Good God, is this why we elected a Democratic majority in 2006? So they can continue to enable the Bush administration as more and more independent sources have verified the criminality that we’ve claimed correctly all along?Dearest Nicole,
-Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars
Democrats have certainly enabled them over the years and will likely continue to. They are politicians, after all, not comic book superheroes. But there should be no doubt to anyone who isn't wrapped up in immature freshman dorm cynicism, that there is a distinct difference between those who believe in the concept of an imperial presidency and those who are simply weak and corrupt. They both undermine freedom, but the first is many orders of magnitude worse than the second.And so begins the dialing-down of expectations. Ladies and gentlemen, the Management wishes to inform you that tonight the role of Mimi will be played by a harbor seal, Rodolfo by a sofa with only small tears in the upholstery, and Musetta by this dented trombone. Meanwhile the fine moral distiction between the Imperial and the Corrupt appears to be a distinction of convenience, since in the very next paragraph it is precisely the weak and corrupt who bear the burden of Hitler.
Perhaps that's not much to work with, but it's all we've got and in the end there will be no one around to acknowledge the intellectual superiority of those who sat on the sidelines, starry eyed and impotent, railing about third parties and revolution, while the world went to hell. (See: Communist Party, Germany, 1932) But hey, everybody has a right to their own kind of therapy and ineffectual whining is as legitimate as anything else. Whatever gets you through the night.
-Digs
Goldstein! is on on about nous, les pédés, and how, like, humanity may use its post-singularity biotech transhumanist powers to eradicate homosexuality, but by accident. Well, the prevalent nature-nurture dichotomy that holds sexuality to be determined either by genetic inheritance or by social conditioning, which to his credit Goldstein! doesn't seem to hold personally, is patently ridiculous. Human sexuality is complex, and preference for one sex over another, or neither over both, or what have you, is plainly a result of genetic predisposition, conditions in utero, social interaction, acculturation, etc. All those valences make it unlikely that an in-utero screening will be able to say with anything approaching certainty that this boy will like boys, this girl will like girls, this future MtF trannie-fag with bi tendencies will . . . ah, nevermind. Perhaps with sufficient advances in genetics and neurobiology we can construct something probabalistic--this or that fetus more or less likely to be queer, but I find little merit to the fear that people may begin aborting or altering their potentially fey children.
I am, however, interested in a this comment:
I have a gay son. I am okay with it if he is but I would be a liar if I said that I wouldn’t prefer he was heterosexual. The young man is so un-obviously gay, however, it is at times hard for me to believe that he hasn’t made a choice.This is bizarre. Imagine if the son were effeminate, but straight, a condition more common than homosexuality in my experience. Would Dad wonder if he had chosen, contra his natural disposition, to like girls?
Tee-hee. Wolcott finds Bernie Goldberg perseverating about Media Bias as a form of Dada tribute to Il Russert. We are amused. Personally, I always thought Russert was a $5-million schmoe, one more piece of doughy, middle-aged, caucasian bric-a-brac cluttering a Sunday morning better given over to infomercials and Tex Avery reruns, but seriously, Bernie, you're a-gonna give yerself a heart attack, no joke.
But the real reason that I care is that James W. mentions my 2nd Favorite Political Character, following only the captain of my Enterprise, James. D. Trafficant, and that man is Alan Keyes, who is making sense:
Which reminds me of this:
He can't believe it's not butter:
"You don't have nude art on your front porch," the Dallas Morning News quoted the delegate as telling the platform committee at the state party convention. "So why is it important to have that in the common places of Washington, D.C.?"The Abrahamic faiths have the most charmingly nonsensical of creation myths. Actually, the creation portion of the myth is pretty pedestrian. Yaweh Elohim just sort of poofs everything into existence, although man gets made out of dirt--rather a letdown, if you ask me. What's interesting is the account of what comes afterward.
[Robert] Hurt, 54, a Kerrville, Tex., rancher and father of 14, told us in a phone interview he first came to Washington a decade ago for a gathering of the evangelical Promise Keepers on the Mall. "It was probably not much different than 'The Beverly Hillbillies' going to Beverly Hills," he joked. At the National Gallery, he was appalled to see statues of unclothed people. "I found it very inappropriate," he said. Returning a few years later, he discovered Arlington Memorial Bridge, flanked by the bare-chested figures of Valor and Sacrifice.
"The Lady Godiva thing -- that's what it conjured up, and that's not what our country's about," he said.
Hurt notified his elected officials of his concerns but believes nothing was done. While he said he respects free speech, "I believe art affects a country indirectly. I have been studying the decline of morals in this country. It's sending the wrong message to children that nudity is fine, that nakedness is fine. . . . There are degrees of vulgarity, and it opens up the door for the other stuff."
The United States has always been soaked in blood and racism and sadistic cruelty, yet we've worked and worked and worked over the centuries to make it less so, and I don't hear from too many people ready to give up on the country. Giving up on a party because of its criminal past makes no more sense. But learning to outgrow both nationalism and party-loyalty, and to be full-time engaged citizens (not just voters) both of our nation and of the world may be an idea whose time has come.Is that what "we" have been working on? Me, I'm just working on a better tan. Was the United States that killed a million Vietnamese substantially less sadistic and cruel than the United States that killed hundreds of thousands of Indians? Is chattel slavery worse than nuclear war? Is ginning up war with Mexico in order to grab land worse than invading and occupying Iraq because, because, because . . . ? At what point does the moral rubric become meaningless as a measure?
-David Swanson on Dennis' P.'s new book, Savage Mules
A young man moves to Pittsburgh from a small town near Columbus, Ohio to study English and creative writing at Pitt. Not long after, he meets Mark and Helène, a couple in their late twenties. Mark is a wunderkind at a development firm, and Helène is an artist and designer. Our protagonist falls immediately in love with Helène, even though he thinks that he can see from the outset that she is doomed to break his heart. He meanwhile finds himself in an increasingly close--and increasingly bizarre--friendship with Mark, who, behind his charm and brilliance, turns out to be fairly paranoid and deeply obsessed with conspiracy theories. Mark's ability to work declines as he pursues the odder, outer reaches of psychadelic and dissociative drugs, and Helène spends her time either working manically or drinking herself to blackout. She soon becomes the target of Mark's paranoia and suspicion; he believes that she houses an alien presence; that her drinking is the only way to silence it, and that within her art are the subliminal, symbolic communications of the alien entity. In a moment of renewed charm and lucidity, Mark takes our protagonist out for a wild night, seduces him, and then convinces him to help bring Helène to the top of a ridge in the Laurel Mountains, where he will perform a magical working that will release the alien. They load a drunken Helène into the car--practically a kidnapping--and drive out to the mountains, where they haul her along a utility access trail to a clearing. There, it turns out that Mark's magical working involves stabbing Helène in the heart with a ritual knife. Our protagonist tries to stop him. They tussle. Quite without meaning to, he pushes Mark onto a steep, stony hillside, and the fall seems to kill him. When our protagonist turns around, he finds Helène standing there pressing a knife to his chest, and her eyes are glowing . . .
Torture "is basically subject to perception," CIA counterterrorism lawyer Jonathan Fredman told a group of military and intelligence officials gathered at the U.S.-run detention camp in Cuba on Oct. 2, 2002, according to minutes of the meeting. "If the detainee dies, you're doing it wrong."I'm sure you could likewise construct an argument that death is subject to perception, that "doing it wrong" is likewise perceptual, that the universe does not create us, but we the universe, calling each instant out of the foam of probability, creating existence anew in each moment, each life a unique product of itself, independent and holistic, hermeneutic and hermetic, a wink of consciousness on the inscrutable skein of space and time, existing forward and backward in crystalline, unitary perfection, whole unto itself.
Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), the committee chairman, asked: "How on Earth did we get to the point where a United States government lawyer would say that . . . torture is subject to perception?"Well, it all began when these Indians . . .
Since my cosexualists may now marry in California, I thought I might take the moment to say some thoughtful things and some intemperate things about so-called gay marriage.
Advocates of marriage--and I mean simply those who approve of marriage in general, irrespective of the gender of the partners--tend to fall in two often overlapping camps: those who believe that outside sanctification, legalization, and recognition elevate the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual character of a relationship, and those who believe that the menu of legal rights and privileges that come with civil marriage constitute, in essence, a set of human rights. Those who lean more toward the former are more likely to oppose same-sex marriage, and those who lean torward the latter more likely support the right of gays to marry, but there's plenty of commerce, the one side to the other, and I think it's fair to say that proponents of marriage, regardless of their position on its gender universality, accept it as an unmitigated good, in theory anyway, and, as the saying goes, one of the foundations of our society.
Both sides of the gay marriage debate use phrases like "strengthening marriage" or "protecting marriage," meaning slightly different things, but sharing nevertheless the conviction that marriage is an institution under duress, whether because some inherent sexual inequity debases it in a culture progressing beyond old biases about sexuality, or else because its potential expansion to a whole new human varietal will undermine its sacrosanctity and its traditional place at the moral center of society. Both sides, incidentally, agree that divorce is bad, with many gay marriage proponents actually going so far as to point to the ease and comnmonness of heterosexual divorce as an argument for gay marriage. It's become commonplace to hear about le nozze di Brittany, or about the "half of all marriages that end in divorce." (Aspiring to membership in an organization or institution with a 50% rate of failure has always struck me as exceedingly bizarre.) The message is unsubtle: "You straights have already debased it enough, so how can we make it any worse?" As a marketing campaign, it has its . . . weaknesses. Deriding the very privilege you hope to acquire isn't very sensible. But I was not consulted, and on it goes. It's worth noting that the history of the emancipation of Western civilization from religious absolutism of the type that we're supposedly combatting in the Islamic world today is a history that's inextricable from the struggle for the right to divorce. Why is it necessarily bad that about half of marriages are eventually terminated? Consider the sum total of relationships you've encountered, others and your own, in your life. Not just marriages, but romantic or sexual relationships of sufficient devotion and duration that you think of them as couples. Most of them end in termination. The pressures of intimacy are great, and the capacity of something as fickle and fragile as love (it is not unending; nor unbreakable) to mediate the lifelong, or even monthlong, partnership of two individuals is more limited than we'd usually care to admit. We make poor choices, or our good choices run out after a while. Isn't it extremely retrogressive to call the right of people to dissolve unhappy and unsuccessful--or just plain impulsive or ill-advised--marriages a degradation?
Well, I've wandered afield. Here is the consensus. Marriage is good. Divorce is bad. Strengthening marriage (whether by expanding or maintaining current eligibility) will strengthen society.
I'm not going to spend a lot of time on legal and economic privileges (rights?). There are some drawbacks in marriage. For instance, if two people with disparate incomes marry, then the lower-income person sees his relative tax load increase, sometimes substantially, but since the assumption is that a married couple is a single economic unit, a family, this is hardly a fair complaint. In general, though, married couples enjoy all the benefits you've seen enumerated before, from hospital visitation to untaxed inheritance to child custody. What interests me is the conception of these as "human rights" by gay marriage advocates, who remain entirely unaware of their contradiction and blind spot. If they are, in fact, human rights, then why must you be married to acquire them?
Well, the gays, or some of the gays, are clamoring for nuptials. Among more radical queer types, you will mostly hear derision; marriage is an inherently sexist, homophobic, gendered institution--a tool of the patriarchy and the forces of economic hegemony--a mechanism for social control--an anachronism--a farce. I'm largely in agreement with that position, but, sorry my fellow faggotarians, our thoughts on this matter are irrelevant to the mess of gays who took from the civil rights movement the lesson that equality proceeds from inclusion, and who therefore see their own struggle ending naturally with state-approved nuptials and inclusion in the state-run military. It would be understatement to say that this struggle rests on some shaky assumptions, and its self-identification with the civil rights movement represents a--you'll pardon the expression--whitewashing of that epoch. Cue Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and some very inspirational music. The truth is that the civil rights era was a fraught and riven one, and for all the Satyagraha in the world, there were plenty of loud, prominent blacks who looked at the shit and decided that the shit was fucked: why would they want to wallow in a lot of fucked-up shit? The currents of black nationalisms and separatisms are largely lost in our Tiger-Woods-Barack-Obama post-racial whathaveyou, and certainly no one wants to talk about the fact that Dr. King himself grew increasingly pessimistic about any hope of racial reconciliation in America, and turned his eye increasingly on the wider mechanics of the empire, which he saw driving and fostering racism, and it was then, when he began talking about empire--not before--that he was shot.
In my mind, the question of the value of inclusion remains an open one. Does it really bring about equality? More pretinently: in what endeavor, in what society would such equality come about, if it does come about? Here, I think, the answer is very unflattering. By and large, gays believe that the highest measures of fairness and equity are the rights to be contractually joined by your government and the right to kill for your government in its armed forces. Along with the right to buy and own or otherwise acquire have children, no other seems comparable, especially as it becomes more and more difficult to fire someone for his or her sexuality, even pretextually.
My cosexualists, in other words, largely look at straight, imperial America and say, "Yeah, I want some of that. You guys are doing just fine." All the caveats in the world don't alter that base reality.
"Violence is down" in Baghdad and Washington, owing to similar, albeit differently scaled, programs to control the movement of populations from district to district, street to street. As a tactic, neighborhood cordons are clearly effective. Violence occurs when people with grievances gather together. So, prevent gatherings, or, barring that, identify oppositional grievants and keep them apart. Thing is, the grievances remain.
Consider Washington. That city's black underclass is systematically excluded from regular economic life. We say that the solution is "education," that if we give them all "vouchers" or what have you (the moderate-conservative position), or at least if we "invest in our schools" (the liberal position), then we will produce (the language is an industrial language) graduates (a newish category, implying inherent merit and, decreasingly, employability), who, because they are educated, acculturated, literate, numerate, and civically integrated, will family-by-family rescue the underclass from the mire of cyclical, generational poverty and disenfranchisement. Ha! Cities have neither the funds, the general wherewithal, or the inclination to repair their schools, and even if they could fancy up every building and put a Joe Clark in every front office, they'd still have the students to contend with. Education, such as it is, can only be effective if it's reciprocal, and neither side is interested in holding up its end of the bargain in failed urban districts. We aren't offering much of anything in any case. What work is there for an eighteen-year-old black guy with a high school diploma (or white guy, for that matter)? During the nineties it was possible (if you were a moron) to imagine that the "new economy," or the "information economy," or the "service economy," or whatever we were calling it on any given Monday, was going to produce a nation in which everyone was a white-collar worker, in which the transubstantiation of information (whatever that was) into currency would ultimately require that the entire working population occupy itself with management. At the time (if you weren't a moron) and in retrospect (if you were), it was and is clear that the managerial class must obviously remain a relatively small portion of the workforce, and that if you eradicate those enterprises that used to employ people, then there will be nothing and no one left to manage. In any case, entrance to the managerial class requires additional education, and though there are certainly odd cases of up-by-the-bootstrapsery, the cost of additional education, particularly baccalaureate education, is an insurmountable impediment for many. And again, even if that were not the case, then it would nevertheless remain true that graduating from college is no guarantor of employment, and to endure four years of economic hardship and academic struggle (since, let's be honest, your inner-city education stinks, even if you were at the top of your class, and you're always playing catch-up) in order to land a $30,000-a-year job with no prospects and additional hundreds of dollars deducted each month for health coverage barely superior to the emergency-room healthcare that serves as primary care for the poor is hardly a motivational model with great chances for success.
The persistence of violence in certain communities is rooted in the economy of poverty. (This is especially true in ulated cities, but almost any of the problems we ascribe to the black underclass are just as true for the rural white underclass. There's an astonishing amount of violence in rural and semi-rural America; because it isn't geographically concentrated, it isn't reported with the breathlessness of "22 killed in DC in the first 6 months of the year!") The principle economic activities of persistently impoverished communities are underground and black market activities. Narcotics, true, but also Real Estate, cars, appliances, CDs, clothing, food, etc. But because this is an "illegal" economy, its participants aren't able to use state authorities to mediate their disputes. Just as in proper states, though, there are codes of justice and punishment in underground communities. Violence is not merely random, and it isn't the only method of punishment, although corporal punishment is far more prevalent (as it was in pre-police, pre-modern cultures). There is in fact a panoply of punishments: economic punishments (fines); corporal punishments (beatings, etc.); punishments designed to "reform" offenders; capital punishment. The fact that our state predominantly chooses incarceration, a supposedly less brutal (questionably) and exceedingly more expensive sort of penalty is a difference of degree, not of kind. Much of the violence in inner-city communities flows directly from the necessity, or percieved necessity, to regulate and control the economy--in mimicry of the state itself. Cultural conservatives in particular will be quick to counter these arguments with anecdotes of random acts of violence, or retribution over cheating girlfriends, wandering boyfriends, disrespect, and so on. Of course, that sort of violence exists in every community, and it is only the fact that among the urban underclass it often exists alongside and in addition to a violent illegal-legal system that exaggerates its relative prevalence.
While violence in Iraq often has a more explicitly political component, nevertheless on the level of Baghdadi neighborhoods, say, much internecine fighting has to do with establishing which faction will control the microeconomies of this or that population; which gangs (tribes; ethnic groups; religious sects) will control which corners; who will extract protection money from whom; who will receive bribes, and who will pay them. Although I'm generally loath to even approach the orbit of the Incompentence argument, it would be dishonest not to admit that had the United States deposed Saddam Hussein without substantially destroying Iraq's infrastructure, and had the Iraqi economy swiftly been returned to something like regular operation, then the amount of a.) overt resistence and b.) civil conflict would be dramatically lower today. (We destroyed the infrastructure over the course of almost two decades, so this is idle speculation anyway.) A "functioning economy," which is to say an economy conducted within the purview of state taxation and regulation, has state-sponsored, state-created means of mediation, however imperfect, and if violence is to be done, it will be done by the "proper authorities." Since the regular Iraqi economy was destroyed by decades of economic santions and routine bombing, it was only natural--indeed, entirely predictable--that what did occur would occur.
The solutions, fortunately, are simple. Legalize drugs; legalize small economic activity across the board; and get the fuck out of Iraq, allowing them to legalize or illegalize whatever the fuck they choose.
