Dorian Taylor offers a nice overview of some very useful vocabulary so I will never again have to explain from scratch what I'm talking about when I allude to “rent-seeking behavior”.
Once these were modes of income for people, now they are better understood as components of commercial transactions.
- A rent is a benefit you receive as an accident of your position.
- Profit is the return you get for putting capital at risk.
- Wages are what you earn in exchange for your labour.
Salon has a little summary of how the IRS “scandal” is nonsense ginned up by the VRWC.
The IRS affair is now frozen in public opinion amber, with millions of Americans believing not just that the IRS unfairly targeted conservative groups, but also that the White House may have actually directed the targeting. That’s just how Issa would like it.
But it now sort of looks like the IRS was just doing its job.
Just keeping this handy here.
A fascinating history of trash collection in New York City.
In its early days, the department [of sanitation] didn’t really function at all. There are some photographs taken for Harper’s Weekly, before and after photos of street corners in New York in 1893 and then in 1895. And the before pictures are pretty astonishing, people were literally shin-high or knee-high in this muck that was a combination of street gunk, horse urine and manure, dead animals, food waste, and furniture crap.
Put yourself back in the late 19th century and think about the material world that would have surrounded you in your home. When you threw something out, it wouldn’t go anywhere. It would be thrown in the street.
I'm sure that my libertarian friends would assure me that the free market would have dealt with this easily had not the government interfered, somehow.
I just made a prediction on Twitter. Azrielen asked
So how long now until polyamory is up for actual discussion? 100 years, you think? Will anyone give a shit in 100 years?
I think it will be a lot faster than that. I replied:
Poly TV drama characters in 5 years.
Sitcoms: 10.
Policy talk: 15.
The limits of 140 characters prevented me from adding:
Policy victories: 20
And in truth, I'm hedging. I think it will happen even faster.
The left blogsophere is fond of quoting this editorial from the conservative National Review from 24 August 1957, written by William F. Buckley. (4:7, pp. 148-9)
The most important event of the past three weeks was the remarkable and unexpected vote by the Senate to guarantee to defendants in a criminal contempt action the privilege of a jury trial. That vote does not necessarily affirm a citizen's intrinsic rights: trial by jury in contempt actions, civil or criminal, is not an American birthright, and it cannot, therefore, be maintained that the Senate's vote upheld, pure and simple, the Common Law.
What the Senate did was to leave undisturbed the mechanism that spans the abstractions by which a society is guided and the actual, sublunary requirements of the individual community. In that sense, the vote was a conservative victory. For the effect of it is — and let us speak about it bluntly — to permit a jury to modify or waive the law in such circumstances as, in the judgment of the jury, require so grave an interposition between the law and its violator.
What kind of circumstances do we speak about? Again, let us speak frankly. The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. Political scientists assert that minorities do not vote as a unit. Women do not vote as a bloc, they contend; nor do Jews, or Catholics, or laborers, or nudists — nor do Negroes; nor will the enfranchised Negroes of the South.
If that is true, the South will not hinder the Negro from voting — why should it, if the Negro vote, like the women's, merely swells the volume, but does not affect the ratio, of the vote? In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.
What are the issues? Is school integration one? The NAACP and others insist that the Negroes as a unit want integrated schools. Others disagree, contending that most Negroes approve the social sepaation of the races. What if the NAACP is correct, and the matter comes to a vote in a community in which Negroes predominate? The Negroes would, according to democratic processes, win the election; but that is the kind of situation the White community will not permit. The White community will not count the marginal Negro vote. The man who didn't count it will be hauled up before a jury, he will plead not guilty, and the jury, upon deliberation, will find him not guilty. A federal judge, in a similar situation, might find the defendant guilty, a judgment which would affirm the law and conform with the relevant political abstractions, but whose consequences might be violent and anarchistic.
The central question that emerges — and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal — is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race. It is not easy, and it is unpleasant, to adduce statistics evidencing the median cultural superiority of White over Negro: but it is fact that obtrudes, one that cannot be hidden by ever-so-busy egalitarians and anthropologists. The question, as far as the White community is concerned, is whether the claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage. The British believe they do, and acted accordingly, in Kenya, where the choice was dramatically one between civilization and barbarism, and elsewhere; the South, where the conflict is byno means dramatic, as in Kenya, nevertheless perceives important qualitative differences between its culture and the Negroes', and intends to assert its own.
National Review believes that the South's premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way, and the society will regress; sometimes the numberical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence.
The axiom on which many of the arguments supporting the original version of the Civil Rights bill were based was Universal Suffrage. Everyone in America is entitled to the vote, period. No right is prior to that, no obligation subordinate to it; from this premise all else proceeds.
That, of course, is demagogy. Twenty-year-olds do not generally have the vote, and it is not seriously argued that the difference between 20 and 21-year-olds is the difference between slavery and freedom. The residents of the District of Columbia do not vote: and the population of D.C. increases by geometric proportion. Millions who have the vote do not care to exercise it; millions who have it do not know how to exercise it and do not care to learn. The great majority of the Negroes of the South who do not vote do not care to vote, and would not know for what to vote if they could. Overwhelming numbers of White people in the South do not vote. Universal suffrage is not the beginning of wisdom or the beginning of freedom. Reasonable limitations upon the vote are not exclusively the recommendations of tyrants or oligarchists (was Jefferson either?). The problem in the South is not how to get the vote for the Negro, but how to equip the Negro — and a great many Whites — to cast an enlightened and responsible vote.
The South confronts one grave moral challenge. It must not exploit the fact of Negro backwardness to preserve the Negro as a servile class. It is tempting and convenient to block the progress of a minority whose services, as menials, are economically useful. Let the South never permit itself to do this. So long as it is merely asserting the right to impose superior mores for whatever period it takes to effect a genuine cultural equality between the races, and so long as it does so by humane and charitable means, the South is in step with civilization, as is the Congress that permits it to function.
Emphasis mine.
They are enemies of democracy. They rationalize their bigotry.
This is who American conservatives were. This is who American conservatives still are.
This nine-minute epic animated film about heroes on a grand adventure of swords, magic, and awesome is unforgettable — but a while ago I wanted to track it down a little while ago, I couldn't remember how to find it. So I'm putting it here.
Morpheus Revenna's post Polytheism: The Light In The Window is pretty terrific, and not just because it quotes me. She talks about how we understand the relationship between our personal gnosis and the truth of the cosmos, and says that we need to keep a critical eye on what we experience ... but we also need to accept what we experience.
It is not necessary to question the reality of our sense experiences – we feel what we feel, we see what we see, and those experiences have primacy. But it’s important to practice discernment about how we shape those experiences into a story about the nature of the Gods. It is important to remember that what we have is always and only the nature of our own encounter, filtered through the membrane that separates the full reality of these powers from our embodied experience. It is in this way that we can be both rational and authentic in our relationship with the Gods.
This post was inspired by a Facebook post of a Friend which said: “Gentrification: Ethnic cleansing, with a liberal twist!”
That's a little ripe. “Ethnic cleansing” is a euphemism for racist genocide. Gentrification is bad, but it just isn't in that weight class.
It rubbed me particularly wrong because that post was the latest word in an ongoing discussion I've been seeing about gentrification, which I've been following not just because it's a hot topic right now but because I'm soaking in it. I'm one of those liberal bourgeois Whites who has recently moved into a neighborhood largely populated with Blacks and other people of color.
There are good reasons why many people resent Gentrifiers like me. Yes, people like me are creating disruptions that can ultimately result in serious hardships for the less-prosperous residents of our neighborhoods. Yes, we are as a rule maddeningly naïve about the effects we are creating. Yes, this betrays the liberal political agenda we think we represent. Yes, bourgeois liberal Whites' smugness about our political and cultural liberalism is often annoying as hell. Yes, we have a deep responsibility to get more sophisticated about how national and local politics and governance create a context in which our migration into urban cores and other neighborhoods has destructive consequences. Yes, we need to not only become more sophisticated but also to become more active in changing those politics. Yes, we have generally failed to even make gestures in the direction of meeting those responsibilities.
But I don't believe that this migration of bourgeois Whites is simply destructive. If I did I wouldn't have participated in it.
So the Facebook post got under my skin because while I respect why people gripe about Those Gentrifiers Moving Into The Neighborhood, if we just stop the conversation there we will miss a necessary broader discussion. I want us to ask how gentrification is part of a greater process that raises the cost of housing, why the housing market is structured such that a migration of bourgeois Whites squeezes poorer people of color, what people moving into a neighborhood can do to support the community they have entered, and a hundred other questions about the political, economic, and material context which makes this migration of bourgeois Whites a problem. If we get stuck on cultural resentments we will lose that bigger conversation.
(A friend says that the big villain here isn't White people, it's capitalism. You may not want to join that chorus, but you should be thinking at that scale.)
It's frustrating and a little weird because the current wave of gentrification is driven partly by something which should be the opposite of a problem. Gentrifiers emerge from a generation of bourgeois Whites who just don't have the kind of bigotry which produced the white flight from the cities of their parents' and grandparents' time.
I don't want to imply that we Gentrifiers are devoid of bigotry, that racism is over, that there's no problem. The process of racist injustice is still working. There's still plenty of White bigotry backing it up. Part of that process of racist injustice is Gentrifiers naïve and disinterested in how the process works or in our complicity in it — supported by forces working to keep Whites naïve and disinterested.
But I cannot believe that we have to take bigotry's weakening grip on White people as something that just creates a problem. There has got to be an opportunity here. Every time I see the racially-mixed patrons of bars and restaurants in downtown Oakland I think “this looks like the America I was promised”. I say looks like because gentrified Oakland is not really the better America we want ... but the fact that it's starting to look like it should be a place from which we can start to build it for real.
Note: I've rewritten this post in response to a friend who rightly took me to task for the implications of the original version.
An incredible interview with Sarah Kendzior in which she lays out a critique of what she calls “the Prestige Economy”.
It's worth it to start with her series of tweets which inspired the interview.
Thomas Friedman writes on the internship scam. He benefits from the scam, so he doesn’t call it a scam.
Here is how the internship scam works. It’s not about a “skills” gap. It’s about a morality gap.
- Make higher education worthless by redefining “skill” as a specific corporate contribution. Tell young people they have no skills.
- With “skill” irrelevant, require experience. Make internship sole path to experience. Make internships unpaid, locking out all but rich.
- End on the job training for entry level jobs. Educated told skills are irrelevant. Uneducated told they have no way to obtain skills.
- As wealthy progress on professional career path, middle and lower class youth take service jobs to pay off massive educational debt.
- Make these part-time jobs not “count” on resume. Hire on prestige, not skill or education. Punish those who need to work to survive.
- Punish young people who never found any kind of work the hardest. Make them untouchables — unhireable.
- Tell wealthy people they are “privileged” to be working 40 hrs/week for free. Don’t tell them what kind of “privileged” it is.
- Make status quo commentary written by unpaid interns or people hiring unpaid interns. They will tell you it’s your fault.
- Young people, it is not your fault. Speak out. Fight back. Bankrupt the prestige economy.
In the interview, she further breaks down how it works.
In one generation, working for free for people who can pay you went from something laughable, to something wealthy people were doing in a few fields, to something everyone was recommended to do, to something almost everyone has to do. Entry-level jobs were replaced with unpaid internships. That same monopoly on opportunity reshaped lower-skill labor. Jobs that once offered on-site training now require college degrees. In response, universities ramp up tuition, knowing that students have little choice but to pay to compete. Instead of options, there is one path to professional success — one exorbitantly expensive path.
The values of the wealthy elite became the rules that everyone had to live by.
At the same time, the rising cost of living made it “normal” to pay a lot of money for basic things. Ordinary life has been redefined as a luxury good. Health care and home ownership are unaffordable for most young people. This makes them feel desperate, particularly when they begin adult life saddled with stratospheric debt. They feel they have no options but to play along, even if that means being party to their own exploitation.
What they have discovered is that even playing by the rules will destroy you in a prestige economy. Institutional affiliation is promoted as a way to advance professionally by building personal prestige, which is why people are paying to intern at prestigious companies or going into debt for prestigious schools. But these are hollow victories, designed to suck you dry and leave you even more desperate. Prestige decreed by institution means nothing when institutions are rotting.
This is the machinery of neo-feudalism. Read the whole thing.
Marc “I am NOT the Beastmaster” Singer:
Darkseid is one of the great archetypal characters, and one of the last to arrive in comics. Most of them were created back in the thirties or forties; the next wave came with Marvel in the sixties; most of today's young turks are still middle-aged grouches from the seventies like Frank Castle or Wolverine. But just before the creativity ended Kirby gave us Darkseid, the stone-faced tyrant from outer space who inspired one highly successful copy (Jim Starlin's Thanos) and a less successful copy of a copy (Jim Starlin's Mongul, now routinely used as a punching bag to show how tough some johnny-come-lately is) as well as any number of more fleeting and forgettable imitators. The best of these characters aren't just antagonists in any particular plot, they are fascism personified, its means and desires incarnated in humanoid form. Thanos lays bare its psychosexual death drive, and brilliantly, but Darkseid is a more mature, more psychologically stable, and therefore far more threatening figure: imagine a Hitler who's both physically intimidating and not the slightest bit insane. Darkseid is what Hitler wanted to be, the visions he sold to himself in his sleep made real. A walking dream, or nightmare, of total control.
Just like the way that I'm often bored by stories where Superman just lifts up heavy stuff and punches out robots, stories where Darkseid is played as a big physical threat are usually completely uninteresting -- with the notable exception of the huge knock-down, drag-out fight in Walter Simonson's Orion #6. Instead, I'm fond of the stories where Darkseid manipulates the characters around him, preying on and exploiting their distrust for each other, their fear, their selfishness. He's not a guy who walks out of a Boom Tube, shouts his own name and starts punching people -- except when he is, which is terrible -- he's a guy who pushes people to embrace the dark side of their own personalities. For all of Kirby's craftsmanship, he never did have much time for subtlety.
That's why my favorite Darkseid stories are the ones where he shows up, sets something in motion and then leaves people to tear themselves apart, breeding the mistrust and isolation and hate that turn otherwise good people into willing servants of evil.
A Friend from Facebook made a memorable sharp-tongued comment about a certain strain of libertarians.
I think property-fetish libertarianism is a special case.
Look to it's antagonistic relationship with any kind of liberation movement: especially feminism. Hell — attacks on altruism. It feels like to me that it's built on “challenging assumptions”, on destruction, on dismantling, on correcting, and on the power of the solitary, glorious, self-generated Ubermensch to situate yourself above and beyond The Sheeple. Because the individual exists in a social vacuum of what's theirs and fuck all’a’yall. It wouldn't know intersectionality if it was going to return to the common mineral deposits of everyone else like we all will.
Also. Look to how it's actually practiced. Online, in pubs, whatever. Does it come across as supporting the individual, as inspiring action, as championing any concrete ethical behaviours of betterment or self-development? Does it really want to change anything? Not especially, as far as I've encountered. It seems more like a way of feeling ok about the problems of systemic-wide exploitation, violence and dehumanisation and/or justifying feeling superior to others who do have a problem with those things.
I think I see your initial point, and I would agree that every political ideology has reactive elements, but speaking from experience of listening and arguing with the spectrum of lefty/anarchist/individualist/hippy/etc friends I have, and chats with other people of varying degrees of political involvement and kinks, I really feel right-wing libertarianism has a special kind of empty reactionary contraryism to it. Or at least opens its arms wide to let in those kinds of folks that want to think like this.
Partly I think that comes from straight up smugness. It is the smuggest ideology I think I've ever encountered. It comes across to me as Reasons Why You Shouldn't Give a Shit, with a healthy side of You Are More Enlightened Than Everyone Else. If you don't want to give a shit, just don't give a shit. Don't concoct fabulous, fatuous, bloodyminded straw men about why you're better for not giving a shit.
Your mileage varies. I know. I hope you get more out of it than I perceive. All I'm saying is at the very least your movement has a lot of dickheads in it. Especially those that hate women and other minorities, manifesting as monumental chips on the shoulder about having to care about anyone else. I really worry there are some fundamental things about the philosophy that allow these to fester in it.
They are making you look like proper twats.
Saving for future reference.
Scott at Jackdaws Love My Big Sphynx of Quartz offers us what he calls The Worst Argument In The World.
I declare the Worst Argument In The World to be this: “If we can apply an emotionally charged word to something, we must judge it exactly the same as a typical instance of that emotionally charged word.”
Well, it sounds dumb when you put it like that. Who even does that, anyway?
I propose that an outright majority of the classic arguments in American politics, and no small number of arguments in religion, philosophy, et cetera, are in fact unmodified examples of the Worst Argument In The World.
I'm not sure whether it qualifies for its colorful title — it seems a pity to sacrifice the equally colorful name The If-By-Whiskey Fallacy — but Scott offers enough examples from political discourse that it may well qualify as The Most Common Bad Argument In The World, at least.
Maeve at L'Esprit D'Escalier has the succinct critique of common objections to the word “cis” that I've been looking for, Intro to cis and why having to write this annoys me.
Louise Mensch said yesterday on twitter that ‘cis’ is “an offensive term that I don’t recognise”. This inspired the tag #ThingsMoreOffensiveThanCis which is about equal parts hilarious-things-that-aren’t-offensive and really poignant transphobia.But, I accept that there are people who may not yet have heard the term ‘cis’ and may want an intro. The briefest definition I can give is: Do you know what ‘trans’ means? It’s the opposite of that.
I saw this film in an art gallery 20 years ago, and flirted a little with the animator who made it. I thought I would never see it again.
I stumbled across it again on YouTube today. I love living in the future.
Over on the Twitters, Marc Rettig points us to a little Forbes piece, ‘Culture of Purpose’ Is Key To Success According To New Research From Deloitte.
What’s the leader of the world’s largest audit, tax and consulting firm doing preaching about what seems like a squishy business attribute like “purpose”? As Punit tells me, “exceptional firms have always been good at aligning their mission or purpose with their execution, and as a result have enjoyed category leadership in sales and profits,” (think Whole Foods, Tom’s Shoes or even Apple). This seems particularly clear for companies where the founder is still very much involved in the business or where the founder’s ethos is culturally ingrained in the organization. Companies that are singularly focused on exceeding customer expectations tend to fall into this category. “So there is an empirical financial benefit to organizations that instill a purpose-driven culture,” says Punit.
The piece says some very good things, but it has such a stiff and awkward tone, it reads like a virgin talking about sex. Take this little passage.
Through interviews with the media and then in speaking engagements that he did at various campuses around the world during those times, the Deloitte Chairman was regularly challenged to justify business in general and even more specifically Deloitte’s reason for being beyond returning profits to its partners. “I found it disconcerting that business has been cast in a not so positive light,” said Punit.
Companies like Deloitte have earned disconcerting questions about what purpose they serve. So business has not “been cast in a not-so-positive light”, business has screwed up and we haven't held businesses nearly accountable enough.
It makes me wish this article didn't make these questions about purpose sound like the usual rah-rah corporate BS, because I believe in what it says. Devotion to purpose supports business success. It makes money.
Having been inside organizations with a strong purpose (and many more organizations without it), one can scent a true purpose focus in discussions of even the smallest projects. When one asks folks why they are doing something, they can — they will — tell you things like, “We are doing A in order to prepare the ground for B, which we are doing despite it being a compromise on C because it will help with the more important project of D and the essential project of E because D and E are both major initiatives in service of our organizational mission of F.” Not only can everyone walk up and down that chain from tactical moves to strategic projects to fundamental purpose and back again, they do it constantly. This makes the organization more effective because tactical actors keep the whole system aligned ... and they need less supervision to do it, freeing up executive attention for doing the work they need to do.
Breaks in this chain test the culture.
In truly purpose-driven organizations people will talk about a break constantly, with the expectation that fixing it matters more than the proximate work in front of them, since the fix must necessarily transform their tactical work.
In organizations without a true commitment to their purpose, people avoid talking about a break between purpose and tactics. Talking about these ruptures becomes politically dangerous, regarded as “distractions from the task at hand”.
That does not mean that every project in a purpose-driven organization must have some kind of perfect conception. People sometimes say, “Yes, we are neglecting the important principle X in service of the urgent need for Y.” But it is not only safe to say that in the organization, it is encouraged, because a purpose-driven organization makes its necessary compromises with its eyes open in order to ensure that those necessary compromises really are necessary.
This a deep organizational culture question. Having a purpose and talking about it isn't enough; you need a cultural commitment to talking about how it connects to everything you do.
And culture is hard to address.
When I was in consulting, I lost count of the number of companies I worked with who worried about keeping their culture as they grew. And I would always tell them, “That's not your problem. What will happen as you grow is you will discover what your culture really is, not what you have told yourself it is. As you get bigger, what will get harder is not keeping that culture, but changing it ....”
David “The Wire” Simon explains in a comment on his blog responding to the question, “ I’m curious to hear your thoughts regarding the Koch’s play for the Tribune company.”
My thoughts?
First, the locally-owned newspapers went to the publicly-traded newspaper chains, which promised economies of scale and great wealth to the owning families at the point of sale, as well as the preservation of editorial independence. It was a lie.
Then the chains went to Wall Street, where analysts who only measure the health and purpose of any endeavor in terms of short-term, quarterly profits, demanded greater mediocrity long before the internet arrived to pressure the industry. The analysts promised greater profits than ever before. In the end, they lied and diminished the product just in time for digitization.
Then the newspapers went to the internet hat in hand, afraid to charge for their weakened, eviscerated product and hoping against hope that giving the news report away for free would somehow encourage a revenue stream. The mavens of new media lied.
And now, those end-game capitalists who will not be content until nothing — no societal need, no communal ambition, no other American ideal save for maximized profit — is left standing. They , will buy up the gutted newspaper carcasses, so that they can lie on a scale that makes all the previous dishonesty a trifle. They will regard what remains of the news report merely as a platform to advance themselves and their capital, just as they regard the political system as such.
Once and forever, capitalism is a worthy tool and a necessary one for creating mass wealth, but as to the distribution and uses of that wealth within a society? No, capitalism is not a metric for anything but profit itself. This is the lie at the core of free-market ideology and libertarianism. And free markets are never the whole or complete answer when addressing any societal goal, compact or responsibility. It’s easy to make money when all you give a fuck about is making money, to invoke Orson Welles. And the Koch brothers and others of their kind wish to build a society that does little but transfer wealth to a select few while obliterating any other ambition for American society. If newspapers can help them secure that future, so be it.
But journalism in those cities where they own the daily newspaper and its digitized versions will be crippled until alternative news sources are developed by independent, professional journalists.
What do you call it when capital has purchased not only government, but all plausible means to criticize governance? A prelude to fascism.
So I guess scandal season is upon us, as once again Republicans try to disrupt a Democratic President's electoral victory through a combination of legal action and press manipulation. Benghazi has been a big success with the Republican base and a nonstarter with anyone else because there's just no there there; like a lot of lefties, I cannot even tell what the scandal is supposed to be on that one. The Department of Justice getting Associated Press journalists' phone records, on the other hand, is a legitimate scandal that I'm upset about. I expect to post about again, but it hasn't quite caught fire yet, in part because it's a continuation of the ongoing development imperial executive in the name of national security which has been an uninterrupted process whichever party has held power.
Then there's this IRS thing. That one's legitimate but not actually all that big a deal; hence “mini-scandal”. I have a couple of helpful commentaries.
The first is from the Rude Pundit, who lays out what obviously happened.
Look, we know how this went down: Post-Citizens United, the Internal Revenue Service was flooded with applications for tax-exempt status for whatever organization a couple of fucksacks with a tricorner hat wanted to start. “Social welfare” groups, they were called, and they could not be involved with specific political candidates or advocacy (although, you know, c'mon). So the IRS told its low-level drones who had to look at all the fucksack applications to flag ones that looked hinky. So the low-level drones, who are overworked to begin with because Congress won't give the IRS the funding it needs to do its fucking job, used some search terms.
It's 2010 and who are the fucksacks who are everywhere? The “Tea Party” groups. So, sure, fine, let's fuckin’ search that. Low-level drone 1 tells low-level drone 2 (and for god's sake, they live in the dull, dull, boring, dull city of Cincinnati, so give ’em a little break), “Hey, just use ‘Patriot’ as a search term and you'll get your job done faster because if there's one thing we know, it's that a whole bunch of these applications are from crazed fucksacks applying for tax-exempt status because they hate them that black guy in office.” Low-level drone 2 might have said, “Oh, shit, that'll get us in trouble.” But low-level drone 1 had a convincing argument by saying, “You wanna get to the bar sooner?” By the way, chances are that LLD 1 and LLD 2 have been LLDs forever, under at least one GOP president.
Does this narrative need to be completed?
Digby offers a quote from Josh Micah Marshall which explains why this trivial thing is such a big thing.
If you wanted create a scandal to have maximal appeal to GOP base freakout, this is it. And it has the additional advantage of not creating the same sort of off-putting crazy as hitting other bugaboos beloved by base Republicans. It’s not about Obama’s ties to the Muslim brotherhood or his foreign birth. It’s about taxes, something everyone has an experience with and understands. And it’s at least rooted in something that’s true. Something really did happen. And it’s not good. It shouldn’t happen. It even has unexpected knock-on effects like the IRS’s supposed connection to the dreaded ‘Obamacare’.
So I go to see Iron Man 3 and there are a bunch of action movie trailers before the movie starts. Including this one for White House Down. I want to say something serious about it.
Hang on a second before you watch that trailer. I'd already seen an earlier trailer, cut rather differently, playing up the classic Bruckheimer stuff: explosions, crowds of people running, explosions, the US military's expensive toys, explosions, famous landmarks, and explosions. Since Independence Day opened big on the strength of an effects shot of aliens blowing up the White House, here we get the White House and the Capitol Building on fire. Jerry Bruckheimer and Roland Emmerich sure know how to hook a certain deep part of the American id.
The newer trailer, which I posted above, is more character-driven. We meet Channing Tatum as the big dumb lunk who's going to have to save the day, a failure who will be redeemed by his standing up as a hero when his moment comes. Add some rifles and terrorists and running around in corridors and our hero wearing an A-Shirt with a few scratches on his face and we've got the Die Hard formula: it's Die Hard in the White House, a perfect set-up for a big dumb action movie.
And then we meet his co-star, Jamie Foxx, who will be his action-comedy buddy, a reluctant hero who has to overcome his discomfort with violence to pick up a gun and save the day. Check them out. Does Foxx look like a dapper badass or what?
Foxx is the brains of this team, right? Of course, because This Is America, that just means that he has a lot to learn from the big dumb lunk. Still, remember that back when Emmerich did this in Independence Day, to have Will Smith as the hero we needed to give him a Jewish sidekick to figure out the brainy stuff, because racism with racism sauce. So this is progress, sort of.
Foxx is the smart one in a nice suit because he's playing the President of the United States, following in the footsteps of Action Hero President Harrison Ford from Air Force One. Because Obama. Now I don't want to be one of those White guys who's all now that Obama is President racism in America is totally solved because obviously not. But. Something's happening here.
And I cannot help but notice that the image of a black guy in a suit running around the White House with a gun ... because he's Action Hero President ... is quoting one of the most powerful propaganda images of the 20th century.
What do you want to bet that there's a shot in this movie which mirrors that photo exactly?
We've gone from that image signifying Malcolm X deliberately evoking White fears of Black political violence to it signifying that we need a heroic Black leader with a gun to save America.
Progress.
Sort of.
God bless America.
Driftglass offers a thumbnail sketch of paranoia and deceit entangled in pseudo-libertarian politics.
For them, the world makes only makes sense as a Philip Dick novel in which everything the government does at virtually every level is suffused with monstrous intentions and dark designs. For them, the world is The Matrix: a massive scam built on top of a web of far-reaching and apparently infinite number of conspiracies in which everyone who is not 100% on their side is either a co-conspirator or a somnolent dupe.
Of course, when the mundane realities of the business of government — even government during a crisis — falls short of proving their specific brand of vast and terrible plots, they have to back-fill or pave over all bits that don't fit — all the chuckholes and logic-chasms and tire-shredding facts — with, well, bullshit.
He provides a tidy example in the form of a clip about Rand & Ron Paul.
Another item for the “Naomi Wolf is not too bright” file: she's allowed LewRockwell.com to post several articles of hers.
Lew Rockwell is almost certainly the author of Ron Paul's old racist newsletter and his site is a hotbed of goofy crackpottery, predictions that a civil war is coming when the government sends former gang members to confiscate our guns and put us in FEMA concentration camps, and other craziness. No responsible person should allow their byline under his masthead.
A long, unhappy index of links for Obama: An Authoritarian Corporatist.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I am also informed of the variant known as Grey's Law:
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
And that is, of course, an allusion to Clarke's Third Law.
Andrew O'Hehir has an good screed in Salon, How Boston exposes America’s dark post-9/11 bargain, which says that the events around the Boston bombing indict pretty much every sector of the Republic as having failed in the wake of 9/11: the press, the government, the commentariat, the polity, the whole thing. Not anything anyone who's reading me doesn't know, but still: a good screed. So check it out.
I want to focus on how, near the end, this jumped out at me:
In America after 9/11, we made a deal with the devil, or with Dick Cheney, which is much the same thing.
....The supposed tradeoff for that sacrifice was that we would be protected, at least for a while, from the political violence and terrorism and low-level warfare that is nearly an everyday occurrence in many parts of the world. According to the Afghan government, for example, a NATO air attack on April 6 killed 17 civilians in Kunar province, 12 of them children. We’ve heard almost nothing about that on this side of the world, partly because the United States military has not yet admitted that it even happened. But it’s not entirely fair to suggest that Americans think one kid killed by a bomb in Boston is worth more than 12 kids killed in Afghanistan. It’s more that we live in a profoundly asymmetrical world, and the dead child in Boston is surprising in a way any number of dead children in Afghanistan, horrifyingly enough, are not. He lived in a protected zone, after all, a place that was supposed to be sealed off from history, isolated from the blood and turmoil of the world. But of course that was a lie.
Well of course it was a lie. Again, not anything anyone who's reading me doesn't know.
But while I understand why O'Hehir is saying that Americans don't really think our children's lives are more important than other children's lives, we sure act like it. And that reminded me of a blog post from Mia McKenzie of Black Girl Dangerous that I've been meaning to blog about, Hey, White Liberals: A Word On The Boston Bombings, The Suffering Of White Children, And The Erosion of Empathy.
Your constant prioritization of the lives of white people over the lives of people of color is taking a serious toll on my psyche and those of many in my community. And by that I don't mean what you might expect. Most of us already know that racism and its BFF white privilege have detrimental effects on people of color. Racial oppression leads to any number of unhealthy conditions, including high blood pressure, depression, heart disease, diabetes and even asthma. But what I’m talking about is something different. Something I’m going to call DSWP: desensitization to the suffering of white people.
O'Hehir is nosing around the foothills of that mountain whose slopes McKenzie is climbing — because after all, when he says “Americans” he's mostly talking about a mediasphere of White people — and I have to admit that there are moments where I feel like I'm drifting toward the altitude where McKenzie finds herself with the DSWP. White people beating their breasts about their misfortunes is starting to feel very, very unseemly to me ... and I am a White person.
This means that this is an even worse moment for the Republic than O'Hehir says, does it not?
These words were published by a well-known radical feminist in 1974. (Note that at that time, “transsexual” was used where today one would more politely use “transgender”.)
There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial points here.
One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.
Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised.
Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disppear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.
Can you guess who? Seriously, guess. Then go see; there's more.
Instructive.
I keep referencing this cartoon and having to track it down again, so I'm posting a copy of it here for my convenience. It makes the point beautifully.
At the Climate Summit we see a man giving a presentation, showing a slide saying:An angry man in the audience asks, “What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?”
- Energy independence
- Preserve rainforests
- Sustainability
- Green jobs
- Livable cities
- Renewables
- Clean water, air
- Healthy children
- etc., etc.
I don't know if this story is true, but I know that it's plausible.
I am a feminist. I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women's rights. Until a month ago, I would have expressed unqualified support for Title IX and for the Violence Against Women Act.
But that was before my son, a senior at a small liberal-arts college in New England, was charged—by an ex-girlfriend—with alleged acts of “nonconsensual sex” that supposedly occurred during the course of their relationship a few years earlier.
....On today's college campuses, neither “beyond a reasonable doubt,” nor even the lesser “by clear and convincing evidence” standard of proof is required to establish guilt of sexual misconduct.
These safeguards of due process have, by order of the federal government, been replaced by what is known as “a preponderance of the evidence.”
It's trivial to notice that the criminal justice is horrifically ineffective in protecting women from nonconsensual sex, largely through dismissiveness about women attesting to their experience. But a standard which assumes that women would never lie is terrifying.
In a discussion of this story on Facebook, a male friend observes
Women have tremendous power over men.
I replied at length.
It's tricky.
On balance, men as a class still have power over women. It's categorically less skewed than it was fifty years ago, but the bottom line is unmistakable: society advantages men and disadvantages women.
But this is the sum of a system of injustice which also creates meaningful injustices for men. I think we can recognize that the injustices against women are categorically greater while still objecting that the injustices against men need correcting. (Indeed, because these are interlocking systems, I suspect that one cannot fully correct the injustices women experience without also attending to the injustices that men experience.)
The model of the civil rights movement against racism adopted by feminist rhetoric proves misleading in this respect. Racism doesn't have significant injustices which cut the other way, but sexism does.
And the forms of power women have over men are largely threats that men face from extraordinarily unscrupulous women exploiting systems that serve typical women. This is very different from the way that injustices women encounter come from the exercise of power by typical men unconscious of the effect that they are having.
The flawed analogy to racism, the overall condition that women are treated less well by society, and the power that women do hold over men being largely a threat from atypical women makes men's vulnerability to the operations of power from women invisible to most women.
The story I linked is an example of a form of power that women don't notice because it would not occur to them that it could be used for ill. Women's sphere of experience is the pervasive threat of being coerced into sex through social pressures and violence. Saying that women making false accusations of rape is a threat to men sounds absurd to them, like a denial of the very real rapes that happen horrifyingly routinely.
But men have commonly had the experience of an encounter with a woman who was more unscrupulous than they realized at first and think to themselves, there but for the grace of God ....
Update:
It occurs to me that it would be useful to link my long note about the challenges men face in getting their heads straight about consent.
I just discovered that Blogger has mislaid my post about what may be my favorite news story ever.
He was walking toward the stairs when a teenage boy approached and pulled out a knife.
“He wants my money, so I just gave him my wallet and told him, ‘Here you go,’ ” Diaz says.
As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, “Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm.”
You know what happens next, right?
Update: Diaz tells the tale.
