Belated

Barack Obama, recently:

From child labor laws to the Clean Air Act to our most recent strictures against hidden fees and penalties by credit card companies, we have, from time to time, embraced common sense rules of the road that strengthen our country without unduly interfering with the pursuit of progress and the growth of our economy.

It sure is a good thing that keeping (American) children out of factories didn't "unduly" hinder business, or else they'd still be right there fitting their little hands into the machines. Luckily, business could just get other children in other places.

His other examples are so ludicrous that I won't even mention them.

Funny

Three in a row in my blugfeed.

Jack: "Listen to the presbot give his 'Tuscon Tragedy' speech. Can't wait to get a hold of the transcript, to compare his moment seizing rhetoric to his murderous austerian actions."

Marisacat: "Could the thing have been more turgid – or a cheaper display to buy the huzzahs, the whistles, the screams? I’d be embarrassed to be in that hall. It’s embarrassing to be a citizen of this country."

Digby: "For my money it was the best speech he's given as president ---simple, human and uplifting in a difficult moment."

UPDATE: Tristero, determined as always to be even more embarrassing than Digby: "I really must go further than Digby and declare it was not only the best speech Obama has given since becoming president, but also one of the greatest speeches given by any sitting president. It was heartfelt, eloquent, beautifully written and paced, and deeply personal while calling all of us to realize a larger purpose: the national goal of establishing a discourse healthy for democracy."

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.)

A sentence carefully constructed to communicate nothing

A Bank of America statement:

This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments.

(By the way, The Kansas City Star, what I said to The Denver Post applies to you, too.)

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.

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!

The Kuleshov Effect

Eric Martin, some yahoo named Gulliver whom Martin quotes approvingly, the New York Times article they are both responding to, and thirty Helens agree: the United States is militarily involved (if you know what I mean) in Yemen in response to the terrifying incident of the underpants bomber.

Which is funny because didn't that happen on Christmas day? And don't I have here an MSNBC article dated December 18 fessing up to U.S. missile strikes in Yemen? (That earlier article, incidentally, is a marvel of propaganda, but then I'm sure you knew that without even having to read it.)

Eric and Gulliver are innocent little babies here, repeating fiction as truth because they specialize in being uncritical of the narratives they're spoon-fed, so long as the one holding the spoon is both liberal and reputable. Which of course the New York Times is. Let's look at that reputable liberalism in action, shall we?

The debate is unfolding as the administration reassesses how and when to use American missiles against suspected terrorists in Yemen following a botched strike in May. That attack, the fourth since December by the American military, killed a provincial deputy governor and set off tribal unrest.

The Yemen quandary reflects the uncertainty the administration faces as it tries to prevent a repeat of the Dec. 25 attempted bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by a Nigerian man trained in Yemen.

Isn't that clever? End one paragraph with the accurate*-yet-vague "since December" timeline, start the next paragraph with the accurate-and-specific "Dec. 25" event, and let the reader assume from there. Faulty memory and the (terribly convenient!) closeness of the events will do the rest.

*Yes, I'm sure we were in Yemen earlier than the MSNBC article admits, but for now I'm gonna give it to them for convenience sake. (Convenience's sake?)

The Police Have Been Wonderful

One of Chumbawamba's two contributions to 1985's Dig This: A Tribute to the Great Strike.

Nothing whatsoever, never

Yglesias:

But whether or not Iraq achieves a durable, non-violent resolution to its political conflicts seems to me to have nothing whatsoever with the presence of American soldiers and it never did.

This makes no sense

Digby apparently thinks, all of a sudden, that the reason people started calling Obama a Muslim was so that other people would take their hatred of Obama and start applying it to all Muslims, who they had previously not had any problem with. Or something? I don't know, if anyone can make better sense of it, let me know.

I tried to come up with a witty title but the best I can do is "Shut Up, Jacob Davies"

It's funny that Jacob Davies kicks off his summary of the 20th century with a mention of Africa, because he then proceeds as if the continent doesn't exist. Of course, the mention ("The twentieth century kicks off with the wizard invention of the concentration camp by the British in South Africa"), in addition to using a really weird noun as an adjective in a just completely strange way that I hate, doesn't have anything to do with Africans themselves directly, and really just serves as a background (factually incorrect background, but background nonetheless) for an element of European history. After all, as Davies tells us in his next paragraph, it's "just a warm up." European colonialism in Africa, just a warm up--because then Europeans started being violent to each other in Europe. I say wow.

There's a lot of use of the words "everybody" and "everyone," for example,

Everybody learns a Valuable Lesson about the Importance of Peace, which they all put into action in the same way: a determined effort to ensure that this time they will be the ones with the biggest guns, goddammit.

And you know, I think it would come as a surprise to the vast majority of the population of the fucking Earth that they "all" were trying to get the biggest guns. Seems to me that was an activity of the elite of the elite, the richest, most powerful members of the richest, most powerful countries. As always, by definition, I mean duh.

"There's a brief period of glorious economic euphoria and excitement in the rest of the world" again, would come as a surprise to most of the rest of the world, especially that continent that I vaguely remember discussing at some point recently. I can't quite remember the name of it. Does anybody live there? I don't think so, so never mind.

The grossest thing about the whole essay is that you can feel this kind of self-satisfied I'm-brilliant air dripping off of the words. Davies clearly thinks he's approaching the 20th century from a perspective never seen before, when really he's just regurgitating the eurocentric racist vision of it that's jammed down all American and European throats from birth.

"I think our children are going to think we are nuts," he says, towards the end if you can make it that far. I sure hope yours do, Jacob.

PS Ha ha ha, read the second comment on the post.

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.

Hope

I hope they're getting this. The administration is not going to escape being seen as anti-business.....And I hope the ensuing discussion will lead President Obama to understand that the human and financial costs of continuing on this path far outstrip any conceivable security benefits....Let's hope the courts don't decide that we need to ratcvhet (sic) up the police state by siding with officers who hope to cover up their unprofessional and illegal behavior.....The sooner this country comes to grips with the fact that our mission in Afghanistan is overly ambitious, while excessively costly, the sooner there will be more and louder calls for disengagement. Let's hope this turns up the volume.....And let us hope some policy based in reality follows.....What I hope we're seeing is a rare example of the Democrats staking out a position on the left so that they can make a compromise in the middle.....I do detect some momentum gathering behind Tom Udall’s constitutional option for curbing the filibuster in January of 2011, which if it happens would revive hope in the legislative arena.....It’s always difficult to characterize the emotional state of a convention full of people. But if the 2007 edition of Netroots Nation was mostly angry, 2008 was hopeful, 2009 was anxious, and now in 2010 the dominant mood is depressed.

That last one, unintentionally, gets at the point I'm trying to make here quite well.

Raoul Vaneigem: "Hope is the leash of submission."

Derrick Jensen, Endgame, vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization, pages 329-331 (immediately after quoting the Vaneigem):

Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that against all odds makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must at all costs, including the cost of our sanity and the world, be avoided). How can we continue if we do not have hope?...

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. ...

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn't believe--or maybe you would--how many editors for how many magazines have said they want me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to "make sure you leave readers with a sense of hope." But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I couldn't, and so turned the question back on the audience. Here's the definition we all came up with: Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency. It means you are essentially powerless.

Think about it. I'm not, for example, going to say I hope to eat something tomorrow. I'll just do it. I don't hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn't crash. To hope for some result means you have no agency concerning it.

To the liberals I quoted above, engagement seems to consist largely of closing your eyes and hoping, interspersed with occasional voting (which is by its nature essentially just a special form of closing your eyes and hoping). I admit that I frequently become paralyzed thinking about everything wrong with the world, and how powerless I feel--and that is exactly when my thoughts turn to hope. It's a sickness! Jensen continues:

So many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they've guaranteed at least its short-term continuation, and given it a power it doesn't have. They've also stepped away from their own power.

...when we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free--truly free--to honestly start working to thoroughly resolve it. I would say when hope dies, action begins.

Hope may be fine--and adaptive--for prisoners, but free men and women don't need it.

Are you a prisoner, or are you free?

Incidentally, I'm returning the book to the library tomorrow morning, so I'm going to have to stop giving over my entire thought process to Jensen. At least until the copy I bought arrives. I hope it comes soon!

UPDATE Hahahaha, I just got home from the library and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a package from Derrick Jensen. Both volumes are now in my clutches. The need to think for myself has been averted!

It is possible for me to have more objections to a paragraph than there are words in it

For example:

America is a Utopian society. It aspires to an achievable perfection, a middle-class egalitarian meritocratic democracy with no kings, no pharoahs, no rulers by inheritance or divine right. In this it is different to Britain, where I grew up, which has class differences that in many ways no side really wants to erase, rather only to throw the other down, or keep them down.

THIS IS THE CHINA PEOPLE AND QUEERS

I'm really glad I read blogs where certain individuals specialize in getting outraged by certain other individuals' public behavior, because otherwise I never would have learned how delightfully unhinged Gallagher, of all people, is these days. Select quotes:

On tattoos: That ink goes through to your soul—if you read your Bible, your body is a sacred temple, YOU DIPSHIT.

If Obama was really black, he'd act like a black guy and get a white wife.

On, uh, the Rice Krispie elves, for some reason?: All three of those guys are gay. Look at 'em!

This is why I'm not on TV. I am powerful. They can tell.

Sounds like he's found a niche for himself.

Google knows me

(clicking makes it bigger)

Victims of the Oiligarchy

By Diane Steen-Hinderlie, via Jon Schwarz.

Ronald Reagan, Campaign Speech 1976

"I would like to be president, because I would like to see this country become once again a country where a little six-year-old girl can grow up knowing the same freedom that I knew when I was six years old, growing up in America."

---

"I would like to be a president. I would like to be a six-year old girl. A country can grow to like a six-year-old girl president.

Growing up old in America, where a president can be a six-year-old girl, I knew freedom. Again, I knew freedom... Can I know freedom? I would like to.

'Where can I see this freedom?' In this country. This America, where freedom can grow. Grow up, America!

I would like to see this country become a six-year-old girl once again."