other than perhaps “harbor anti-American sentiments”. Is that a crime? And now, after all these years of unjust imprisonment, the US is afraid to let them go because of what they might do? We piss them off by imprisoning them unfairly and then continue to imprison them because we’re afraid that they’ll be so mad at us once released that they might harm Americans? Or American interests? Or what? Are they super-villain cab-drivers or something? Like General Zod from Superman, who had to be imprisoned in an extra-dimensional cube to keep him out of trouble? Our we afraid that, once released, these psychologically destroyed and physically starved people will suddenly HULK OUT and lay waste to vast swathes of idyllic America?
As purely an aside, did that not already happen when we let the so-called “masters of the universe” drain our economy and leave its husk by the roadside? We are willing to sacrifice our national soul to keep highly fantastical and utterly imaginary threats at bay while we allow far greater damage to be wrought without so much as a peep. The Hulk could not wreak as much damage to America as either our headlong plunge into a security-state nightmare or our corruption-and-fraud-driven housing-bubble collapse has. But, again, I digress.
To conclude, we have all of this turpitude under the purportedly most liberal, socialist President that America could possibly hope to elect. The world waits, I’m sure, with bated breath to see what marvel of fascist thought will be elected by Americans ignorant of reality and hungry for revenge against a world that hates them.
Guantánamo is an abomination without even considering the perversity of keeping a military base/prison on a corner of an island nation against which the US has blockaded all other economic activity for over 50 years (Cuba, for those weak in geography or US political history). Cuba won’t have anything to do with them until they overthrow their communist government and open themselves to foreign private investment—and it is an ever-present danger to the US. So dangerous that we have a military base in their country, despite their status as an enemy. And we’re perpetrating the most horrific human-rights violations there. Is it any wonder that they say that irony is dead in America?
It’s utterly, utterly awful.
The NYT is so utterly typical of the US, a perfect representative of the American psyche. Even in the face of such an affront to any ethical or moral standard worth mentioning, they still focus only on the economic/fiscal impact of any given issue (as does Obama). You’re not allowed to use anything else as a reason in America. All of the reasoning above, based on what is perceived as right and wrong is null and void in what are deemed the serious policy circles.
For example, the article cites Obama as,
“[d]escribing the prison in Cuba as a waste of taxpayer money that has had a damaging effect on American foreign policy”
That’s why we should close it? Because we’re losing money and it hurts us? Not because it’s gulag? Thanks for the moral compass, New York Times.
And, as mentioned in the article, Obama never really wanted to close Guantánamo; he wanted to move it to a splendid, comfortable, super-max facility on the US mainland. Congress thwarted him in his efforts because nobody wanted these super-criminals in their white-picket-fenced midst.
Would a super-max American prison have been better, somehow? Those, too, are an affront to all that we would consider civilized, with prisoners in solitary confinement for over 23 hours per day. By all rights, they are not legal by American standards, if we interpret “cruel and unusual punishment” at all literally. But the only part of the Bill of Rights that any God-fearing, real American cares about is the Second Amendment anyway. Is that not also indicative of our war-like nature? Of our utter vapidity? That we cling to the right to fight back against government tyranny, all the while allowing all of the other rights for which we fought to be taken away in the name of security? The first, fourth, fifth and eighth Amendments [2]—the most prominent examples—are obviated with nary a peep. But as long as we have the right to bear arms, we can get all of those back whenever we want? We are either collective really that stupid or we’re collectively really that small-minded and mean to think that those lofty rules only apply to us and our kind. That there are certain kinds to which we should not extend these precious and pristine rights because those are the bad guys. And how do we know that they’re bad? Well, they hate our freedoms, don’t they?
I shall endeavor to make that my last digression, or I’ll never finish this article.
And not only are most of the people in Guantánamo innocent—they have, at any rate, never been charged—but they’ve actually been cleared to leave for years. Unfortunately, the transfer procedure is just taking a little while. As stated above, this is not an Obama thing. It wasn’t solely a Bush thing, either. It is a thing birthed from America’s putrid soul, a soul full of bile directed toward the “other”, manipulated and honed to a fine point by selfishness and mind-boggling and deliberate ignorance as well a gigantic dollop of propaganda such as the world has never seen. [3]
And this is not hyperbole. Read the following casually deposited statement from the New York Times —considered the leading, left-wing rag by many real Americans.
“Mr. Obama was ambiguous about one of the most difficult problems raised by Guantánamo: what to do with dozens of detainees deemed too risky to release but not feasible to prosecute. His policy has been not to release those prisoners, but to continue to imprison them indefinitely under the laws of war — just somewhere else.”
Look at the words: “ambiguous”, “difficult”, “deemed”, “feasible”, “continue to imprison”—this is the soft language of tyranny. A modern tyranny, to be sure, one that cares that you think of it as a democratic bastion, a harbor against the marauding hordes of evil that are eager to tear freedom from your babies’ weakly grasping fingers.
But the Times is discussing people that cannot be prosecuted for lack of evidence, but that the government—as well as the Times—knows did something bad, or intended to do something bad to America. Or thought bad thoughts about America. Or whatever. Evil is evil. Just be happy that they’re behind bars and that someone is standing on that wall, protecting your American ass. [4]
The second half of the article is then concerned mostly with whether it’s unethical to force the prisoners to stay alive, cutting our eyes away from the main horror to focus, as always, on … us. The Times is concerned that innocent American doctors are being ethically compromised by the force-feeding. If the force-feedings were carried out by soldiers (some are), would that be better? Would that fix the problem? That almost 2/3 of a prison population is suffering so badly that they’re trying to starve themselves to death? But the problem that the times focuses on is not the prisoners’ situation but rather the moral weight on the doctors’ shoulders.
Re-read the article and see the tone, see the information and angles that are covered. It’s almost as appalling as the issues they skirt.
The article 130 Men Are Starving Themselves to Death Because Political Cowardice Keeps Them Locked Up by Amy Goodman (AlterNet) includes government statements that reveal the same attitude.
“Some prisoners have reportedly lost dramatic amounts of weight, while authorities have attempted to break the strike with force-feeding and isolation. Many human rights and medical groups consider force-feeding a form of torture. The U.S. government says allowing them to starve would be inhumane. (Emphasis added.)”
It would be inhumane to let them starve to death, but force-feeding them in order to keep them indefinitely imprisoned with no charges is…what? Humane? Civilized? What the f&$k are we doing here? Just trying to push the whole issue back into the shadows, I suspect.
As always, turn the tables, put the shoe on the other foot. When America invaded Vietnam and killed 50,000 of its soldiers in a deluded, mad war that they never officially declared while killing millions of Vietnamese who wanted to decide for themselves whether they would be communists or socialists, we mourned each and every life. I grew up in a country where the black MIA (Missing In Action) flag flew on every second lawn. Some still fly to this day.
And that was for soldiers whose job was to travel 8000 miles to enforce our colonial will on another country. Guantánamo is full of cab drivers who were sold to the US and spirited first to Baghram prison and then to Guantánamo. If I know the US, they will agree to release the prisoners, but only if they first work off their debt—airfare as well as room and board for the last 11 years—at $2 per day. Then we’re square. Forced-feedings cost money, you know, and you may have heard that we’re a bit tight on cash lately.
In the article, on a supposedly left-wing web site—it would be deemed treasonous by those Americans whose reality is shaped mostly by mainstream media—we read that “We’re in crisis, and President Obama is doing nothing.” But, plastered across the article is an advertisement for “Brunch with Barack”, as shown below.
And this is one of the more compassionate journalistic views you will see on Guantánamo; imagine how much the rest of America cares about what is going on. Which brings us back to the point that Guantánamo is simply a projection of a deeper sickness in American culture, the need to view all issues through a simplistic—and utterly flawed—economic lens. Morality and ethics carry no weight in discussions whereas economics trumps all. And we don’t even understand that facet very well. The economic lens through which we view all issues warps reality beyond recognition. Even a site like AlterNet cannot just report on the horrific human-rights abuses of the Obama administration without, at the same time, running advertisements paid for by that self-same administration’s political party.
Who wouldn’t want to brunch with that hilarious guy who yucks it up with Jimmy Fallon or absolutely kills—the families of US drone victims will, I hope, pardon the expression—at the Correspondents Dinner every year?
Again, citing from 130 Men Are Starving Themselves to Death … by Amy Goodman (AlterNet)
“[…] the average American on the street does not understand that half of these men, […] 86 of the men are cleared for release, meaning that the government has said that not only haven’t they done anything wrong, but they’re not dangerous, that they could be released immediately. And they languish there in Guantánamo while the president is guffawing with, you know, the social elite in Washington.”
The lawyer for eleven of these men continues in his interview,
“But that’s not what we—who we are as a country. As a country, we don’t hold people for what they may do in the future.”
This is where he is dead wrong. The America to which he refers—if it ever existed other than on paper—is gone. There is a large majority of Americans absolutely falling all over themselves to convict people of pre-crimes—so long as they are people that the media has assured them are dangerous and—and this part is critical—so long as they are people that they do not know. Destroy the other to provide a façade of safety. We’re not even clever enough to come up with a new way of being evil, settling instead for a banal rehashing of history, utterly oblivious of Santayana and Vidal. [5]
Published by marco on 23. Feb 2013 19:09:37 (GMT-5)
Ron Paul appeared on a recent Smiley and West show. He’s a bit slippery. He generally argues for absolute liberty and that the government’s role is to ensure liberty—in other words, the goal of the strict Libertarian that he always has been. If nothing else, he’s consistent. But he very quickly gets into trouble with issues that don’t work so well with a black-and-white political philosophy—in other words, almost any issue of consequence.
For example, the conversation turns to Hate-Crime legislation, an issue for which there is room for a lot of nuance.
Ron Paul started off strongly with the following statement:
“The other way you look at that, is that if there’s an identical crime committed, and one is perceived to be motivated for one reason versus another, why should one person get less punishment? […] It’s the act itself that should be judged; no one should get more punishment or less punishment because…”
This is the basic—and strong—argument against hate-crime legislation: it’s already illegal to beat the crap out of someone, so why make the punishment worse if you beat the crap out of a gay person because you hate gay people? The motive may be necessary in order to determine guilt, but it’s irrelevant for determining the severity of the punishment, no?
In the ivory-tower, theoretical world, the argument would end there.
In most systems of law, however, one of the reasons for exacting punishment is deterrence. History has shown that the deterrence against beating a man can more easily be overcome by intense prejudice. So the reasoning is that the punishment for a crime driven by prejudice should be more severe. We don’t want people beating each other, but we really don’t want people beating each other for morally abhorrent reasons like prejudice.
It’s not the soundest of reasoning, but people aren’t the most rational of creatures. So, while I don’t agree with the logic behind hate-crime legislation, I can agree that it fits snugly within the immanent legal framework in the U.S. That is, things we consider to be worse, we punish more severely. Dealing heroin is punished more severely than dealing marijuana and so forth. Even if the logic isn’t borne out by experience or historical data, it is, at least, consistent.
Dr. Cornel West agrees, pointing out that strict libertarianism will fail to protect the most vulnerable groups, leaving them to be preyed upon ad infinitum, which can’t be a situation than any humanist should abide. That is, the world is messy, humans are irrational and theoretical conceptions often break down, leading to needless suffering.
“I think Tavis is pushing you, though, in a wonderful way, that your night-watchman conception of government where the government is to protect property, the government is to procure security. What brother Tavis is saying, there are groups who (sic) are weak and vulnerable. Do you think that government should protect the right of workers to engage in collective bargaining? Because it’s clear that they’re weak and vulnerable in a corporatist system that you and I and Nader and Tavis are critical of. It seems you’ve got to thicken this notion of government’s role if you’re really concerned about the individual rights of people who have been treated as if they’re members of a group and cast as weak and vulnerable owing to racism.”
This is a well-stated objection to the pure libertarian principle: that the application of such has historically led to human suffering. And, that it has been historically applied lopsidedly to certain people—of certain groups, which is not fair. Until we can ensure a more equitable and consistent application of libertarian values, we should put in some non-libertarian checks—training wheels, as it were—to keep people on the straight and narrow.
Instead of responding to this well-stated and consistent argument about how to actually ensure liberty for all—rather than just stating it as a goal—Ron Paul responds as follows:
“But you have to look at which system so far has produced the greatest amount (sic) of jobs and the greatest amount of prosperity. We’ve generally followed what you’re talking about for many, many decades and now we have a situation where we have 22-24% unemployed, more among minorities, so that thing doesn’t work…”
Wait, now he’s making the economic argument? I thought he cared about liberty above all? Is he suggesting that you sometimes have to stop defending people’s liberty in order to give them a job? Or is he subtly trying to suggest that, in a capitalist society, without a job a person has no chance at obtaining liberty and freedom from subjugation? That seems a bit far-fetched—and, quite frankly, much more subtle than I imagine Mr. Paul to be or for him to expect his audience to be.
At any rate, it doesn’t address how the overtly libertarian society we’ve built tends to use a job as way of limiting a person’s freedom. I.e. keeping them chained to a job else they lose their entire societal standing, health insurance, etc. We’ve built a society where wages aren’t keeping up with the cost of living, so people end up not being able to afford health care. There are two paths from here: sink or swim (i.e. let people suffer and die if they can’t provide for their own care within the strict bounds of the market system), or provide a health-care system, which increases the size of the government.
It would be possible to avoid this if people were paid more in general, but that’s not happening either because the MARKET IS KING and the natural attractor [1] in this equation is a race to the bottom. But the libertarian system is designed to screw a lot of people over. It will always spiral in this direction.
Paul realized that the discussion in that direction was going to be a hard slog in which he couldn’t possible come out looking good. [2] He changed the conversation away from social and domestic issues and turns to military contracting and defense spending—where he rightly thinks that the government is much too large, in contrast to many other big-government opponents who only want to eliminate social programs. However, his call to get rid of this kind of spending directly contradicts the concern for jobs that he espoused not one minute earlier.
At any rate, he went on to say that,
“The whole purpose of a free society is to make sure that you and I have our rights to live our lives as we choose, how to spend our money as we choose, go to our church as we want, to make as much money as we want, but I just happen to have the firm conviction that that society will produce the greatest amount of wealth.”
That doesn’t sound like it has much to do with liberty or justice or fairness or any of the things that actually make life bearable for people. And it has an uncomfortable emphasis on money and church. It doesn’t sound like a plan for equitable distribution. It sounds much more like a dog-eat-dog prescription for life that mirrors quite accurately what the U.S. currently is. Looking at that summary statement, it’s a mystery what Ron Paul’s problem is with the current system: it’s the natural extrapolation of his core ideals. Especially the laser-like focus on making and spending money.
Cornell West riposted:
“I think we got to the center of this: I’m a deep democrat with libertarian sensibilities; you’re a deep libertarian with a little dose of democracy added on. I think we got to the core of this thing. I think we got some common ground, though.”
Ron Paul did not disagree.
Paul was famously squeezed into such a corner when he said during a debate that basically someone without insurance would have to take responsibility for his own death, if need be.
“What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul responded, adding, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…”
That is, as the saying goes, the way the ball bounces. He’s be right if we were all still cavemen or if there just wasn’t a ridiculous amount of wealth and resources to go around. But there is. And he’s not.
Published by marco on 11. Feb 2013 22:26:12 (GMT-5)
NBC has released a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo titled DOJ White Paper: Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen Who Is a Senior Operational Leader of Al-Qa’ida or An Associated Force by DOJ (MSNBC). As you read through the document (or just the citations below), if you find yourself being swayed by the DOJ’s seductive logic, it is a useful exercise to turn the parties around: instead of the US claiming the rights detailed in this document, imagine that it were Israel or Russia or Iran. This is what the rest of the world does when confronted with such brashness, such arrogance, such utter fanaticism. The memo evinces a mad desire to convince the very people that the U.S. slays that the U.S. is doing it for the best of reasons, with the highest of purpose, and supported by the most ironclad of legal reasoning.
This is not new. For some reason, those in power want not just to wield nearly unimaginable and unstoppable power over their subjects, but want their love as well. It is one of the most reliable ways of preventing revolution. This document from the DOJ was supposedly leaked. It is more likely that its contents were floated among what passes in the U.S. for the intelligentsia to see how it would be received. In the vernacular, the Obama administration threw it up on the wall to see what sticks.
This history of this behavior is well-documented and discussed in the article The Paranoia of the Superrich and Superpowerful: Washington’s Dilemma on a “Lost” Planet by Noam Chomsky & David Barsamian (TomDispatch), this attitude is not at all new. From the article,
“The Clinton doctrine was that the United States is entitled to resort to unilateral force to ensure ‘uninhibited access to key markets, energy supplies, and strategic resources.’ […] The belief in that entitlement continues right to the present. It’s also part of the intellectual culture.”
As detailed in the recent Obama DOJ memo, the only kind of legal killing discussed is that by the U.S. And the majority of the memo deals with legal justifications for killing U.S. citizens, acts for which it is deemed necessary to make more of an effort at explanation. That it is legal for the U.S. to kill any and all other non-U.S.-citizens is so obvious as to need no discussion.
For example, when some commentators—Chomsky foremost among them—thought that even an Osama bin Laden deserved a trial and due process, that “[i]f you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial.” The well-trained U.S. intelligentsia deemed this attitude “amazingly naive”, as detailed in the following passage.
“Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left liberal commentator, […] said that ‘one of the main functions of the international institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use of deadly military force by western powers.’ Of course, he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the United States. So the principle on which the international system is based is that the United States is entitled to use force at will.”
Chomsky and Barsamian covered many more examples of very well-respected members of the U.S. intellectual elite from both sides of the political spectrum being equally morally corrupt and thoroughly abasing themselves before what they somehow convinced themselves to be unquestionable U.S. hegemony. [1]
What follows is a series of excerpts with my stream-of-consciousness notes that I took as I was reading the document. The citations were transcribed by hand since the PDF was composed of only a series of scanned pages and was obfuscated with MSNBC watermarks.
One of the first parts of the document establishes to whom the document applies:
“The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future […]”
This assurance that extra-judicial killing applies only to the worst of the worst—i.e. an American “who is a senior, operational leader of al-Qa’ida or an associated force of al-Qa’ida”—wouldn’t last long, as the DOJ would soon open up the memo’s applicability by weakening all of the conditions described above, utterly obviating them from a legal perspective.
So far, though, the memo still doesn’t quite cover Anwar al Awlaki.
“Targeting a member of an enemy force who poses an imminent threat of violent attack to the United States is not unlawful.”
Well, it used to be, didn’t it? Now, apparently, anytime you feel like killing someone, you just have to declare war on them and their annihilation is legal. Or, as we’ll see later, just have Congress give the Executive the power to declare a permanent war.
They still didn’t feel that Anwar al Awlaki’s murder was covered yet. Let’s up the ante:
“It is a lawful act of national defense.”
Killing an American abroad who posed a potential if very vague threat—even in faraway Yemen—counts as an act of national defense. It kind of makes you wonder whether the people writing this horseshit even believe it. Or do they chuckle? I almost hope that they chuckled while they were writing this. I’m much more comfortable with evil bastards who know they’re evil bastards than with those who are convinced that they are working on the side of goodness and light. (See footnotes below for some startling examples.)
“Nor would it violate otherwise applicable federal laws barring unlawful killing in Title 18 or the assassination an in Executive Order No. 12333.”
Of course it doesn’t. Because you need it not to. So what’s the reason that it doesn’t conflict with all of these things? The message is: because we the mighty DOJ says it doesn’t. So sit down and shut up while the grownups do the dirty work you’re too much of a chickenshit to take care of.
To be fair, though, if you accept the argumentation, the DOJ is definitely getting warmer on justifying the murder of Anwar al Awlaki.
“Moreover, a lethal operation in a foreign nation would be consistent with international legal principles of sovereignty and neutrality if it were conducted, for example, with the consent of the host nation’s government or after a determination that the host nation is unable or unwilling to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted. (Emphasis added.)”
Well, we’ve cleared up now that it was legal to nail Anwar al Awlaki in Yemen because they clearly weren’t going to do it.
Does that mean that Cuba can finally legally drone-strike Orlando Bosch? Oh, he’s already dead? Was it Cuba who killed him? He died of old age in a Miami hospital? Oh.
Does it mean that Yemeni soldiers are also allowed to hunt and kill the drone operators who are hunting and killing people in Yemen? Those are terrorist attacks executed by the U.S. on Yemen, no? By these self-same rules? No? I suppose it would be useful to review the initial few paragraphs of this article as a reminder as to who runs the world—and who makes the rules.
But just to continue the thought experiment, let’s assume that at least part of the Yemeni government is on board. Would those members of the Yemeni government who took umbrage to U.S. attacks also be justified in writing up a document allowing them to kill both Yemenis and Americans and anyone else in the U.S. who poses an “imminent threat of violent attack to [Yemen]”? What would the U.S. think of such an attack? Would they accept its legality after Yemen explained that Yemen had only carried out the attacks after establishing to their own satisfaction that the U.S. was “unable or unwilling to suppress the threat posed by the individual targeted”?
“Were the target of a lethal operation a U.S. citizen who may have rights under the Due Process Clause and the Fourth Amendment, that individual’s citizenship would not immunize him from a lethal operation.”
Before you ask the obvious question—why would the crystal-clear 4th Amendment not apply?—the answer is—say it with me—because we say so.
“[…] against a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida or its associated forces who poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States. (Emphasis added.)”
If you thought not being a senior operational leader of al-Qa’ida would protect you (as suggested in the first paragraphs of the memo), think again. To establish a baseline for what “imminence” means in the U.S., remember that this is the country that believed that an attack by Iraq was imminent. The standard of proof for imminence of an attack is pretty f&$#ing low.
Also, “the United States” is pretty much defined as anywhere where Americans live: bases, embassies, diplomat’s houses. Going by the logic cited above, I can only assume that the United States is pretty much wherever the f%#$ we say it is. That is, anyway, how I would translate the declaration that “the AUMF [Authorization of Military Force] itself does not set forth an express geographic limitation” and the “Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions” says the conflict is not a “clash between nations” and thus has no jurisdiction.
That Al-Qa’ida has no nation makes the U.S. think it can magically make the Geneva Conventions go away. The U.S. is holding all of the guns, so it would be behoove you to go along. As mentioned above, though, the more interesting thing is this need, this compunction to get the consent of the oppressed.
The paper cites many cases of precedence, most of quite recent provenance (2004, 2006, several from 2010, 2011), illustrating quite clearly that the main logic is newer and based on laws made up just in the last couple of administrations. They use a lot of sophistry and legalese but it boils down to: we want this to be legal, so we will make it legal.
As for the case when “operations [are executed] in a new nation”, well, then it’s perfectly legal and logical—it’s common sense!—to spread the conflict to that nation as well, all without asking them. The best part is the precedent: Vietnam! That’s right, the war theree spread to Laos and Cambodia—spread by the U.S., but that’s neither here nor there—and the U.S. was not prosecuted for it so that established the legal precedent that war can spread. Q.E.D.
The memo doesn’t even beat around the bush here:
“[…] if a neutral state has been unable for any reason to prevent violations of its neutrality by the troops of one belligerent using its territory as a base of operations, the other belligerent has historically been justified in attacking those enemy forces in that state.”
Sounds like taking the Afghan conflict into Pakistan is also legal. What were the odds? I know the answer to this question, but can Iraq and Afghanistan now attack the U.S. legally for belligerence? I can’t imagine that it would work that way.
“In view of the interests and practical considerations, the United States would be able to use lethal force against a U.S. citizen, who is located outside the United States and is an operational leader continually planning attacks against U.S. persons and interests, in at least the following circumstances: (1) where an informed, high-level official of the U.S. government has determined that […]”
The “at least” means that the listed circumstances would be sufficient, but serve only as an example and other situations not listed would also fall under this rule. Presumably the applicability would be decided on an ad-hoc basis—presumably by “an informed, high-level official”. That’s pretty damned open-ended as far as who can be targeted—with no due process, the burden of proof for providing that an individual is “continually planning attacks” is exactly zero—and who can authorize it. How many thousands of “informed, high-level” people are there in the U.S. government? There are almost a million people with top-secret security clearance. Do they all get to act on this law?
“In these circumstances, the “realities” of the conflict and the weight of the government’s interest[s…] are such that the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process to such a U.S. citizen.”
No trial for you. No trial for anyone. The nature of the undefined conflict has forced the U.S. into this very uncomfortable and unfortunate corner. We all just have to make the best of it. You will be doing so in itty-bitty pieces sprayed all over the neighborhood in which you and your family used to live.
What about the requirement that you have to be “planning attacks”? That part is addressed in the next section, pleading again that common sense and the “nature of the conflict” dictate that the U.S. cannot “refrain from action until preparations for an attack are concluded.” Not only does the attack never have to take place, neither would any or a majority of the planning.
Essentially, if an “informed, high-level” U.S. government official thinks you may be thinking dangerous thoughts about the U.S. and orders a drone strike, their ass would be amply covered by this paper. How will we be able to evaluate the actual imminence of these theoretical attacks? There isn’t really any way to do that doesn’t involve what seems like a lot of work, so why even try? How can we tell the difference between actual, Armageddon-asteroid–level imminence and the crazed imaginings of an American zealot? You can’t but rest assured that you will either be much safer for it—or dead, depending on your circumstances.
The paper confirms this in stating that “the threat posed by Al-Qa’ida and its associated forces demands a broader concept of imminence in judging when a person continually planning terror attacks […]” Everything after that doesn’t matter because the gist is that the leeway granted to those acting on this rule/law/paper would be “broad”—a ten-lane highway, most likely.
The paper goes on to note that the high-level official would have, of course, to abort an operation if “anticipated civilian casualties would be excessive in relation to the anticipated military advantage”. This is followed by a long section softening the Hague convention against treachery and further reducing Fourth Amendment protections to, essentially, nothing.
If no proof or process is required for execution of sentence, then it can be applied to anyone, with retroactive justification. That’s pretty much all there is to it.
The language is fancier and I’m sure the people who wrote it are just in love with what they see as their own brilliance in dodging loopholes, but we don’t have to accept it. They are trying to make state murder legal, which just won’t wash. Or it shouldn’t, at any rate.
The authors of this memo know this and try to justify that as well, by stating that “under the circumstances described in this paper, there exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional considerations.” Isn’t that convenient? If we accept that statement, then we have to accept that the prior pages cannot be adjudicated and must be accepted a priori. The paper arrogates all power to the Executive and then cautions the Judiciary against even thinking about interfering because it would endanger the nation. Or, in their words,
“[w]ere a court to intervene, it might be required to issue an ex ante command to the President […a]nd judicial enforcement of such orders would require the Court to supervise inherently predictive judgments by the President.”
The court can’t interfere because then it would be judging the President. That is, the President can’t even come up with evidence for even the shadow of due process, so how will the court manage to do it? The President has decided that a person needs killin’ and who is the court to even question that? And if they were allowed to interfere, they might try to put the kibosh on the killin’ and then America would be unsafe. Does the court want millions of American lives on its hands? No? Then sit the f&$k down and shut the f%&k up while the real men do some killin’.
And then I swear to God that the end of page 10 and most of page 11 redefines murder as OK when it’s justified. Manslaughter laws, international unlawful-killing laws, murder laws—they all go out the window, one by one, in the inexorable march toward the natural conclusion that “we know who needs killin’ and we ain’t got time for proof”. Since the authors had already eliminated due process on page one, this section—while gob-smackingly amoral—is mostly moot. It was likely more inspired more by some lingering feelings of humanity and conscience than by any real legal need.
There is apparently a limit. Shockingly, on page 12, the paper admits that “[t]he public authority justification would not excuse all conduct of public officials from all criminal prohibitions”. So, they seem to have stopped just short of enabling “God mode”. [2] They do, however arrogate to themselves—the public authority—the right to acts that would not be allowed to the hoi polloi (i.e. the “persons not acting pursuant to public authority”). It just “would not make sense” for “Congress […] to criminalize […] activities undertaken by public officials”. The goose knows what it’s doing; the gander does not.
Then they finally slip up and put in an analogy:
“federal criminal statutes should be construed to exclude authorized conduct of public officers where such a reading “would work obvious absurdity as, for example, the application of a speed law to a policeman pursuing a criminal […]”
To apply the analogy back to the situation being protected by this memo: just as a cop can break the speed limit to catch a speeder, the executive is allowed to kill people without due process that they suspect of wanting to kill others without due process. Even if they haven’t actually done so. It’s called preventative defense.
“Nor is there anything in the text or legislative history of section 1119 [prohibits unlawful killing; ed.] itself to suggest that Congress intended to abrogate or otherwise affect the availability of this traditional justification for killings.”
Surely when Congress outlawed unlawful killing, they didn’t mean us, did they? Just those other guys. The bad guys.
This would all be utter insanity if it was a post on a right-wing blog. It is not. It is a memo by the U.S. Department of Justice. It’s not law, though. There are a tremendous number of cases cited, all leading to the foregone conclusion. They may, in fact, logically provide justification. The law of the U.S. may, at this point, be such a steaming pile of shit that it literally allows some people to kill others without justification or due process. But, if that’s the case, rather than just accepting it, we instead have a lot of laws to overturn. Starting with this one,
“The United States is currently in the midst of a congressionally authorized armed conflict with al-Qa’ida and associated forces, and may act in national self-defense […]”
The bar for providing that an action is “in the interests of national defense” has historically been so low as to be nearly non-existent. And this one congressional authorization—the AUMF (Authorization of Military Force)—seems to have put the country in a perpetual state of war during which wartime rules apply—and those are, essentially, that the strongest gets his way.
And, the war cannot end because “mere suspension of combat is insufficient” for a former member of Al-Qa’ida to claim protection under Geneva Conventions Common Article 3. Simply “hav[ing] laid down their arms” or being injured “hors de combat” is not sufficient for the U.S. to not have the right to kill that person. Once the U.S. has suspicion, the only way to avoid being justifiably and legally killed is to die, apparently.
So, extra-judicial killing is required because Al-Qa’ida—insofar as it actually even exists as an entity—is not a state and cannot be attacked. Conflict can spread to any country in which we claim that Al-Qa’ida is hiding and it will be their fault for hiding there. And, finally, there’s no way for anyone who we say is in Al-Qa’ida to either disavow it or to stop being a member.
Even for those who’ve never actually done anything to the U.S., this paper would allow the U.S. to continue to target that person if we suspect that they have bad thoughts. They can’t prove that they don’t—no due process, remember? The only alternative is to give yourself up to the welcoming arms of Guantànamo or kill yourself. The U.S. would be satisfied with either.
“This paper does not attempt to determine the minimum requirements necessary to render such an operation lawful. […] it concludes only that the stated conditions would be sufficient to make lawful a lethal operation.”
The paper doesn’t acknowledge that the Executive is in any way restricted to applying this logic only to Al-Qa’ida members either. It has demonstrated to the satisfaction of its authors that it is legal to kill those unsavory types—but that the legal scaffolding will very well apply to any other enemies of the state.
Much of the reasoning in this memo rests on the original Congressional AUMF (Authorization of Military Force) which was, apparently, a watershed moment in U.S. history in that it utterly eradicated checks and balances and instituted a monarchy. Oops.
Of course, if we refuse to accept that that happened, we can also ignore the utterly mad reasoning of this memo. Be aware, however, that the Obama administration will not ignore it.
So you’ll be right, but you’ll be dead. You will have been right, though, so that’s something.
The two citations that stood out in this respect were the following two examples, the first discussing the idea that the U.S. yearns for democracy in any realistic way.
“If you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a bad joke. That’s even recognized by leading scholars, though they don’t put it this way. One of the major scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly regarded — a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He worked in Reagan’s State Department and has several books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history. The history is that every U.S. administration is “schizophrenic.” They support democracy only if it conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of course, there’s another interpretation, but one that can’t come to mind if you’re a well-educated, properly behaved intellectual.”
The brainwashing is so deeply ingrained that, even when the fact that the U.S. never supports actual democracy—in one case after another after another—they are all regarded as anomalies, aberrations to what is perceived as the baseline desire for democracy. The next example is in the same vein, with the “transcendent” purpose of the U.S. taken as a given—a fact whose truth is borne out only my hundreds of claims but isn’t borne out by any historical evidence whatsoever.
“The main founder of contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the very few political scientists and international affairs specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called The Purpose of American Politics. You already know what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The purpose of America, on the other hand, is “transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like Carothers. So he went through the record. He said, when you study the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says, to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds” — which is a good comparison. It’s a deeply entrenched religious belief. It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to disentangle it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or “hating America” — interesting concepts that don’t exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian societies and here, where they’re just taken for granted.”
For Americans, U.S. superiority and goodness is a matter of faith.
Published by marco on 20. Nov 2012 06:35:07 (GMT-5)
In 2009, Side-by-side in Gaza noted the disparity in the damage caused by Palestinian ordnance versus that caused by Israeli. As revealed in pictures from Israel—Gaza conflict (Big Picture Blog), the stark difference remains in 2012. Is it clear that, while the Gazans are capable of producing some weaponry despite the strict blockades (and allegedly with Iran and Arab countries in its corner), its firepower pales in comparison to that of the Israelis (with the U.S. in its corner). Having the right friends makes all the difference.
Published by marco on 13. Nov 2012 21:56:55 (GMT-5)
The U.S. elections have come and gone. People in other parts of the world—I can attest to Switzerland—were at times exasperated with the amount of coverage in their home countries. That coverage, it seems, pales in comparison to the deluge of information to which Americans themselves were subjected for at least a solid year. And some candidates even started campaigning two years out. The intensity of media saturation was reported to have been prodigious.
Unsurprisingly, many are just glad that it’s over, almost regardless of who actually won the damned thing. It is reported that the amount of money spent on all elections was approximately $5.8 billion. While that pales in comparison to other large numbers we can think of—like the $1.030–$1.415 trillion federal military budget [1] or the $156.3 billion in revenue Apple made in fiscal year 2012—it’s still a lot of money to spend on…what, exactly?
Many of the candidates who were supported most buoyantly by anonymous and very generous donors failed to be elected. This implies that, even in the U.S., it is possible to have a platform that is so odious that even oodles of cash can’t sell it. Another phenomenon that was quite apparent was the amazing depth to which people believed in the separate strand of reality generated by the right-wing media. There are always issues, like Benghazi, that one side will try to sell regardless of the paucity of evidence, simply because the upside is so good. But this year, the entire right-wing press was utterly baffled that Romney did not win in a landslide. This is reality-denial at an extreme level. Now that was a good sales job.
I’m not sure what the operating costs are for Fox News, but money invested into that reality- and consensus-building machine seems to be much better spent than on robo-calls, TV commercials or other standard campaign media.
That is, where the billions poured into traditional campaigning methods failed utterly to get certain candidates elected, billions spent elsewhere managed to make people believe in an entirely alternate reality where arithmetic does not exist.
SuperPAC owners, take heed: you get far more bang for your buck propagandizing through Fox News than negative campaign ads. Or, you could take the advice given in this cartoon by Chan Lowe on November 12th, 2012 (GoComics) (shown below).
To put into perspective how much we spend on the military, the article A Socialist Joins the Presidential Debates by Bruce Lesnick (CounterPunch) compares to the federal education budget:
“If you consider that the $248 billion annual interest payment on the national debt is primarily due to past military spending, the ratio of war to education spending is more than 16 to 1.”
I used Ballotpedia (Ballotpedia) as my reference. They have good sections showing who’s for/against and why. It’s also a good way to test the wind by... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 7. Nov 2012 22:31:27 (GMT-5)
A friend of mine in California asked for my input on the ballot propositions in California in November 2012. Here’s my quick impression of these issues. YMMV.
I used Ballotpedia (Ballotpedia) as my reference. They have good sections showing who’s for/against and why. It’s also a good way to test the wind by seeing which way Democrats or Republicans are voting. Also interesting to see which and how many papers endorsed one way or the other.
California has a lot of important issues on the ballot and got a few of them right: ending the three strikes law rights a horrific overreach of legislature, so that’s good. Death penalty still stands, though, and lifelong digital branding is now law for certain offenses. No labeling for GM foods and Californians could only approve the tax increase that’s bound to the billionaire hedge-fund guy instead of anything their own legislature came up with, but that’s just how they roll. Increasing property taxes would be a nifty idea, but it’ll be a cold day in default hell before they try that.
The following quote floated through the Internets, bubbling along on the social-network streams. It was written in support of voting for the candidate that supports gay rights, for one who supports equal rights for all Americans.
“I wish my... [More]”
Published by marco on 6. Nov 2012 00:05:52 (GMT-5)
The following quote floated through the Internets, bubbling along on the social-network streams. It was written in support of voting for the candidate that supports gay rights, for one who supports equal rights for all Americans.
“I wish my moderate Republican friends would simply be honest. They all say they’re voting for Romney because of his economic policies (tenuous and ill-formed as they are), and that they disagree with him on gay rights. Fine. Then look me in the eye, speak with a level clear voice, and say, “My taxes and take-home pay mean more than your fundamental civil rights, the sanctity of your marriage, your right to visit an ailing spouse in the hospital, your dignity as a citizen of this country, your healthcare, your right to inherit, the mental welfare and emotional well-being of your youth, and your very personhood.” It’s like voting for George Wallace during the Civil Rights movements, and apologizing for his racism. You’re still complicit. You’re still perpetuating anti-gay legislation and cultural homophobia. You don’t get to walk away clean, because you say you “disagree” with your candidate on these issues.”
A friend of mine posted this to his Facebook page and told his more tenuous friends that, should they disagree, he would unfriend them immediately. One of his possibly more distant female friends responded: “So go ahead and use the [un-friend] button because your friendship isn’t going to feed my children.”
Boom! Headshot! Can’t argue with that logic, eh, faggot? Think your right to be gay trumps my child’s right to eat? It. does. not. Q.E.D. [1]
I’ve heard this logic before. It is employed by people who have no fixed morals or principles. It follows, then, that they are not aware when they cross lines that place them squarely in the same camp as the more unsavory members of society. They will do anything to protect their own, justifying it because “won’t someone please think of the children?”
It can be argued that there is nothing inherently wrong with this attitude. It is, most likely, an unavoidable part of being human. However, when combined with an utter lack of knowledge about how the world works and what the issues really are, it is incredibly dangerous. Combined with superstition, her attitude approves all manner of horrific policies. The lady in question expressed all sorts of hopeful fiddle-faddle about a Romney presidency that had no roots in reality. Her hopes are that president Romney will help her feed her children better.
It’s almost as if, as soon as some way of protecting children is mentioned, it must be acted upon—just to be sure, just to be safe from recrimination should the aforementioned children be harmed. Bush Jr. said that “we had to attack them there [Iraq] so that they wouldn’t attack us here [the States]” and, for many people, it became true. The moms of the world ran through the mental calculation and, instead of dispensing with the wholesale superstition that underlay his argument, they supported an invasion of Iraq where hundreds of thousands of other children died—just to keep their own children safe. Is there a limit to this superstition? It seems the answer is no.
On Facebook, I responded to both sides with:
@Romney supporters: you think the policies of a Romney presidency will ease your financial pain in ways that those of an Obama presidency have not. You would be disappointed. The Romney campaign’s espoused economic strategies differ far less from those of the Obama campaign than you think, other than that they are generally more extreme. The effects would likely be detrimental to you and yours. The debt will not go down and neither will gas or food prices (unless the government intervenes in markets even more than now, which isn’t what you’re voting for, is it?)
@Obama supporters: the statement about complicity cited above is very on-point and can be applied to other abhorrent Republican attitudes toward women, right-to-choose and rape. However, that logic cuts both ways and puts Obama voters on the hook for extra-judicial killings, a continued expressed support for torture, eavesdropping on Americans, suspension of Habeas Corpus, the NDAA, the Patriot Act and a steady erosion of the Bill of Rights. The Bush administration started many of these policies, but you cannot ignore the fact that the Obama administration has wholeheartedly supported and even expanded them. The Romney campaign also supports them, but you’re not voting for him.
The conclusion I draw is that a vote for Romney or Obama puts you on the hook for the many horrible things listed above, but you can avoid being horrible to homosexuals and women on top of all of that by voting for Obama. Of course, you could also vote for Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson and extricate yourself still more.
It’s not just gay or women’s issues that are at stake, either. The article Capitol Hill’s Rabid, Ravaging Republicans by Ralph Nader (CounterPunch) lists many more examples:
“The Republicans en-mass (sic) voted to repeal protections to stop health insurance companies from discriminating on the basis of gender. […] In a frenzy, House Republicans have voted to repeal the “Affordable Care Act” 33 times. Be assured their hatred for Obamacare is not because they want full Medicare for all. It is because they want to voucherize Medicare and hand patients over to the avaricious Aetnas and the Pfizers who return the favor with campaign cash. […] Vote to weaken the Clean Air Act, drinking water safety standards, cut funding for these cancer preventing, health protecting programs while pushing for more military weapons and bloated Pentagon budgets. […] For the poor, let them eat less. Hunger in America is real. But not real enough for the Republicans to stop wanting to cut these food programs. (Emphasis added.)”
In the end, it’s almost always a war on the poor. A Romney presidency would accelerate that war in a way that even Obama hasn’t dared to do. That is, if we are to believe what Romney publishes about his own agenda. The article Pointing Toward Prosperity? by Paul Krugman (NY Times) provides a bit more detail, some illumination, on Romney’s economic plan:
“Mr. Romney’s “plan” is a sham. It’s a list of things he claims will happen, with no description of the policies he would follow to make those things happen. “We will cut the deficit and put America on track to a balanced budget,” he declares, but he refuses to specify which tax loopholes he would close to offset his $5 trillion in tax cuts.
“Actually, if describing what you want to see happen without providing any specific policies to get us there constitutes a “plan,” I can easily come up with a one-point plan that trumps Mr. Romney any day. Here it is: Every American will have a good job with good wages. Also, a blissfully happy marriage. And a pony.
“So Mr. Romney is faking it. His real plan seems to be to foster economic recovery through magic, inspiring business confidence through his personal awesomeness.”
As discussed in earlier posts, Krugman’s snarky comment about “personal awesomeness” comes very close to describing why Romney is running for president. He really and truly seems to believe that America will be much better off with him at the helm, based on all of his experience. He’s never failed before, so how could he fail now? It is this mythology about himself that deludes poor Mitt into thinking that he doesn’t have to explain himself or his plans—because what does it matter? He’s the right choice for America, no matter what, so what do Americans need details for?
Even as a staunch democrat, Krugman can’t muster up much enthusiasm for Obama’s plan. Krugman says that it’s far too modest and “[…] disappointing, to be sure. But a slow job is better than a snow job. Mr. Obama may not be as bold as we’d like, but he isn’t actively misleading voters the way Mr. Romney is. (Emphasis added.)”
There are good reasons to disagree with Krugman’s zinger of an assessment, emphasized above. The article The Moral Case for Silence by Norman Pollack (CounterPunch) sees a more sinister side to Obama’s economic plan.
“Obama, more than his predecessors, is the quintessential spokesperson for a mature capitalism in which government, as custodian of the public interest, is under assault from the forces of privatization, now gathering as a tidal wave which he is blithely surfing. The leader of government presides over its transformation into an annex of Wall Street. Really, a transmogrification, both of government and society, knit together in callous disregard for both economic and ethical constraints on greed, extremes in the distribution of wealth, and the widespread privation created by a political economy of market idolatry and financial chicanery.”
A vote for Obama may be a vote against Romney, but it’s not a vote for any real change in the economic system of America—or the world. If Romney is elected, the imposition of that system will be crasser and quicker; with Obama it will be slower and less painful. But the end result may be more-or-less the same. The argument is that Romney’s crassness may awake the revolution needed to avert further “widespread privation” whereas the soma of Obama’s presentation and approach will go undetected until it is too late, when an oligarchic state is a fait accompli.
The article Hurricane Sandy and the Myth of the Big Government-vs.-Small-Government Debate by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) explains how insidiously the “market idolaters” mentioned above twist their ideology to always neatly match their ends. When it benefits them, big government, subsidies, socialization et alia are good; when it benefits others, these things are the antithesis of America, a communist plot to benefit moochers.
Taibbi explains:
“Here in the tri-state area, and especially in the lower Manhattan region I’m staring at out my window right now, you’ll get much of the same – lots of whining now about deficit spending and the parasitical 47%, but also conspicuous silence a few years ago, when in one fell swoop, taxpayers had to spend about twice the amount of the annual federal budget just to save bonus seasons on Wall Street for the few thousand of our local assholes who nearly blew up the world economy.
“Programs like QE [Quantitative Easing] are always defended as being necessary to stimulate the economy in general, and who knows, maybe they are – but it’s conspicuous that a crowd of people who normally hate “government spending” are suddenly overflowing with praise for the Fed’s wisdom and logical explanations for why this massive pseudo-state intervention is necessary. (Emphasis added.)”
As Noam Chomsky puts it: the plan is privatization of profits and socialization of risk. All of the professed ideology and free-market mumbo-jumbo is just the marketing campaign used to sell the plan to the suckers that are going to pay for it.
Social security is another issue that the rich constantly hammer at, deploring the moochers that dare to think that they can actually use a pension plan that they’ve paid for. We haven’t heard very much about it during the campaign lately, though. Why? Because Mitt and Barack essentially agree. The article Why Big Bucks Donors Don’t Want President Obama to Champion Social Security by Dean Baker (AlterNet) explains that this is simply a pragmatic matter of funding.
Baker notes that,
“President Obama has consistently refused to rise to the defense of social security. In fact, in the first debate, he explicitly took the issue off the table, telling the American people that there is not much difference between his position [5] on social security and Romney’s.”
Whereas most of the second and third debates featured Mitt stumbling all over himself to agree with Obama, this capitulation of Obama’s in the first debate stands out. Baker goes on to explain why an ostensibly progressive president—hell, even a conservative one—should be proud to support social security.
“On its face, this is difficult to understand. In addition to being good politics, there are also solid policy grounds for defending social security. The social security system is perhaps the greatest success story of any program in US history. By providing a core retirement income, it has lifted tens of millions of retirees and their families out of poverty. It also provides disability insurance to almost the entire workforce. The amount of fraud in the system is minimal, and the administrative costs are less than [6] one 20th as large as the costs of private-sector insurers.”
It sounds like puppies, unicorns, sunshine and rainbows—all mixed into an ice-cream flavor that never melts. What’s the problem? It should be a no-brainer that Americans would defend this program to the death, voting heavily in favor of anyone who would support it. Alas, neither Obama nor Romney spends much time among average voters. Instead, they spend a lot of time with well-heeled donors, who are far more important to a modern American presidential campaign.
“But there is another set of economic considerations affecting the politics of social security. These considerations involve the economics of the political campaigns and the candidates running for office. The story here is a simple one: while social security may enjoy overwhelming support across the political spectrum, it does not poll nearly as well among the wealthy people – who finance political campaigns and own major news outlets. The predominant philosophy among this group is that a dollar in a workers’ pocket is a dollar that could be in a rich person’s pocket – and these people see social security putting lots of dollars in the pockets of people who are not rich.”
If nothing else, the Republicans have at least played the long game quite well. They laid down a backup plan four years ago and are just now springing it on the American public. The article Republicans Filibuster Everything, Romney Blames Obama for Not Working With Congress by Bob Cesca (Huffington Post) provides some background, but the sentiment in the title says it all. As Romney hammered away during the debates at Obama’s inability to get any legislation passed with Republican approval, it was clear that this was going to be their gambit in the end-game, should Romney’s charm fail to overwhelm Americans sufficiently.
“[…] the Republicans proceeded to rack up the highest number of filibusters in American history. […] Not even a handful of “sensible” Republicans had the guts to break ranks and vote with the Democrats. Meanwhile, on the House side, the Republican majority has voted in near-lockstep against almost everything.”
Lest we forget: these people are ostensibly there as representatives of real Americans, their constituents. But their actions seem to be much more in line with a lockstep ideology that would rather get nothing done at all—leaving their constituents in the lurch as well—than to let anything at all happen that might benefit Obama, regardless of whether it would benefit their constituents. This scorched-earth approach to politics is a good deal more extreme than at any other time in the past.
The reason for all of this? That, too, is explicit—and was roundly approved at the time:
“Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell famously told the National Journal, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” Not economic growth, jobs, healthcare or military strength. A failed Obama presidency was the primary – and I would argue the only goal of the last two Republican congresses. (Emphasis added.)”
And the Republicans have stated again and again that winning is more important than getting anything done, if it’s the wrong guy who gets it done. It’s an utterly insane—and utterly criminal—way to run a country, but it meets with hearty approval by at least half of the population, who are happy to torpedo their own lives—and those of their families—just to get Obama out of office.
With four years of groundwork laid, it was time for Romney to spring the trap:
“The Romney campaign is […] projecting Republican obstructionism onto the president and accusing him of refusing to work with Congress, even though the president and the Democrats have dished out heaping piles of legislation that Republicans could reasonably get behind. […] But if you take Romney’s word for it, the president is a lazy, do-nothing chief executive who’s been stonewalling the Republicans. (Emphasis added.)”
The essay The Blackmail Caucus by Paul Krugman (NY Times) points out that, divested of all adornment, the argument being made boils down to the following statement.
“Vote for Mr. Romney […] because if he loses, Republicans will destroy the economy.”
It is, in fairness, a good point. It is likely that the Republicans, should they lose tomorrow, will double down and make the last four years of economic woe seem like a trip to Disneyland. Who knows what they’re capable of? They’ve already demonstrated a sociopathy that should, at the very least, be respected for its destructive potential.
So what’s the answer? Vote Romney of course, and let him actually get something done. The Democrats have not shown the same willingness to burn the ground that Republicans have, so it is very likely that he will get something done. But is getting anything at all done worth it if those are the wrong things? Is it not better to stand still than to take steps backward? And where is our pride, anyway? Are we really going to succumb to a threat that is more at home in the Godfather than in a democratic society? As Krugman put it, “are we ready to become a country in which “Nice country you got here. Shame if something were to happen to it” becomes a winning political argument?”
The best way to listen to the foreign-policy debate was the ... [More]
]]>Published by marco on 5. Nov 2012 22:55:35 (GMT-5)
The third debate was eons ago, the election is tomorrow and, if we’re very lucky, we’ll never have to hear about Mitt Romney again. Sure, we’ll still be stuck with Obama but, as the Economist so lovingly put it, better the devil you know.
The best way to listen to the foreign-policy debate was the Expanding the Debate Special on Foreign Policy (Democracy Now!), which featured two of the other candidates—Jill Stein of the Green Party and Rocky Anderson of the Justice Party—who offered much smarter and less pandering answers than either of the two candidates who have the official stamp of approval. The Transcript of the Third Presidential Debate (NY Times) is also a good place to start, where you can read what the candidates actually said rather than concentrating on how they looked.
Many of the reactions I read focused on how close Obama and Romney actually are on foreign-policy issues. The article The Foreign Policy Debate: Coke or Pepsi? by Kevin Carson (Antiwar.com) explains that its not just that they agree on the issues—they’re operating from the same basic assumptions about how the world works. These assumptions don’t leave a lot of wiggle room.
“Liberal Democrats, just as much as Republicans, make foreign policy on the assumption stated by Chomsky as ‘America owns the world.’ Obama, as much as Romney, believes the United States bears some sort of messianic obligation to maintain “global security” by determining the outcomes of international disputes, installing “responsible” governments, and deciding who’s allowed to have nukes. Obama, as much as Romney, believes America is the one country whose “defense” capability should be based, not on “legitimate defensive needs,” but on the capability of enforcing its will on the entire rest of the world combined. Obama believes, every bit as much as Madeleine Albright did when she was raining death from the skies over Yugoslavia, that “America is the world’s indispensable nation.””
The “world’s indispensable nation” is a quote from Obama himself. This is not to say that Romney is any better—viewed from the perspective of someone who doesn’t accept American exceptionalism as a God-granted tenet, they’re both far away from the ideal. Romney, however, is adamant that whatever Obama is, he’s two times that—so he’s twice as far from the ideal, by his own admission.
But Romney wouldn’t see it that way, I think. He sees his presidential campaign as a way of granting America the greatest gift of all: his leadership. Romney’s entire life has consisted of him convincing himself that it was his steadfast leadership that was solely responsible for his success. Or, as has been oft-cited of late: he started life on third base and thinks he hit a triple. With Romney, it’s pathological, which is why—even more so than other politicians—you seem him swing from one viewpoint to another, seemingly desperate to just. get. those. votes. Whatever you need, he seems to be saying, just elect me, for f&#k’s sake. The essay Finally Liberated From Facts, Mitt Romney the Pure Bull Artist Takes Flight by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone) explains how liberating it must finally be for Mitt to just be himself.
“From the start of the first debate, Romney has almost seemed liberated, spouting line after line of breathless, ecstatic inventions – things that are, if not lies exactly, at the very least just simply made up out of thin air, and seemingly on the spot, too. The business about the $25,000 “bucket” of deductions which he prefaced, with seemingly half of America watching, with the phrase, “Let’s pick a number”: awesome. […] Now there’s no more future to worry about and he’s just casting off from his moorings and being what he basically is at heart, which is a salesman and bullshit artist of the highest order.”
After a lot of introductory text from both sides, the first interesting statement came from Obama, who took Romney to task for his unquestionably dated foreign-policy statements.
“Governor Romney, […] a few months ago when you were asked, what’s the biggest geopolitical threat facing America, you said Russia […] And the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back because, you know, the Cold War’s been over for 20 years. […] you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.”
Bam! This is a pretty accurate summary of, well, some of Romney’s policies—as explained above, he’s held the exact opposite views as well. Obama’s summary more accurately describes Paul Ryan’s views, which haven’t changed nearly as much as Romney’s. As Romney’s chosen running mate, one has to assume that Romney at least somewhat supports his views.
Obama went on to say that, as regards Syria—where Romney has said repeatedly that he would be much more aggressive—he himself favors a non-military approach, for pragmatic reasons.
“But we also have to recognize that, you know, for us to get more entangled militarily in Syria is a serious step. And we have to do so making absolutely certain that we know who we are helping, that we’re not putting arms in the hands of folks who eventually could turn them against us or our allies in the region. (Emphasis added.)”
The emphasized part is the one that should be the most important to Americans: it is of vital concern that we do not succumb to the false syllogism of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Romney, however, wasn’t buying it.
He responded with:
“Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea. It’s the route for them to arm Hezbollah in Lebanon, which threatens, of course, our ally Israel.”
At this point, I stopped the playback and quickly checked Wikipedia to confirm my suspicions. If Syria is so important to Romney’s foreign-policy plans, then why couldn’t he be bothered to look at a map before the debate? Iran has a little something called the Straits of Hormuz that form a massive coastline—something that even Fox News has seen fit to mention dozens of times. They regularly mention it as a threat. Even if Iran were somehow to forget that they have over 1500 miles of coastline, it’s unlikely that they would seek a route to the sea through a country with which they don’t even share a border. Perhaps I’m underestimating those sneaky Iranians in a way that Romney is not. Or perhaps Romney knows nothing of geography.
But neither of them was finished yet with Iran. In a response to the next question about Iran, Obama set out to prove his foreign-policy chops by bragging about how much suffering he caused in that country (without even mentioning the several cyber-war attacks his administration has made in what anyone else would call acts of war).
Obama again:
“We then organized the strongest coalition and the strongest sanctions against Iran in history, and it is crippling their economy. Their currency has dropped 80 percent. Their oil production has plunged to the lowest level since they were fighting a war with Iraq 20 years ago. So their economy is in a shambles. (Emphasis added.)”
U.S.A.! U.S.A.! Is there any way to be proud of these accomplishments? That a large and thriving country that has done nothing wrong except get in the way of America’s plans for world domination has been brought to its economic knees? Is this not war already? How can this even be legal? Or supported by Americans? And this is all based on the theory that Iran is trying to get nuclear weapons, a theory that has very little supporting evidence. Even U.S. intelligence agencies regularly report that there is no evidence to support the theory (in 2002, 2007 and again in 2011). The IAEA concurs. All of these authorities are ignored in favor of more saber-rattling and acts of war.
But let Obama explain why we are at war with Iran:
“And the reason we did this is because a nuclear Iran is a threat to our national security and it’s [a] threat to Israel’s national security. We cannot afford to have a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region of the world. Iran’s a state sponsor of terrorism, and for them to be able to provide nuclear technology to nonstate actors — that’s unacceptable. And they have said that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.
“So the work that we’ve done with respect to sanctions now offers Iran a choice. They can take the diplomatic route and end their nuclear program or they will have to face a united world and a United States president, me, who said we’re not going to take any options off the table. (Emphasis added.)”
Well done, Mr. President. You managed to repeat all of the unsubstantiated allegations about the nuclear program and the “wipe Israel off the map” horseshit, all in one breath. And Romney won’t say a word against your lies because he agrees with you 100%. You’re both totally on board with economic warfare that is far more damaging than even actual warfare. You both believe that crap line about wiping Israel off the map—a deliberate mistranslation that has entered canon. You both support keeping the nuclear option open, a terrifying statement from the only country in history to have actually used it. You both emphasize Iran’s support for terrorism, acting as if nothing the U.S. does could be interpreted as such. Iran funds groups in neighboring countries? Terrorism. The U.S. sends military troops halfway around the world to invade other countries? Defending freedom.
Obama seems to be offering Iran an olive branch by suggesting that they can use diplomacy. How? For the last 40 years, diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Iran have been conducted only through Swiss go-betweens. The U.S. is unwilling to reestablish normal relations, preferring cybar-war, sanctions and the destruction of countless innocent lives to diplomacy.
Those hoping that Romney would show more sense and take the opportunity to distance himself from warmongering were sorely disappointed. Instead, Romney responded that he would do all of that awesome stuff, but times a MILLION.
Read on for Romney’s reaction:
“[…] It’s absolutely the right thing to do to have crippling sanctions.
“Number two, something I would add today is I would tighten those sanctions. I would say that ships that carry Iranian oil can’t come into our ports. […] Not only ships couldn’t, I’d say companies that are moving their oil can’t, people who are trading in their oil can’t. I would tighten those sanctions further.
“Secondly, I’d take on diplomatic isolation efforts. I’d make sure that Ahmadinejad is indicted under the Genocide Convention. His words amount to genocide incitation. I would indict him for it. I would also make sure that their diplomats are treated like the pariah they are around the world, the same way we treated the apartheid diplomats of South Africa. (Emphasis added.)”
There’s your choice, folks: the war criminal or the wanna-be war criminal. And has Romney even read the Genocide Convention? You have to actually have killed people in order for it to apply. There are a few other conditions as well, but having killed people is pretty high on the list of requirements. As far as I know, Ahmadinejad hasn’t done that. Hell, when it comes to invading other countries and slaughtering thousands of innocents abroad, he’s an absolute piker compared to any American president. Maybe Romney should have turned up the rhetoric to 11 and said he would indict Obama under the Genocide Convention. That would have gotten some attention.
Romney wasn’t finished, though. He continued down his list of right-wing talking points:
“Number two, Mr. President, the reason I call it an apology tour is because you went to the Middle East and you flew to — to Egypt and to Saudi Arabia and to — to Turkey and Iraq. And — and by way, you skipped Israel, our closest friend in the region, but you went to the other nations. And by the way, they noticed that you skipped Israel.”
Romney seems to be taking Obama to task for visiting allies in the Middle East … what’s the issue again? And is Romney channeling a Jewish mother here? And how many times can he say “[w]e’re four years closer to a nuclear Iran. We’re four years closer to a nuclear Iran” without feeling embarrassed? His good friend Bibi Netanyahu warned us all of a nuclear Iran way back in 1992—Bibi can say that we’re 20 years closer to a nuclear Iran. This is technically correct, as time does have a way of proceeding inexorably forward. Iran’s nuclear weapons program? Less so.
Romney still wasn’t finished and made sure to emphasize that he thought the President’s drone-strike program was the bee’s knees and that “we should use any and all means necessary to take out people who pose a threat to us and our friends around the world.” Are Americans so mind-bogglingly brainwashed, so utterly incapable of empathy, that they can’t hear how belligerent that statement is? Ask yourself how you would react to hearing such talk from a state that has declared your country an official enemy. The candidates for U.S. president are saying that they would use “any and all” means, which is a not-too-subtle way of indicating that nuclear weapons are not off the table. This is the very definition of insanity: to pledge attack against a fictitious enemy for fictitious reasons for non-existent benefit.
Romney again:
“Well, I believe that […] drones are being used in drone strikes, and I support that entirely and feel the president was right to up the usage of that technology and believe that we should continue to use it to continue to go after the people who represent a threat to this nation and to our friends.”
For those playing along at home, “friends” here refers to “Israel”. And again, Romney is totally supportive of the idea that the U.S. can initiate extralegal attacks in any country in the world. And how are these attacks different from 9/11? In the eyes of the countries being attacked, U.S. drones are terrorist attacks. In the eyes of any realistic international justice, any useful definition of the word, they are terrorist attacks. And the U.S. does it with drones, without even having to go to the trouble of training suicide bombers to execute the missions. The drone pilots live in Nevada and Arizona and go home to their families at night to say grace over the meal with which the Good Lord has blessed them. Amen.
Obama was not to be totally outdone by Romney’s swaggering braggadocio. The Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning candidate derided a 2008 statement by Romney, chiding him for being naïve enough to think that the U.S. should respect international law and treaties by clearing any missions with Pakistan before invading:
“When it comes to going after Osama bin Laden, you said, well, any president would make that call. But when you were a candidate in 2008 — as I was — and I said, if I got bin Laden in our sights, I would take that shot, you said we shouldn’t move heaven and earth to get one man, and you said we should ask Pakistan for permission. And if we had asked Pakistan for permission, we would not have gotten him.”
There he goes, the constitutional-law professor, proving the justice of an action by the incontrovertible evidence that it achieved his aims. He wanted bin Laden dead, asking Pakistan first might have soured those plans, ergo a sneak attack was justified. Clearly the U.S. would not object to similar logic applied in the opposite direction. And Mr. Peace Candidate does not even bother to express remorse that bin Laden could not be brought to trial. A bloodthirsty electorate does not care—in fact, Obama would have lost face had he brought Osama to trial instead. The Norwegians’ handling of Brevik was much more laudable, but Americans care only about the myth of justice, not its actual execution. Especially when what’s right gets in the way of what they want.
It was utterly exhausting and somewhat boring: Romney either outright agreed with Obama on most of the foreign policy questions or he first claimed to disagree, then went on to describe a program that sounded exactly like the program either described by or already implemented by Obama. This is only a concern if you actually listen to and understand what Romney is saying—a capacity not many of his supporters have.
Imagine the following conversation:
Obama: I think we should pick option #2
Romney: I completely disagree. I think we should pick the option between #1 and #3.
Obama: ?!?
Now, if your ear isn’t refined enough to detect bullshit, or the topic is too far over your head, or you are just brainwashed to believe everything that Romney says, then, yes, of course you’ll think that Romney disagrees with Obama. You will further believe that you are justified in supporting Romney’s foreign policy while hating Obama’s. That this is not true in no way bothers you.
Obama is not stupid and called Romney out for this during the debate:
“You know, there have been times, Governor, frankly, during the course of this campaign, where it sounded like you thought that you’d do the same things we did, but you’d say them louder and somehow that that would make a difference […]”
Given the choice between two candidates who hold more or less the same opinion, which should you choose? To be safe, you could choose the one who’s less extremely militaristic, just to keep the world safe. At the same time, you would be choosing the one who at least holds those opinions, instead of just parroting them without understanding them. Or you could not choose either one of them and vote for a real anti-war candidate—like Jill Stein or Rocky Anderson.
Published by marco on 4. Nov 2012 22:36:30 (GMT-5)
The title of the essay Which one? America could do better than Barack Obama; sadly, Mitt Romney does not fit the bill (Economist) sums up its contents, to some degree. The conclusion to which they came is justified given some of their arguments. But some of their other arguments are just not supported by any tangible evidence. That is, the Economist shows in a short and eminently readable essay why you can’t really trust them for cogent analysis. Not only does their ideology gets in the way, but they believe some quite fantastical and obviously false things in order to support their tattered definition of what they think a free market is.
In net effect, the Economist dislikes Obama for the wrong reasons—much as so many benighted and woefully mis-educated voters in the States. They attack him for things that never happened or that happened in the completely opposite way. Among those voters with whom they agree will be those who give up on the Economist for endorsing Barack Hussein Obama instead of the one whom they consider to be the clear free-market candidate, Willard Mitt Romney. For those who still thought they could glean something from the Economist, though, this English rag has definitely jumped the shark.
They start off attacking Obama for having run a singularly negative campaign. Being offshore and not having paid attention to American television commercials, I’m not in a position to say whether this is right or wrong. They spend two paragraphs on it, though, which seems a little excessive in a campaign so awash with cash and where Romney has also been reported to have been extremely negative in his campaign—and was extremely rude and negative in the debates.
They continue, though, giving credit where credit is due, but soon devolve into a fantasy world.
“No administration in many decades has had such a poor appreciation of commerce. Previous Democrats, notably Bill Clinton, raised taxes, but still understood capitalism. Bashing business seems second nature to many of the people around Mr Obama. If he has appointed some decent people to his cabinet—Hillary Clinton at the State Department, Arne Duncan at education and Tim Geithner at the Treasury—the White House itself has too often seemed insular and left-leaning.”
This is highly disingenuous, as any administration compared to what Republicans—and clearly the Economist—would like to see would appear to be left-leaning, even if it is clearly to the right of center, as is the Obama administration.
The endorsement continued to hammer Obama for his bloody-minded left-wingedness:
“He surrendered too much control to left-wing Democrats in Congress. As with the gargantuan Dodd-Frank reform of Wall Street, Obamacare has generated a tangle of red tape—and left business to deal with it all.”
Indeed. Poor beleaguered business. Never catch a break under the Obama administration. This is just pure bullshit. Insanity. It’s Fox News talking points repeated in a British accent. I’m sure the few remaining left-wing Democrats would love to know on which planet this all transpired. Because that paltry handful of left-wing Democrats would likely have chosen a single-payer system, which Obama ditched almost before starting (presumably with hearty supportive cheers from the Economist editorial staff, who would likely love to deep-six the NHS in their own home country).
“Disgracefully, he ignored the suggestions of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson deficit commission that he himself set up”
Why is this disgraceful? Because Erskine Bowles—paid about half a million bucks per year by Goldman Sachs—delivered such unbiased recommendations? The committee never actually made an official recommendation, making it difficult for Obama to have refused to take its advice. The Economist doesn’t care as it prefers its own reality.
There are more slams on the president—for not having played enough golf with Republicans, who I’m sure were lined up to round out his foursome.
The only reason they ended up endorsing what they clearly think is a socialist automaton bent on destroying business all over the world in order to establish free stuff for all moochers is, well, because Mitt Romney is an unsupportable cipher, an unprincipled, mendacious man of whom few good things can be said with certainty. The Economist rightly finds his fiscal policy a joke, which is a small saving grace for their capacity for rational thought.
“Mr Romney is still in the cloud-cuckoo-land of thinking you can do it entirely through spending cuts: the Republican even rejected a ratio of ten parts spending cuts to one part tax rises. Backing business is important, but getting the macroeconomics right matters far more. (Emphasis added.)”
The emphasized part is just to point out that the Economist doesn’t miss a single opportunity to point out that poor businesses are left so far out in the cold by the Obama administration, having reaped only 90% of the gains as the economy slowly got back to its feet.
In fairness, and despite their conspiracy-theories above, the Economist endorsement does finish strongly. The final paragraph is included in its entirety below.
“For all his businesslike intentions, Mr Romney has an economic plan that works only if you don’t believe most of what he says. That is not a convincing pitch for a chief executive. And for all his shortcomings, Mr Obama has dragged America’s economy back from the brink of disaster, and has made a decent fist of foreign policy. So this newspaper would stick with the devil it knows, and re-elect him.”
Published by marco on 29. Oct 2012 23:15:24 (GMT-5)
Updated by marco on 26. Feb 2013 21:01:12 (GMT-5)
Along the left-hand side is a handy chart published with the article The Republican Rape Advisory Chart (AlterNet). It features some of the most stupefying and misogynistic things that politicians have said about rape in the last year or so. We will return to it soon, but let it provide contrast to the French social policies detailed in the article French teens to get the Pill for free (France 24).
The main point is as follows:
“French teenagers aged 15 to 18 will have their contraceptive pills reimbursed 100 percent by the state from the beginning of 2013, Health Minister Marisol Touraine announced on Tuesday. […] French Minister for Women’s Rights Najat Vallaud-Belkacem added that the teenagers’ anonymity would be “guaranteed” under the new rules.”
I can imagine half of America shuddering at the thought of any of this:
Don’t you ever feel like America got gypped when it came to handing out governments? While one Republican after another redefines rape and takes aim at abortion, planned parenthood and public health care, the French have a Minister of Women’s Rights who says:
“Providing free contraception is just as important for these teenagers as getting good sex education at school”
Instead, the U.S. gets troglodytes like Treasurer of Indiana Dick Mourdock, wanna-be Senator Akin whose clearly rational and science-based world-view is exactly what they’re looking for on the Committee on Science, Space and Technology where he’s currently serving. Hell, even Libertarian darling Ron Paul—who’s a doctor—feels the need to help women distinguish between kinds of rape. A Wisconsin state representative who garnered Paul Ryan’s endorsement (and didn’t lose it after his statement) was heard to say that “Some girls rape easy.” He went on to clarify that some girls change their minds so easily, turning a fun night into a rape when they regret what they’ve done. You know how some girls are.
With so many politicians volunteering their wisdom in national television interviews, Jon Stewart weighed in with the following segment:
In it, he addressed the Romney campaign’s continued support of Mourdock, despite his utterly reprehensible views:
“Not often do you hear someone say: …you know, I disagree with your views on rape and incest, but, um, … it’s not a deal-breaker.”
The Republicans as well as the Romney campaign are right to be somewhat surprised that this is such a big issue. Romney’s running neck-and-neck with Obama in the latest public-opinion polls and it’s not like he hasn’t been quite up-front about his positions—as has his running mate Paul Ryan, who’s even more extreme and uncompromising. The Republican Party just published their platform at their convention several weeks back and they were quite explicit there as well. No room for misinterpretation: the misogyny is intentional and baked right in.
Jon Stewart explains:
“I mean, where does Mourdock get his crazy, fringe ideas about rape and abortion anyway? I don’t know, maybe from Mitt Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan, who co-sponsored a Sanctity of Human Life Act so severe it not only could outlaw all abortions, it also could effectively ban in-vitro fertilization. Or from the platform of the Republican Party, which states that the ‘unborn child has a fundamental right to life’ and calls for a ‘human-life amendment to the Constitution’. Nothing in there about rape, incest, life of the mother or … feelings of swing voters. In other words, according to the Republican Party platform—and the man who wants to be a heartbeat away from the presidency: if a woman wants to have a baby [by] in-vitro fertilization, she cannot; rape? she has to. (Emphasis added.)”
The segments ends with a shorter version of this credo: “In-vitro? Can’t. Rape? Must.” It would fit on a T-Shirt—a stocking-stuffer for the more extreme members of your family.
On the same evening, Stephan Colbert interviewed Mitch Daniels of the Republican Party and current governor of Indiana.
Daniels started off by stating—seemingly without irony—that “[t]the point, Stephen, is that democracy only works if people are allowed to make their own decisions […] It’s more consistent with human dignity to give people the opportunity to make choices for themselves”. This is a lovely sentiment that I stand behind 100%. Mitch Daniels, however, as a Republican, cannot. Because he doesn’t believe that a woman should be able to make her own choices. He believes that a blastocyst has more rights than a full-grown woman. When he says “people”, he likely means “people who matter” and would probably filter them into two groups remarkably reminiscent of those created by the founding fathers of America (white, mail, landed gentry in the “people” pile—and everyone else in the other).
The interview continues:
“Stephen: Now we had a surplus, uh, when Bill Clinton left office. And you were George W. Bush’s director of management of Management and Budget. Who came in and chloroformed you and stole all the money?
“Mitch Daniels: The answer is, that the dot-com bubble broke and the money that people thought was coming did not show up.”
I include this quote not because it is relevant to the discussion of women and women’s rights but because it illustrates the utter hypocrisy—at best, a massive cognitive dissonance—that affects all politicians, but more grossly and obviously Republican ones. The excuse that Daniels gives is 100% acceptable in the Republican sphere—remember that Republicans desperately wanted Daniels to run for president at the start of the year—but the same exact excuse is utterly rejected when used by Obama. The bursting of the housing bubble in 2008 makes the dot-com bubble crash of 2000 look like peanuts in comparison but, because Obama is not Republican, the increased deficits on his watch are the result of his socialist agenda whereas those on Bush’s watch were the unavoidable consequence of a beleaguered Republican president cleaning up Clinton’s mess.
After this opening salvo on deficits and debt, Stephen honed in on the issue of abortion and rape:
“Stephen: [p]eople have their own feelings about abortion and I’ve been very clear how I feel about it on this show.
Mitch Daniels: Listen and I guess I would say this, and I say it in my book incidentally, that this is a question—and there are others—on which people have very sincere—on both sides—and deep personal views. And … we’re not going to agree about them. And, um, frankly, I don’t think anything’s going to change in any direction fairly soon.
Stephen: I agree with you. Abortion is a very divisive issue. People aren’t going to agree on it. Rape we’ve generally agreed on in the past. Rape has not been a divisive issue. (Emphasis added.)”
Daniels waffles hard on the question, trying desperately to defend the Republican platform without getting any of it on him. He does not succeed because his interviewer is not a soft-balling patsy from the mainstream media but Stephen Colbert, who is a master of pretending to agree with you while eviscerating your position. How can Daniels have so little principle as to find himself defending rape because he wants so badly to outlaw abortion? Does he really not lend any credence to the power of reductio ad absurdum? Or is there nothing too absurd for a Republican to believe?
If you haven’t gotten enough of Republican misogyny, there’s the article How the GOP’s Real Agenda Is Revealed in Their Nasty Rape Comments by Jill Filipovic (AlterNet), which digs beneath the superficiality of support for a “right to life”. During the debates, Obama accused Romney of having a social policy from the fifties. This probably sounded harsh to Romney supporters, but in their hearts they know it’s true. It’s what they’re voting for. Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. With their fool mouths shut. Opposing abortion is just one facet of a more general approach to dealing with women.
“Mainstream GOP leaders, including Mitt Romney, campaign with conservative activists who lament the fact that women today no longer fully submit to the authority of their husbands and fathers, mourn a better time when you could legally beat your wife […]. Senate Republicans, including Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan and “legitimate rape” Todd Akin, blocked the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act.”
Other than smacking around, what are women good for? Well, that’s why abortion has to be illegal: they’re still the only way we have of making babies.
“Underlying the Republican rape comments and actual Republican political goals are a few fundamental convictions: first, women are vessels for childbearing and care-taking; second, women cannot be trusted; and third, women are the property of men.”
Does this all sound extreme? Sure. Are these arguments hyperbolic? Perhaps. But honestly, the weight of evidence—cheerfully and voluntarily provided by Republicans themselves—supports the hypothesis that they consider women to be second-class citizens and want to anchor this concept more firmly in law. The burden of proof is on these Republicans to disprove it by finally distancing themselves from their stone-age principles.
The facts of the case, as described in the article Unarmed and Gunned Down by Homeowner in His ‘Castle’ by Jack Healy (NY Times) are distilled below:
]]>“Mr. Fredenberg […] strode up the driveway […] to confront Brice Harper, a 24-year-old romantically involved with Mr. Fredenberg’s young wife. […] he... [More]”
Published by marco on 29. Oct 2012 22:10:24 (GMT-5)
The facts of the case, as described in the article Unarmed and Gunned Down by Homeowner in His ‘Castle’ by Jack Healy (NY Times) are distilled below:
“Mr. Fredenberg […] strode up the driveway […] to confront Brice Harper, a 24-year-old romantically involved with Mr. Fredenberg’s young wife. […] he walked through Mr. Harper’s open garage door […] Mr. Harper aimed a gun at the unarmed Mr. Fredenberg, fired and struck him three times. Mr. Fredenberg crumpled to the garage floor, a few feet from Mr. Harper. He was dead before morning.”
It sounds like an affair gone horribly wrong: Mr. Fredenberg uses a bit of liquid courage to help him confront his wife’s lover, Mr. Harper. Harper, fearful of a beating, gets his gun to scare off Fredenberg. One thing leads to another—as they say—and the gun is smoking, the barrel is hot and the husband is dead. In most countries, this would be a clear-cut case of manslaughter: a man was shot out of fear but the victim was in no real danger and hadn’t actually become a victim, yet. Fredenberg was not armed, his wife was in the car about a dozen meters away, and he did nothing that couldn’t be interpreted as walking into a garage to talk. Harper had every right to assume that there would be a confrontation, but kind of had to wait legally for one to begin rather than initiating it. He had his gun for protection. But, almost before anything else could happen, he fired. Even a few decades ago in the U.S. this would have resulted in Mr. Harper’s arrest, at the very least.
This, however, is a new America, where preëmptive defense has trickled down from national defense policy to the local level. Or rather it is a throwback America. It is an America that not only clings to its guns, but constantly increases the situations in which they may lethally and legally used.
“Had Mr. Fredenberg been shot on the street or sidewalk, the legal outcome might have been different. But on Oct. 9, the Flathead County attorney decided not to prosecute, saying that Montana’s “castle doctrine” law, which maintains that a man’s home is his castle, protected Mr. Harper’s rights to vigorously defend himself there. The county attorney determined that Mr. Harper had the right to fetch his gun from his bedroom, confront Mr. Fredenberg in the garage and, fearing for his safety, shoot him.”
Zimmerman shooting Martin sparked a dialogue but no action. More than 20 states now have “Stand your ground” laws that bring the Wild West to the 21st century. No other civilized country in the world has anything like it.
While shooting people with no justification other than suspected trespassing and possible assault goes unpunished, other crimes are punished more and more harshly. The fallout from the drug war, with its decades-long punishments for victimless crimes. No-one is talking about this in either the media or the debates, you’ll notes. Almost equally insidious is the increased and continued punishment of so-called sex offenders: so-called because, increasingly, the burden of proof has fallen below any acceptable measure of justice and the punishments are life-long for what, in many cases, amounts to misdemeanor misunderstanding or mental illness. Punishment rather than treatment is the order of the day.
The article The Mission Creep of Rape Shield Law by Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice) talks about a case where a “divorced father [who] was allowed to see his children on weekends. [H]is relationship with his older [13-year-old] daughter was fraught with difficulties.” After one night when she didn’t come home and the “police picked her up at the home of a 16-year old boy”, he yelled at her over the phone, after which “she informed her mother that her father had sexually abused her.”
There is no evidence whatsoever that any abuse occurred at any time. Before the accusation, there was no suspicion that this was the case by any party (even the estranged wife). Soon enough, though, “younger daughter […] made a similar revelation”.
Since there is an utter lack of physical evidence—“[t]he case […] was built solely on the testimony of his daughters, with no forensic evidence behind it”—and the decision rests on her word against his, the defendant would naturally like to introduce evidence to support his story that she is acting out against him because of his disapproval of her lifestyle. To that end, he needs to describe the lifestyle of which he disapproves: the way she dresses too provocatively, hangs out with older boys and so on. Your basic teen-rebellion but escalated to the point of accusing her father of sexual abuse in retaliation for humiliating her in front of her friends. It’s a perfectly plausible explanation (especially given the history of the family relationship and his lack of priors for child abuse). Unfortunately for his case, none of this evidence is admissible because of the Rape Shield Laws. Greenfield explains:
“The Rape Shield Laws came about at a time when recognition that rape wasn’t about loose women looking like floozies giving up their right to refuse sex, but about a particular wrongful act, and the right of every woman, regardless of the height of their skirt, to say no.”
These laws are a good thing. However, as Greenfield explains, they are intended to address “consent, not credibility” and the father is clearly trying to admit evidence that his daughter(s) consented to sex with him but rather that they are not credible. But, despite one judge’s having noticed the discrepancy and issued an emphatic ruling, the Court of Appeals affirmed the conviction.
“[the] scenario [described by the prosecution] is magically transformed into accepted fact, because the alternative would be to disbelieve a female child. This just isn’t done anymore. […] we have gone so far off the deep end the other way that it’s nearly impossible, no matter how insane the contentions, to defend against the facile accusation of rape or sexual molestation.”
Finally, a bit of good news from the sphere of U.S. justice. The article Nebraska Allows Sex Offenders to Breath[e] by Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice) discusses legislative and judicial attempts to impose a lifelong ban for anyone on the sex-offender registry to
“knowingly and intentionally [use] a social networking web site, instant messaging, or chat room service that allows a person who is less than eighteen years of age to access or use [it].”
So, basically, you’re not allowed to use the Internet in a way considered standard and almost necessary in U.S. society. Almost all social networking services allow access by minors, so almost everything would be illegal to use. And, with warrantless wiretapping de rigeur in the States—and all the more so for those on the sex-offender registry, who have already abdicated their rights regardless of whether they’ve already served their sentence and regardless of how they got on that list in the first place—it should be easy to keep tabs on these monsters.
As Greenfield goes on to say:
“Frankly, there aren’t many folks who would lose sleep if anyone remotely tainted by sex offender status was shipped off to an island in the middle of the ocean and left there to rot. Don’t bother to argue the point that these aren’t all horrible monsters; they just don’t care. […] to those who elevate their own safety at the expense of the rights of others, this law likely seems eminently reasonable. After all, these are sex offenders. Who cares what happens to them if it means my babies will be safer.”
Happily, this attempted injunction was rejected and a sex offender “who has completed his sentence, paid his debt to society, and returned in the hope […] of leading a law-abiding life […] must be allowed back into society or his sentence is never served and he will be left with no option but to engage in crime to survive.”
So, for once, a happy ending for justice, at least.