Davis

I've been trying to comment less on current events, in a feeling of what-do-I-know, but I do know that this is what murder looks like.

A letter I got today

Dear Ethan:

As Councilman representing [your ward], one of my main priorities is safety, especially your safety.

Recently, there has been an increase in crime in our neighborhood. Breaking and entering is on the rise; therefore, I would like to stress the importance of locking all doors. Be sure to secure your home and automobiles, and, if you are fortunate to have a house alarm; engage your alarm system in your absence and at night while sleeping.

Due to the importance of this matter, I will be conducting a neighborhood meeting on September 12, 2011, at [a local elementary school] from 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm to discuss this safety issue and any other matters and concerns.

The area Crime Watch program has been successful and will continue to do well if we all contribute in any way we can in deterring crime in our neighborhood. Please continue to be observant and contact the police to report any suspicious activity.

Thank you for your help in making our community safe. If you need my assistance, please contact me at the council office, [phone number]. Also, please sign-up for news and events at [url made into a link automatically by Microsoft Word which is a bit useless in a printed letter].

Sincerely,
[Rich white dude]

cc: [A bunch of cops]

I'm half-thinking about going and asking if he's taking any time out of his busy fearmongering, alarm system-advertising, and overemphasizing-of-dates-places-and-times schedule to, you know, do anything about the causes of those tiny actions that fit into his definition of "crime." The theft of huge swathes of people's ability to support themselves continues into its nth century of not prompting any important meetings at elementary schools.

By the way, the "area Crime Watch" that has been so "successful" so far in my experience consists of 1) a woman who has lived down the street from me for two years but who apparently doesn't recognize me following me at low speed (her in her car, me on my bike) for three blocks and around several turns before stopping and yelling "Where do you live??!!?!" at me and accusing me of being shady because I kept looking behind myself at the car following me at about ten miles an hour for three blocks and around several turns, and 2) our probably diagnosably sociopathic next door neighbor begging us to let him string a trip wire in our backyard so that if people come through it in the middle of the night he can catch them and beat them with a baseball bat. Given these encounters, I'm wondering if you understand why I'm made a bit queasy by Rich white dude's urging my neighbors to "contribute in any way we can to deterring crime in our neighborhood."

PS I wish someone would break into his office and steal from his semicolon and hyphen budget, because it's clearly overfunded.

I don't have the stomach to write much about this

I see via antiwar that horrible Wired has finally released the full Bradley Manning/Adrian Lamo chat logs, and my (and a bunch of other people's) feeling, based on the bits that had leaked out already, that Manning has been misgendered this whole time seems to have been correct (assuming, that is, that the log is reliable).

I have no doubt that the guards who forced hir to stand naked with legs spread and hands behind hir back, and whoever gave them their orders, know that.

Incarceration is not something that improves when you do it while trans.

PS I only read the top, like, twenty lines, and my god is Adrian Lamo even more disgusting than I thought.

Training starts early

We've been watching a lot of new-millennium Doctor Who recently. Hey, this stuff is pretty frequently brilliant, you know? The Baronette, for reasons of a) employment and b) general good sense has been sticking to just Who proper, while out-of-work, no-sense me has been indulging additionally in the spinoffs--the self-consciously "adult" Torchwood and the for-kids Sarah Jane Adventures (RIP). At this point I've only made it through the first seasons of each, though we're on the third season of for-adults-really-but-kids-have-always-loved-it Who.

Anyway, the Whoniverse as a whole has always been pretty gentle. Torchwood pushes at that quite a bit (and often tries way too hard while it's at it), but there are far worse shows to grow up on than these. It's often violent and kid-scary (and, occasionally, verges on adult-scary), but the Doctor makes a point of never carrying weapons, and he respects life unless it unacceptably threatens other life, and occasionally drops some nice slogans.* And the whole thing has been pretty remarkably good in terms of women (regularly creating strong female characters who can think, frequently passing the Bechdel test without cheating, etc.), and race (though there are some slightly troubling patterns with its black characters, overall it's not too shabby--and it has a lot of them, relatively), and sexuality. In general, it is very seldom that I cringe while watching it, and when I do it's usually fairly minor things. Much better than you might expect from state TV**, in other words.

*Dalek Emperor: "What are you, Doctor? Killer or coward?"
The Doctor: "Coward. Every time."
That episode also contains the amazing line "You are tiny. I can see the whole of time and space, every single atom of your existence, and I divide them." Delivered brilliantly by the brilliant Billie Piper as the brilliant Rose Tyler.
**And there's a pair of words to chill the blood, am I right?

All of which makes it all the more...weird, when something goes icky. Like in the Torchwood episode where some startlingly vehement, and yet disturbingly casual, transphobia was put into the mouth of, of all characters, Captain Jack, the pansexual anything-goes-including-aliens open-minded man of the 51st century (though apparently I was the only person in the world bothered by that line--and no, I'm not linking to that After Elton post because I like it, but only because it starts with the quote I'm talking about).

Or like in the Sarah Jane Adventures episode I watched this morning that suddenly spewed out a prison rape joke:



It's the kind of thing that should be unbelievable. Sarah Jane is one of the gentlest characters in the entire gentle world of Doctor Who. It's in the middle of an episode with a decent, if a bit ham-handed, message about how awful it is to train young children for violence. And yet right here in the middle of this show for children, the threat of imprisonment and violence is treated lightly, as if it were funny. Unfortunately, it's not unbelievable. Because, you see, we all have to be trained from a very young age to lack all empathy, to separate humanity into good and bad, and to think that punishing the bad part is not only acceptable, but good, and not only good, but funny. What better way than by casually sticking this kind of thing into a show purportedly against violence?

I'm not saying that the episode's writer, Phil Gladwin, plotted and schemed his way to to sticking this line in. But as far as I can tell there's only two kinds of minds that could think a line like that is appropriate in any context, or, for the love of god, necessary in a fucking children's show*. The first is the kind that does have a deliberate interest in training empathy out of children so as to maintain the status quo. The second is the kind that has been so socialized that it does this unconsciously. In some ways it's almost worse that Gladwin is far more likely to be the second kind. It's in this way that this murderous culture of ours maintains itself.

*And I am most emphatically not one to be all "but think of the children." I think children can be trusted to handle far more than we usually let them. And I don't think they should be protected from information and knowledge about either sex or violence, since those are both integral parts of the reality they live in (one a much much better part than the other, of course). But it's exactly these kinds of messages that slip past the conscious level and become a sort of background radiation of what-we-think-is-acceptable, until it gets to the point where we have a whole society of what used to be human beings who can't be bothered to stop laughing uproariously at goddamn prison rape, let alone do anything to stop it.

A year and a half before that episode originally aired, there had apparently been a minor controversy about a Who episode that had a brief, throwaway, fairly subtle joke about oral sex between consenting adults. To my knowledge (and to google's, as far as I can tell), there was no such outcry about this.

To anyone who doesn't understand, or doesn't believe in, the concept of the rape culture: voilà.

Well put

Renee:

One of the things that has always bothered me about the death penalty, is that it creates yet another circle of victims. These victims will never see justice, because the murder happened at the behest of the state. Imagine the horror his 12 year old daughter felt, as she watched her father being gunned down, after the U.S. military invaded her home.

There's a lot in the details of her post that I don't agree with, but as far as the "big picture" goes it's an excellent point.

And now, RESOLVED: that this will be my last post on the whole stupid topic.

Philip K. Dick, "The Android and the Human" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.), several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

Speaking in science fiction terms, I now foresee an anarchistic, totalitarian state ahead. Ten years from now a TV street reporter will ask some kid who is president of the United States, and the kid will admit that he doesn't know. "But the president can have you executed," the reporter will protest. "Or beaten or thrown into prison or all your rights taken away, all your property--everything." And the boy will reply, "Yeah, so could my father up to last month when he had his fatal coronary. He used to say the same thing." End of interview. And when the reporter goes to gather up his equipment he will find that one of his color 3-D stereo microphone-vidlens systems is missing; the kid has swiped it from him while the reporter was babbling on.

If, at it seems we are, [sic] in the process of becoming a totalitarian society in which the state apparatus is all-powerful, the ethics most important for the survival of the true, human individual would be: Cheat, lie, evade, fake it, be elsewhere, forge documents, build improved electronic gadgets in your garage that'll outwit the gadgets used by the authorities. If the television screen is going to watch you, rewire it late at night when you're permitted to turn it off--rewire it in such a way that the police flunky monitoring the transmission from your living room mirrors back his house. When you sign a confession under duress, forge the name of one of the political spies who's infiltrated your model-airplane club. Pay your fines in counterfeit money or rubber checks or stolen credit cards. Give a false address. Arrive at the courthouse in a stolen car. Tell the judge that if he sentences you, you will substitute aspirin tablets for his daughter's birth control pills. Or put His Honor on a mailing list for pornographic magazines. Or, if all else fails, threaten him with your using his telephone-credit-card number to make unnecessary long-distance calls to cities on another planet. It will not be necessary to blow up the courthouse anymore. Simply find some way to defame the judge--you saw him driving home one night on the wrong side of the road with his headlights off and a fifth of Seagram's VO propped up against his steering wheel. And his bumper sticker that night read: Grant Full Rights to Us Homosexuals. He has, of course, torn off the sticker by now, but both you and ten of your friends witnessed it. And they are all at pay phones right now, ready to phone the news to the local papers. And, if he is so foolish as to sentence you, at least ask him to give back the little tape recorder you inadvertently left in his bedroom. Since the off-switch on it is broken, it has probably recorded its entire ten-day reel of tape by now. Results should be interesting. And if he tries to destroy the tape, you will have him arrested for vandalism, which in the totalitarian state of tomorrow will be the supreme crime. What is your life worth in his eyes compared with a $3 reel of Mylar tape? The tape is probably government property, like everything else, so to destroy it would be a crime against the state. The first step in a calculated, sinister insurrection.
pages 194-5

Sudden surprises, by the way--and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you--are a sort of antidote to the paranoid . . . or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems--that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about--are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving--total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward.
page 208

[N]o android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me fully human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:

One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca-Cola they could drink, free--and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.

To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca-Cola company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passive infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike--may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread never did live. But she and her friends--they, our human future, are our little song.
pages 209-10

A model

I'm not under the impression that any of what follows is some kind of revolution in thought. It's just useful to lay things out every once in a while. Suggestions for amendments also welcome.

At the start, people for the most part do what is needed for survival (obtaining and preparing food, finding and/or constructing shelter) themselves, individually or cooperatively as a community.

A point arrives where some minority, whether through luck or nasty genius or both, hits upon a way of getting other people to do these things for them--that is, a method of getting other people to use some of their time to provide necessities for them rather than for themselves and their actual community. This is great for the minority.

It does however create a problem in that such a system is naturally subject to a lot of resistance from the majority, who would rather use their time and labor for themselves and their communities than for a minority of people who don't do anything to help. The minority therefore have to devise methods to keep the majority working for them, whether through violent enforcement or the establishment of a system of beliefs, religious or otherwise, or the corruption of a pre-existing system, which will function to convince the majority to sacrifice portions of their own lives for the benefit of the minority.

The minority is no happier doing this work than they were doing the work of directly supporting their own lives, especially since by this point they've gotten used to not doing any work. So for their own convenience they create a new class, still a minority but a larger one than the now-ruling class, which will be responsible for managing the people who do the essential work: keeping up the belief system, performing violent enforcement, etc., in the service of keeping the necessities flowing from the class that still creates them.

Perhaps at first this intermediary class still spends some time producing necessities as well, but as their responsibilities grow more complex, this becomes increasingly impossible. So before long, there is a laboring majority, which does all of the actually necessary work, a ruling minority, which does none of the actual work itself, and a third group, intermediate in both size and power, which does all the work of keeping this situation viable but none of the genuinely essential work (in case it needs to be said, I and in all likelihood you are members of this class).

Of course, there is then a problem with keeping the intermediate group doing its job instead of rebelling, as it otherwise would tend to and indeed on occasion does. And so another intermediate class must be created. And so on, until, inevitably, the whole damn mess collapses, one way or another.

This pattern is observable on many different scales, from worldwide to a specific empire to a specific region to a specific town to a specific family.

Things remind me of things

Apologies for the lengthy quotations and dearth of commentary, but I find these quite valuable and they speak for themselves. All emphasis is mine.

This is from James C. Scott's beyond excellent Seeing Like a State:

It goes without saying that the farmer was familiar with each of several varieties of any crop, when to plant it, how deeply to sow it, how to prepare the soil, and how to tend and harvest it. This knowledge was place specific in the sense that the successful growing of any variety required local knowledge about rainfall and soils, down to and including the peculiarities of each plot the farmer cultivated. It was also place specific in the sense that much of this knowledge was stored in the collective memory of the locality: an oral archive of the techniques, seed varieties, and ecological information.

Once the farmer was moved, often to a vastly different ecological setting, his local knowledge was all but useless. As Jason Clay emphasizes, "Thus, when a farmer from the highlands is transported to settlement camps in areas like Gambella, he is instantly transformed from an agricultural expert into an unskilled, ignorant laborer, completely dependent for his survival on the central government." Resettlement was far more than a change in scenery. It took people from a setting in which they had the skills and resources to produce many of their own basic needs and hence the means of a reasonably self-sufficient independence. It then transferred them to a setting where these skills were of little or no avail. Only in such circumstances was it possible for camp officials to reduce migrants to mendicants whose obedience and labor could be exacted for subsistence rations.

Although the drought that coincided with forced migration in Ethiopia was real enough, much of the famine to which international aid agencies responded was a product of the massive resettlement. The destruction of social ties was almost as productive of famine as were the crop failures induced by poor planning and ignorance of the new agricultural environment. Communal ties, relations with kin and affines, networks of reciprocity and cooperation, local charity and dependence had been the principal means by which villagers had managed to survive periods of food shortage in the past. Stripped of these social resources by indiscriminate deportations, often separated from their immediate family and forbidden to leave, the settlers in the camps were far more vulnerable to starvation than they had been in their home regions.

It reminded me of these passages, spread out over about ten pages in Derrick Jensen's beyond excellent Endgame vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization:

Civilization has only been on this continent a few hundred years. There are many parts of this continent, such as where I live, that became subject to civilization far more recently. Yet in this extremely short time this culture has committed us and the landscape to this technologized path, in so doing shredding the natural fabric of this continent, enslaving, terrorizing, and/or eradicating its nonhuman inhabitants, and giving its human residents the choice of civilization or death. Another way to say this is that prior to the arrival of civilization humans lived on this continent for at the very least ten thousand years, and probably much longer, and could drink with confidence from rivers and streams everywhere. After this culture's short time here, not only has it toxified streams and groundwater, but even mother's breast milk. That's an extraordinary and extraordinarily quick commitment to this technologized way of being (or rather non-being). ...

Dependency. One of the advantages of not having to import resources is that you need depend on neither the resources' owners nor on the violence necessary to eradicate these owners and take what's theirs. One of the advantages of not owning slaves is that you need not depend on them for either your "comforts or elegancies" or even the necessaries of life. We have at this point become dependent on oil, on dammed rivers, on this exploitative way of being (or, once again, non-being). Without it many of us would die, most all of us would lose our identities. ...

To mask our powerlessness in the face of this destruction, many of us fall into the same pattern as those abused children... we turn the focus inward. We are the problem. I use toilet paper, so I am responsible for deforestation. I drive a car, so I am responsible for global warming. Never mind that I did not create the systems that cause these. I did not create industrial forestry. I did not create an oil economy... [W]e did not create the system [and] our choices have been systematically eliminated (those in power kill the great runs of salmon, and then we feel guilty when we buy food at the grocery store? How dumb is that?).

And this is just one photogenic example

Despite my opinions on the urge to punish, I secretly want to make all politicians and CEOs make this same swim. If I was more old-fashioned, I'd say they would have to take their kids along, too, for the symmetry, but instead I say leave the kids in the care of someone who will raise them not to be sociopaths.

Lee Hazlewood, "Pray Them Bars Away" on Cowboy in Sweden

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

I'm told I should be thankful
For everything I got
So thank you for rock walls
And the brave bulls, thanks a lot
And thank you for the good job
At twenty cents a day
And thank you for the break time
To pray them bars away

Yglesiology

This is a Matt Yglesias post. It's interesting.

At first, it's pretty sensible!

I imagine in the wake of this Arizona shooting that there’ll be a move to deliver more security around members of congress as they travel in-state. I think that would be a real mistake. As horrible as what happened this weekend is, the fact of the matter is that political assassinations are extremely rare and it’s simply not the case that the country faces some kind of systematic assassination problem.

Yglesias and I, having different understandings of people in power's motives, use the word "mistake" differently, but other than that, yeah! Very sensible! To hear most mainstream liberals say it, you'd never know that we're not in the midst of an assassination epidemic. Smart, clear-headed guy, that Yglesias.

What’s [sic] we do have in the United States is an unusually high level of violent crime across the board, but pulling police resources off their day-to-day work and onto personal security for politicians is going to make that worse.

I...well. I wouldn't disagree that we have an "unusually high level of violen[ce]" in the United States. But "pulling police resources off their day-to-day work" would be an excellent way to combat that violence! In fact, Yglesias has made me realize that exactly what we should do is pull police "resources" (aka, human beings who are police officers, by the way) off their day-to-day work and onto personal security for politicians. Man, how awesome would it be if every single goddamn cop was off the streets and forming bristling armed circles around all the members of Congress instead? Get the army involved, too. That way, the politicians could make whatever laws they wanted, but there'd be no one left to enforce them, and we and the rest of the world could just get on with our lives. Throw in the prison guards while you're at it and it's the best idea I've heard all year.

UPDATE: I had originally intended to note here that, of course, in the real world the increase of security on the powerful will not result in the decrease of police harassing people on the streets; rather, it will lead, just like everything else the powerful do, to an expansion of the police state.

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL POST

The change that we ought to be making, however, is an institutional one relating to the question of what happens if someone shoots a United States Senator.

Yglesias has a habit of using the first person plural in perplexing ways. Who is this we that ought to be making this change? Anyway, wow! Is Matt Yglesias really arguing for prison reform? Maybe he's even arguing for prison abolition!

I think it would sit poorly with all of us if assassinating a senator led to a change in partisan control of the senate via gubernatorial appointment, but many states’ laws leave the door open to that possibility. Senators ought to be replaced, in my view, either through a special election or else through an appointee pre-designated by the Senator as a legitimate proxy for his or her approach to politics.

Oh. Well, that's less exciting.

This use of "us" following after the "we" in the previous sentence has me even more confused. With whom would a change in partisan control sit poorly? Certainly not with me! Nothing in my life has ever changed due to a change in the partisan control of the Senate. Certainly my life is less good than it would otherwise be due in part to the existence of the Senate, but the composition of the body matters not a bit to me. Anyway, if I did care about the partisan balance of the Senate (and may I reiterate that I surely do not!), I don't think a system of powerful people appointing their own successors would make me feel better about it.

This is the kind of thing that we tend not to think about until after it’s happened, but by that time it’s too late. The political system itself needs to be made as resilient as possible to attempted violent interventions.

"Too late" for what? Has the political system itself crumbled as a result of this shooting?

And, finally: am I the only one who thinks that it's funny when Democracy True Believers argue for making the system itself as resilient as possible?

MEANWHILE: Sky robot murder, starvation austerity, war powers expansion, occupations and escalations, coups d'etat, wetwork, black ops and the militarization of public space continue apace. (Thanks to Jack for the excellently condensed list of horrors.)

All is well

Another one I got via Mel at some point:

...the Wisconsin Supreme Court [has] upheld an order for a 17-year-old to register as as sex offender, even though he committed no sex crime. The youth forced another 17-year-old to accompany him to collect a debt. This was enough to convict him of falsely imprisoning a minor, which the Wisconsin legislature has defined as a sex crime.

Isn't this wonderful! Wasn't I foolish to be concerned about the Supreme Court (the Big One that time) ruling that people can be held indefinitely, even after their sentences end, if they're determined to be sexually dangerous?

The Wisconsin legislature defines "falsely imprisoning a minor" as a sex crime. What else is defined that way? What else will be?

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, several excerpts

(Cross-posted from Commonplace)

The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. "Anything," he thinks, "any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose." He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom...
-pages 120-1

Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.
-page 168

It is taken for granted that a beggar does not "earn" his living, as a bricklayer or a literary critic "earns" his. He is a mere social excrescence, tolerated because we live in a humane age, but essentially despicable.

Yet if one looks closely one sees that there is no essential difference between a beggar's livelihood and that of numberless respectable people. Beggars do not work, it is said; but, then, what is work? A navvy works by swinging a pick. An accountant works by adding up figures. A beggar works by standing out of doors in all weathers and getting varicose veins, chronic bronchitis, etc. It is a trade like any other; quite useless, of course--but then, many reputable trades are quite useless. And as a social type a beggar compares well with scores of others. He is honest compared with the sellers of most patent medicines, high-minded compared with a Sunday newspaper proprietor, amiable compared with a high-purchase tout--in short, a parasite, but a fairly harmless parasite. He seldom extracts more than a bare living from the community, and, what should justify him according to our ethical ideals, he pays for it over and over in suffering. I do not think there is anything about a beggar that sets him in a different class from other people, or gives most modern men the right to despise him.

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simple reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice no one cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it?" Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately.
-pages 173-4

Another tramp told the story of Gilderoy, the Scottish robber. Gilderoy was the man who was condemned to be hanged, escaped, captured the judge who had sentenced him, and (splendid fellow!) hanged him.
-page 189

I'll say this for the internet

Jody McIntyre and Emily Henochowicz. The apparatus of the state attacked them brutally, in Henochowicz's case damaging her permanently. The result? People know who they are now. Googling either of their names comes up with their personal sites as the first result. Anyone who sees the Israeli government and sympathetic media saying Henochowicz deserved to have her eye shot out* can, if they're so inclined, google up her gentle and whimsical art and her simple, but radical, view that humans should be treated like people. Anyone impressed with McIntyre's performance in front of the most hostile interviewer imaginable--or, more importantly, anyone seeking confirmation of the interviewer's terrifying claim that McIntyre self-describes as a revolutionary--can google him up and hear it from his own perspective--with all of his extraordinarily well thought out and explained reasons for describing himself thus. In other words, when presented with State organs' negative portrayals of these people, there is a whole body of their own work readily available contradicting it. I don't know how many people avail themselves of it, but at least some small number must. And there is a chance that some tiny number of people who would not otherwise have been exposed to this kind of thinking now have. That is a good fucking thing.

*Still the best (or at least my favorite) comment on that is hist's on a SMBIVA post: "If I wrote a fictional villain who put out a young art students eye and laughed about how she deserved it, I'd be accused of laying it on too thick."

More, different: Aaron Bady and Barnaby Raine. Neither of them are known now for violence done to them by the state (though Raine, at least, has had some experience of that; I don't know if the same can be said for Bady or not). Instead, they're known for putting opposition to what the state is doing into lucid, eloquent words. Bady's article on the philosophy behind wikileaks was linked to from all over the place, including The Atlantic and The New York Times. Even people who take what the fucking NYT says seriously have been given the easy opportunity to click around his site and see other recent writing like "when it suits the imperial hegemon to give a shit about death and suffering, they do so because it suits them to do so." Raine hasn't, to my knowledge, been quite so widely linked, but, hell, I came across him at Digby's blog of all places. And so again we see people with a body of thought out there available for reviewing getting eyes directed to that work.

The Baronette has alerted me to the fact that Gang of Four's "Natural's Not In It" (opening lyrics: "The problem of leisure/What to do for pleasure") is currently being used in commercials for some sort of XBox product; the commercial can be seen here. This is of course horrifying in many ways, and in other ways there is of course a kind of dark hilarity to it. The glimmer of possibility mixed in, though, is that someone, somewhere might see the commercial, think, "That guitar riff sounds great! I wonder what it's from," look it up, listen to Gang of Four, and learn something. Or maybe one or two of the 141,671 people who have watched the commercial on youtube as of this writing read some of the comments about how terrible it is that this song is in this commercial and looked into it a bit. Who knows. It seems unlikely to me that this hasn't happened at least once. And that's a hell of a lot better than nothing.

This is the kind of thing that makes me persist in seeing the internet, in the context of the shit civilization that is the only kind of foundation that could support such a thing as the internet, as a good thing, and why I think it's terrible that the internet as currently composed is surely about to come to an end while the civilization still marches on strong. I've got my eye on what The Pirate Bay is up to. It's not much, yet, but as I keep saying, it's something. And something is better than nothing.

Beautiful

IOZ:

I propose to you that the desire to see another human being punished, even a person who has done wrong...is the most despicable of all human desires. Even if one admits to the necessity of punishment, a necessity that I find categorically problematic to begin with, then the only decent attitude is regret.

More London protest footage

China Miéville's commentary (via) is worth a read:

The scene: a mass demonstration in Tehran/Harare/Rangoon/Pyongyang/&c. The police are filmed shoving a 20-yr-old demonstrator with cerebral palsy from her/his wheelchair & dragging her/him across the pavement, to the horror of onlookers. Footage of this event is sneaked out & publicised. Accordingly, Iranian/Zimbabwean/Burmese/North Korean/&c state broadcasters cannot ignore it. Forced to report it, they stress, however, that there ‘is a suggestion’ that said demonstrator was ‘rolling towards the police’.

The British & American media response can be imagined. Shock. Disgust at such overt & disgraceful victim-blaming. Sympathy for the young activist, who becomes an international hero. Revulsion at the outlet’s patently ridiculous claims of ‘objectivity’. Bitter humour, perhaps, at the sheer Leviathan absurdity of the implied justification.

‘Rolling towards the police’ might become a media meme, this year’s Comical Ali, a shorthand for any self-evidently ridiculous & tasteless claim by the media apparatchik of a repressive regime. Hipsters begin to wear t-shirts emblazoned with the phrase & the face of the ‘journalist’ who spoke it.

Now relocate that attack.

If you haven't seen the BBC interview with Jody McIntyre, the man in (and then out of) the wheelchair, the video and an excellent transcript are here (note: I know nothing of that blog in general, but just having the transcript is a great resource). The interviewer is even more ludicrous than you might expect (even primed by Miéville's commentary), but McIntyre keeps his cool and says some really remarkable things that hopefully had some impact on at least a few people watching. McIntyre's blog, Life on Wheels, also seems like good reading.

Not retreating, still mocking liberals

Yglesias:

I have mixed feelings about a lot of different aspects of this, but there are two key points. One is that the leaker here (presumably Bradley Manning, but that’s not yet been proven in a court of law) has broken the law and needs to be punished.

Listen, you utter piece of shit: Bradley Manning has not been tried, and he doesn't need to be punished--he is being punished. Not just that--he is being tortured.

Even someone with the twisted, authoritarian point of view required to be an establishment liberal, even someone as painstakingly idiotic as fucking Matt Yglesias, should have a goddamn big problem with that.

Entrapment With The Stars

Between this story and this one, I'm wondering if maybe the U.S. government is going to start building bombs, talking celebrities into trying to blow them up, and then arresting them. It would be no more absurd, but plenty more entertaining!

Good stuff from recent days

The hellhole I work in makes me fall way behind on my internettization for the first half of the week, and other aspects of life made me behind to begin with, so here's some good things ("good" referring to the posts themselves, not always their subjects) I would have responded to in the past week or so had time allowed:

what the Tee Vee taught on monogamy. An excellent and hilarious discussion of what's insane in our attitudes towards sex, and as is so often the case, wtTVt can say in a tangential aside what it would take me a thousand words to say. Here, it's this: Yes, it's pop-sci. Smart folk will hate it (assuming, since it's a book, that they — and only they — are the intended audience, adorable smart folk will write squawking reviews: "I already knew all of this!! Not groundbreaking!")

Jack on Mehserle and Grant, summing up the difference in the treatment of violence directed upwards and violence directed downwards in as few words as possible.

For Rhode Island-interested people, stupid Dave Segal posted some pretty cool proposals for a walking bridge where the old 195 bridge used to be. My favorite is the second one he posted, if you take the awful "The Creative Capital!" slogan off of the wall. Team 10's design is also pretty great, and Team 3's would be good if it didn't assume that there would always be swans and lots of fog on the Providence River, which in my experience is not a safe assumption.

I approve of this Postsecret.

Justin's unfinished Ballroom Dream is one of my favorites of his that I've seen. Very cool layering effect achieved just by painting over someone else's mostly-bland painting.

Dr. Boli misinforms us about the French. Nutella On Toast in comments reminds us that the same is unfortunately true of all foreigners.

We kill other species in lots of different creative ways. Increased UV exposure is burning whales.

Eric Garris on the FBI's detention of David House and seizure of his computer, not even for any bullshit criminal charges, only for working with the Bradley Manning Support Network.

Authoritarianism the economy democracy! crystals stability star ancestors roll a saving throw v. recession

Well, this article (which I come to via Matt Yglesias, who I finally just added to my reading list after a few years of getting him only via the mockery of those like IOZ and the praise of those like digby, which if you think about it is kind of the same thing...but anyway) is a delightful example of contemporary fantasy literature. Sometimes (actually a lot more often than sometimes), I'll read an analysis of some aspect of politics or economics or whatever and it will be so dramatically unrelated to reality that it's hard to even describe it as wrong, really, any more than you could say that, oh, J.R.R. Tolkien's portrayal of Sauron is factually incorrect.

The gist of the article is that in general "democracies" fare economically better than "authoritarian regimes." Most readers of this blog have probably already come up with a lengthy list of objections just to this premise: how do you decide what country is which, what definition of economic success are we using, etc etc blah blah blah.

It's one of those charmingly formulaic articles that starts with a little "I wasn't there but let's write like I was" scene-setting, which then leads into The Point:

On a recent Saturday morning, several hundred pro-democracy activists congregated in a Moscow square to protest government restrictions on freedom of assembly. They held up signs reading “31,” in reference to Article 31 of the Russian constitution, which guarantees freedom of assembly. They were promptly surrounded by policemen, who tried to break up the demonstration. A leading critic of the Kremlin and several others were hastily dragged into a police car and driven away.

Events like this are an almost daily occurrence in Russia, where Prime Minister Vladimir Putin rules the country with a strong hand, and persecution of the government’s opponents, human-rights violations, and judicial abuses have become routine. At a time when democracy and human rights have become global norms, such transgressions do little to enhance Russia’s global reputation. Authoritarian leaders like Putin understand this, but apparently they see it as price worth paying in order to exercise unbridled power at home.

What leaders like Putin understand less well is that their politics also compromise their countries’ economic future and global economic standing.

From this, we're meant to see that Russia falls into the "authoritarian" column, which, you know, I wouldn't necessarily dispute, I guess. I don't know much about Russia, honestly, but the takeaway here is that countries, like Russia, where people aren't even allowed to peacefully protest in freedom, are authoritarian baddies.

Oh, oops, I linked to an event in the wrong country. WELL I'M SURE THAT WAS AN EXCEPTION, RIGHT, AND NOT A PARTICULARLY TAME EXAMPLE OF THE NORM HERE RIGHT. I mean, it's not like the US has ever murdered or in any other way violently impeded dissidents, right?

Attempting to analyze the rest of the article makes my head hurt. Beyond his weirdo little anecdote about the Russian protest, he never defines the difference between authoritarianism and democracy. He explicitly excludes countries "that owe their riches to natural resources alone" from his theorizing, so we can continue to hate mozzies even if they're rich--what a relief!

When we look at systematic historical evidence, instead of individual cases, we find that authoritarianism buys little in terms of economic growth. For every authoritarian country that has managed to grow rapidly, there are several that have floundered. For every Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, there are many like Mobutu Sese Seko of the Congo.

Ha ha! Mobutu, whadda kidder! And I suppose the fact that for every [insert name of universally prosperous democracy here if you can think of one] there's an Iceland or a burning banker in Greece is...what, statistical outliers or something? OK then.

Democracies not only out-perform dictatorships when it comes to long-term economic growth, but also outdo them in several other important respects. They provide much greater economic stability, measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle. They are better at adjusting to external economic shocks (such as terms-of-trade declines or sudden stops in capital inflows). They generate more investment in human capital – health and education. And they produce more equitable societies.

Ha ha ha, what the fuck is this economic stability? I'd like to get some of that for myself!!! Too bad then that it's "measured by the ups and downs of the business cycle," rather than by whether or not ordinary people have what they need to live. And "investment in human capital," aside from being one of those terrifying terms that economists like to throw around as if it were some kind of a good thing, is another laugh and a half, for reasons I doubt I have to provide any links to. The "equitable societies" thing pushes it all over the edge for me, because, well, Indians weren't US citizens until 1924 and even now they don't even have to bother stepping out of line for this to happen, Black people here are still legally enslaved to this day, and women, we all agree, aren't even human. To name three examples.

For the true up-and-coming economic superpowers, we should turn instead to countries like Brazil, India, and South Africa, which have already accomplished their democratic transitions and are unlikely to regress. None of these countries is without problems, of course. Brazil has yet to recover fully its economic dynamism and find a path to rapid growth. India’s democracy can be maddening in its resistance to economic change. And South Africa suffers from a shockingly high level of unemployment.

And waddaya know, that South African unemployment just happens to plague primarily the population that was the victim of the authoritarianism there before that magical "democratic transition" they accomplished. It's almost like it didn't actually happen--or, maybe, it's almost like democracy is a fucking crock, a hoax, a distraction.

As some of my smarter readers may have gathered, I actually know less than jack shit about "economics." And you know what? I don't care. I know a hell of a lot more about the meaning of "democracy" and "authoritarianism," of "wealth" and "poverty," than this hack's article demonstrates. Economics is magical bullshit. It's remarkably successful in convincing large numbers of people that the suffering of the vast hoard of humanity for the profit of a tiny little segment of the population is good, just, scientific, rational, and best for everyone, but beyond that it's about as "true" as the notion that if I put on a magical ring I'll turn invisible.

PS I'm not actually a fan of Tolkien if you were wondering.
PPS My point, which I never actually made, is that economic interests in the US have a vested interest in defining "democracy" and "economic success" the same way, and that definition is of course that both are any country which submits itself to the rules laid out by those economic interests.