R2D2

Andrew Sullivan ought to go back to trolling craigslist for bareback hookups, an altogether more wholesome pastime than crouching wantonly before the Pentagonal glory hole and hoping for a little, er, intervention.  Here he is defending something Here is some ridiculous Andy Sullivan Guestblurgher  defending something that Anne-Marie Slaughter--and with the marvelous exception of Samantha Power, was ever a chick apparat so appropriately surnamed?--calls the Responsibility to Protect, rather glibly IRCized as R2P, as if intended to be textulated intertwixt giddy tweens: OMG did u gIz c r2p @ da VMAz last nite LOL she wuz drest up in a manuhtee custoom!ROFL!  Arendt's error was living too soon; Eichmann may have trumped these motherfuckers when it came to evil, but he was a goddamn sight less fucking banal.  So apparently Humanitarian Intervention is out and R2P is in; I return to my metaphor; these people are more changeable than teenagers in an Urban Outfitters; mom I told you I wanted Levi's slim jeans these are Levi's skinny jeans god you are so stoopid I don't want these 511s I want 513s why do you hate me so much???!!!!  Sullivan attempts to make some kind of taxonomic distinction between the two, aping Slaughter, but insofar as there is any difference, it appears that the new, ahem, doctrine makes so-called sovereignty even more contingent upon the whims of the west than it was under the humanitarian rubric, although also, maybe, the opposite?  I don't know; you tell me.  Either the case is herein made that this new Responsibility frees the West to forcefully intervene more often, or the case is herein made that it does not . . . well, in fact, disregard that either/or.  Both cases are made, and in the course of offering a clarification, we find a muddle.

Anyway, the contingency of sovereignty now apparently rests on what yinz leaders r doin to yinz own people.  THIS IS NOT TOM HOBBES OLD SOVEREIGNTY.  This is the new Chevy Malibu, um, Volt, um, Cruze, um, THIS IS NOT YOUR FATHER'S BUICK.  But pay attention to the prestidigitation; the new definition of sovereignty is a crackpot reintroduction of a subject's belonging to his sovereign.  When a leader fucks with his own people, he is a leader no more.  Now this is just hysterical, but you will see it wherever war is being promoted.  It is an objectively true, empirically verifiable fact that Barack Obama has ordered the deaths of more people than Muammar Qaddafi or Bashar al-Assad.  But not his own people.  Ergo the moral duty falls to the greater murderer to murder the lesser because it is worse to kill your neighbor somehow than some random dude across town.  Well, actually, given the Hobbesian social compact, it is.  And you know, by the way, the next time you go worrying about a Hobbesian state of nature, you may recall that not only did Hobbes have no idea what such a state might consist of, living as he did before archaeology, anthropology, paleontology, zoology, biology, or pretty much any ology that might contribute in any meaningful way to an understanding of how the animal world functions, let alone how pre-agricultural homonids might interact with each other and their environment, but also he was an apologist for totalitarian theocratic monarchy; his vision of the State wasn't the fucking Works Progress Administration; it was the Ukranian Famine.  ANYHOO, his ghost mocks us all; here we are with a new name for an old company; Payroll Solutions is now called Sentrix, but we are the same Customer-"Sentrix" company that we've always been!  America has an unlimited right to fucking kill you.  The end.

War Is a Farce that Gives Us Preening

I take it as a given that it is not the event which is an outlier, but the reporting of it.  So while you are constructing your elaborate morality pyramid in which the United States, however compromised, however violent in pursuit of its policy aims, at least isn't [insert enormity], well, basically, fuck you, you are worse than wrong.  The argument that the institutional violence the US pursues, its endless supposedly accidental slaughter, is by dint of some extraordinary claims about good intentions not simply less objectionable than "terrorism" or whatever bargain-rack Hitler you are fixated upon at this particular timeslot in cable history, but actually supportable as some kind of legitimate force of opposition to the amateur depredations of the Qaddafis of the world is simply laughable.  We avail ourselves of our army of conquest in order to take all those al-Assads' places; we are not merely Saddam's executioners, but his executors; this is the conqueror's doom, and it is why all our endeavors on this bloody field are in the most classical sense tragic--they aren't just awful, but also inexorable.

A Fistful of Dollars

Yes, but [bullying is] even less physical in the workplace. The intermittent slap on the back of the head outside shop class is unheard of in the office.

-Prof Coldheart

Hey, you know, I'm not trying to bully yinz, but since thisahere blog is pretty whitedudey in the comments, I am going to bring some executive realness down on ya.  The above statement is just not fucking true.  In the words of Abby Adams, I desire that you would remember the ladies.  And the Gaze and the Minorities and the world of blue-collar work not to mention the fact that even the persistent threat of layoffs and pink slips in your comfy whitedude office jobs is a kind of physical threat since the reduction of means is the removal of livelihood is the precariousness of food and shelter.  But mostly I just want to remind you that while a prominent member of the global elite may not have actually raped your mouth recently and then gotten away with it because you, like all human creatures, are a terrible and irredeemable liar . . . well, you can see where I'm going here.

Your Lunch Money or Your Life

The law, known as the Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, is considered the toughest legislation against bullying in the nation.

-The Times

Well this neatly summarizes the national psychopathology, doesn't it.  WE ARE GOING TO FORCE YOU TO STOP BULLYING!  We'll respond to violence and intimidation with coercion.  We'll bring in the cops and the courts.  We'll be proactive.  We will seek out the bullies and destroy them.

Now psychopathically, ahem, um, no, psychopathologically speaking, what we call bullying is actually a learning curve into adulthood; it is the early human operating system reprogramming itself to ape the actions of its elders, clumsily and imperfectly.  Bullying is considered a uniquely childlike behavior, and when it is encountered among adults, it's seen as a case of arrested development, a grade-school mentality somehow stuck in place.  But this is completely backwards; the adult world is built on bullying; the whole vast edifice of status and hierarchy is bullying; the law is bullying; authority is bullying; the enforcement of style and trend is bullying; the mechanisms of advertising and consumption are bullying . . . and these poor school kids, bullies and bullied alike, are just imitating that bizarre and competitive adult world into which they are subsumed every time they walk into a school.  Education is rigid, hierarchical, and competitive; it is in fact ever more competitive; and here we are, telling these kids on the one hand that they must not be mean to each other, but on the other hand they are the vanguard in the very battle for the future, the crack troops against the Chinese math menace, or whatever.  They are competing with each other for better test scores.  They must not be left behind.  They must achieve the promise of the future America where every janitor and pipe fitter has a graduate business degree and seventeen years experience in an executive management capacity with an emphasis on human resources and spend process growth development improvement practices.  So on the one hand they are supposed to be civil and decent and compassionate, but on the other hand they are supposed to triumph.  And meanwhile those who manage to reject the obscene, competing priorities of education, well, just put them on drugs.  That'll fix them.  It is not the law that needs to change to stop kids from bullying each other, but the perverted culture in which they are born and raised.

Not in Nam, of Course

Cruise missile liberals will be looking for war crimes in Libya like Iraq pimps are still looking for WMD in Iraq even though it seems clear that bloody reprisals are the order of the day on either side of the conflict (via Charles Davis).  It turns out that in a civil war the emphasis falls on the latter word.  The desire to cover warfare in the wash of moral hygiene is completely reprehensible, symptomatic of a desire to name as righteous that which is at best merely necessary.  And plainly in the case of Libya you'd have to stretch the definitions of necessity far, far beyond their breaking point.  What such arguments represent is the apparently endless expansion of circumstances in which the right action is to use warfare as a tool of policy, the endless march of deathdealing as an act of mere governance.  Qaddafi was a troublesome vassal; send in the sorties!  It is notable that the loudest cheerleaders of this war do not actually desire anything remotely resembling a revolution.  "As much as possible of the current bureaucracy, police and army should be retained," says Juan Cole, which unintentionally illustrates the truth: that this was not a revolution, not from the Euro-American perspective; it was a hit.  If Qaddafi were quite the Hitler he's now supposed to be, or to have been, or whatever, then it would hardly do to keep his party apparatus in place.  Look, I know this is uncomfortable for you self-flattering rebel sympathizers who imagine yourselves at the wheel of a Spanish ambulance each time you type your login name and password into your Google account, but you are being played for fools and suckers; your extravagant sympathies and your juvenile desires to align yourselves with revolutionary causes blind you to your meager posts as adjunct propaganda writers for the Western war machine.  Did Qaddafi commit enormities?  Yes.  All leaders do; all governments do; the United States does every day; the French and the British do every day; the Sub-Saharan nations are rife with them; Central Asia is rife with them; South America is rife with them--you would support one monster over another only in the hope that it will not one day turn on you?  Perhaps you consider a skeptical pacifism childish; I say to you the moral life of children is superior in every way to a perpetual adolescence.  Endorsing violence except at the uttermost end of need is monstrous; cheering it, even then, is evil.