the pace of change

language and the power to torture

More on language and power, from Greenwald. On the heels of Brennan's withdrawing his name from consideration in an Obama administration, the traditional media is oh so sad that the DFHes got a scalp. He quotes a sinister NYT article that complains how the DFHes may make it "difficult for Mr. Obama to select someone . . . who has played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda since 9/11." ANY?

Digby noted the same passage and made a similar point: that to object to someone like Brennan -- who advocated and defended the Bush administration's rendition and "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- is hardly the same as objecting to anyone who "played any role in the agency’s campaign against Al Qaeda." And Andrew Sullivan made a related point about an AP article by Pamela Hess which contains this wretched sentence: "Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over Web logs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics, including waterboarding, which critics call torture." As Sullivan notes: "no sane person with any knowledge of the subject disputes the fact that waterboarding is and always has been torture. So why cannot the AP tell the truth?"

All of this underscores a crucial fact: a major reason why the Bush administration was able to break numerous laws in general, and subject detainees to illegal torture specifically, is because the media immediately mimicked the Orwellian methods adopted by the administration to speak about and obfuscate these matters. Objective propositions that were never in dispute and cannot be reasonably disputed were denied by the Bush administration, and -- for that reason alone (one side says it's true) -- the media immediately depicted these objective facts as subject to reasonable dispute.

Hence: "war crimes" were transformed into "policy disputes" between hawkish defenders of the country and shrill, soft-on-terror liberals. "Torture" became "enhanced interrogation techniques which critics call torture." And, most of all, flagrant lawbreaking -- doing X when the law says: "X is a felony" -- became acting "pursuant to robust theories of executive power" or "expansive interpretations of statutes and treaties" or, at worst, "in circumvention of legal frameworks."

But of course, don't hold breath waiting for them to examine their use of language.

words have power

Tom Ackerman presents, "A Marriage Manifesto... of Sorts"

I no longer recognize marriage. It’s a new thing I’m trying.

Turns out it’s fun.

Yesterday I called a woman’s spouse her boyfriend.

She says, correcting me, “He’s my husband,”
“Oh,” I say, “I no longer recognize marriage.”

The impact is obvious. I tried it on a man who has been in a relationship for years,

“How’s your longtime companion, Jill?”
“She’s my wife!”
“Yeah, well, my beliefs don’t recognize marriage.”

Fun. And instant, eyebrow-raising recognition. Suddenly the majority gets to feel what the minority feels. In a moment they feel what it’s like to have their relationship downgraded, and to have a much taken-for-granted right called into question because of another’s beliefs.

Just replace the words husband, wife, spouse, or fiancé with boyfriend, girlfriend, special friend, or longtime companion. There is a reason we needed stronger words for more serious relationships. We know it; now they can see it.

Take that, straight people!!

24 torture

From the Guardian ("Torture is illegal - and it never works"). Much of the article describes his correspondance with an actor who was offered a part, turned it down, and wrote to the Fox exec in charge.

Gordon also told the actor about his belief that it was "essentially true that ... 24 posits that torture is a necessary evil that works and is therefore acceptable". There was also an indication of concern. "I would hate to think," wrote Gordon, "that I've somehow been the midwife to some public acceptance of torture."

Well, the reality for Gordon, on the account given to me by Diane Beaver as well as others, is that he seems to have become the very midwife he feared. And not just to the public acceptance of torture, but to its actual use on real, living human beings.

He hopes that it "will encourage" a re-thinking of the show's position. Fat chance. (Though my students told me yesterday that the most recent plot involves him being dragged back to Washington to face indictment.)

cost of the bailout

From the author of the upcoming book Bailout Nation. The bailout -- so far -- costs more than:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

COMBINED.

innocent bystanders

Because we couldn't possibly have had a role in the problem we're criticizing!!

David Sirota complains about the media:

[T]he Newsweek reporting team is constantly referring to "reporters" and "the press" and "the media" - as if Newsweek reporters aren't a part (and a leading part) of those things - as if they are innocent bystanders. More broadly, the way they portray it, candidates and political operatives are larger than life heroes or villains who make Big Decisions and Face Consequences, while the media is a herd of lobotomized automatons that are so mindless and innocent and pure, that they cannot be held culpable for anything at all. Indeed, according to Newsweek, the entire political media is an innocent bystander to politics. And Newsweek creates this portrayal as if somehow the reporters writing their story have nothing to do with "the press" they are writing about.

They've been doing this forever, with the Clintons as the prime example. Digby notes that they're set to do so all over again:

The press is beside itself concern trolling the Obama administration about how the "Clinton Circus" will ruin him, replete with hand wringing and despair about how unfair it all is. But if it is a circus, it's because the media make it one.

These posts could be useful reading to encourage students to criticize passive voice, assigning agency, and deconstruction.

down the memory hole

Shred, shred, shred.

Last month, Salon published a story reporting that U.S. Army Pfc. Albert Nelson and Pfc. Roger Suarez were killed by U.S. tank fire in Ramadi, Iraq, in late 2006, in an incident partially captured on video, but that an Army investigation instead blamed their deaths on enemy action. Now Salon has learned that documents relating to the two men were shredded hours after the story was published. Three soldiers at Fort Carson, Colo. — including two who were present in Ramadi during the friendly fire incident, one of them just feet from where Nelson and Suarez died — were ordered to shred two boxes full of documents about Nelson and Suarez. One of the soldiers preserved some of the documents as proof that the shredding occurred and provided them to Salon. All three soldiers, with the assistance of a U.S. senator's office, have since been relocated for their safety.

It's sure going to be hard to write the history of this regime. Which is exactly what they want.

BNP bust

Oops! The British National Party's member list gets leaked to the general public. As in, a list of every member of the party. Evidently it's even being BitTorrent'ed. Needless to say, this is a bit of a problem for them:

[M]ost embarrassingly of all, an assortment of file notes providing information on their members’ employment, hobbies and interests. The former could prove particular problematic for those members of the armed forces and police for whom the BNP is a proscribed organisation. That said, the list apparently also includes construction managers, receptionists, district nurses, lay preachers, company directors and teachers, some of whom could find themselves with much explaining to do if the list remains in the wild and starts to be widely circulated.

Couldn't happen to a meaner group of people. Liberal Conspiracy has some fun with it:


There are some map links too -- a "heat map" too. A whole site full of lolcats.
Funny.

On the other hand, it appears that many on the list are not even in the Party (well, not any more). So they've been inflating their membership stats -- naughty, naughty.

Updates from Lancaster Unity -- which turns out to be the go-to site for all things BNP.

"gay nazis" in action

Well, queue the outrage from Christianists. Box Turtle Bulletin reports:

San Francisco police had to escort a group of preachers out of the Castro. Those so-called “Christians” are now using this as an excuse to post the most extraordinary claims and garnering vast amounts of publicity and sympathy for themselves on right-wing blogs.

Links to KTVU report on the story here, and also to the raw footage (5 min) that made up the report.

Here's a report from one of the prayer people, provided in the YouTube description:

Since it was a long night, I can't even begin to remember all of the things that were shouted and/or chanted at us. Then, they started throwing hot coffee, soda and alcohol on us and spitting (and maybe even peeing) on us. Then, a group of guys surrounded us with whistles, and blasted them inches away from our ears continually. Then, they started getting violent and started shoving us. At one point a man tried to steal one of our Bibles. Chrisdene noticed, so she walked up to him and said "Hey, that's not yours, can you please give it back?". He responded by hitting her on the head with the Bible, shoving her to the ground, and kicking her. I called the cops, and when they got there, they pulled her out of the circle and asked her if she wanted to press charges. She said "No, tell him I forgive him." Afterwards, she didn't rejoin us in the circle, but she made friends with one of the people in the crowd, and really connected heart to heart. Roger got death threats. As the leader of our group, people looked him in the eyes and said "I am going to kill you.", and they were serious. A cop heard one of them, and confronted him. (This part is kinda graphic, so you should skip the paragraph if you don't want to be offended.) It wasn't long before the violence turned to perversion. They were touching and grabbing me, and trying to shove things in my butt, and even trying to take off my pants - basically trying to molest me. I used one hand to hold my pants up, while I used the other arm to hold one of the girls. The guys huddled around all the girls, and protected them. Soon after, the cops came and stood between us and the mob. When it was getting more heated, the cops were like "You guys should leave." and Roger said "We want to stay." Someone tried to steal my backpack, but I tapped a cop on the shoulder, and said "Hey, that's my bag." and he got it from him and gave it to me. Others weren't so lucky. Probably half our team got their jackets stolen. Eventually, as the crowd was getting more and more uncontrollable, the cops were afraid for our lives, so they escorted us to our van. (The cops were very nice to us from start to finish.)

Story is a bit implausible to me... Okay, mean chants and whistles, sure. But notice how the account quickly descends into stereotypes: The gays are peeing on them somehow. They try to molest the narrator. They're afraid for their lives, but somehow one of them is able to brave the mob and "connect heart to heart" with one of the fallen, without being molested or killed of course. All in all, a great opportunity for the Christians to display how much they love these fags and just want to help them, but they are so depraved that they resist it:

We can't hate the people because they are just broken and blinded by the spirit of this age. Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against Principalities and Powers. It's not a political thing, we just love the people.

Comments on that story are fuckin scary. ("God will judge that city soon!" "Fucking faggots. I hope for a backlash so severe no fag would dare come out of the closet. Chase the sick liberal faggots to the shores. Icky pervert deviants. Kill them all. ")

Classic Nazi tactics: invade the enemy's neighborhood and insult them, provoking a reaction that can then be propagandized to show how "hateful" they are.

daily Godwin

Gay Nazis! But not the kind you think. Take it away Newt Gingrich:

"I think there is a gay and secular fascism in this country that wants to impose its will on the rest of us, is prepared to use violence, to use harassment. I think it is prepared to use the government if it can get control of it. I think that it is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion."

Teh Gheys are coming! Watch out! If you take away their rights they will speak out against you -- just like Hitler!

In other right-wing Godwin goodness, Michael "Savage" Weiner turns over a rock to find Hilmar von Campe. He's an old aristocratic HJ basterrd whose thing appears to be writing the same book over and over again -- "I was a Hitler Youth and so I know firsthand that [the Soviet Union/globalization/Muslims/Obama] are about to take over America JUST LIKE HITLER DID!!" O NOES!!

anthropic multiverses

Some recent articles on the possibility of a multiverse.

Jason Rosenhouse wonders, "Is the Multiverse Real?" and conveys the speculation of theoretical physicists on that point.

Gets interesting when the original source, Discover magazine's "Science's Alternative to an Intelligent Creator: The Multiverse," muses on the history of the so-called "anthropic theory" of the universe and its creation:

The idea that the universe was made just for us—known as the anthropic principle—debuted in 1973 when Brandon Carter, then a physicist at Cambridge University, spoke at a conference in Poland honoring Copernicus, the 16th-century astronomer who said that the sun, not Earth, was the hub of the universe. Carter proposed that a purely random assortment of laws would have left the universe dead and dark, and that life limits the values that physical constants can have. By placing life in the cosmic spotlight—at a meeting dedicated to Copernicus, no less—Carter was flying in the face of a scientific worldview that began nearly 500 years ago when the Polish astronomer dislodged Earth and humanity from center stage in the grand scheme of things.

So it's a chapter in a much larger story. Could be interesting early reading.

in the sausage factory

You don't want to know how right-wing radio works. Well, sure you do. You just don't want to consume it. Milwaukee Magazine provides "Secrets of Talk Radio", and it's a sad story whose sad result have been plaguing us since 1994 at least.

lost photos from a lost city

Design Observer (online magazine?) reports on an exciting discovery - lost photos from Hiroshima. There were previously very few due to the clampdown on photography and any reports on the bombings.

But the War Department created a Physical Damage Division to go over and record the details for official purposes. They did, but even their evidence has been largely unknown for decades... until somebody found a huge stockpile of them in a surburban garbage bin. The story of their recovery is interesting enough in itself, and can be found here. The photos themselves, of course, are awe-inspiring.

decline of conservative intellectualism

WSJ has an article about how Palin represents the Republicans' 20 (40?) -year slide into anti-intellectual populism. What once was a movement of ideas and exchange has (long) become about denigrating knowledge, the people who have it, and the institutions that produce it:

For the past 40 years American conservatism has been politically ascendant, in no small part because it was also intellectually ascendant. In 1955 sociologist Daniel Bell could publish a collection of essays on "The New American Right" that treated it as a deeply anti-intellectual force, a view echoed a few years later in Richard Hofstadter's influential "Anti-Intellectualism in American Life" (1963). But over the next decade and a half all that changed.

He chronicles the rise of conservative intelligentsia, and describes it as a refreshing alternative to then-ascendent liberalism and the post-60s craziness of leftist politics. But then, in the 80s, "leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an 'adversary culture of intellectuals.'"

Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

And with Palin they reached their apotheosis. The question is where it goes from here.

past promise and future hope

Trying to just bask in happiness and enjoy a newfound freedom from political blogs. But of course there's commentary out there to be read!

CT is an interesting place for reflection, given its Canadian base. Kieran relays an article by a Canadian historian Rob MacDougall, who might just be on to something about America:

“We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” said Martin Luther King Jr. at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. … King went on: “When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note … a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

And here Sancho [Panza] or Sacvan [Bercovitch] whispers to the guy standing next to him, “Were they? Really? If we went back in time and asked the architects of the republic–Jefferson and Madison and Washington and the rest–did you mean for this to apply to your slaves too, would they agree? … Because it would have saved a lot of trouble if they’d spelled all this out in 1789.”

The black belt rhetorical jiu jitsu of the “I Have A Dream” speech is that King pulls it off. He convinced the better part of a nation that dismantling segregation was not so scary, not so radical, but really what they’d all meant to do all along. They just hadn’t gotten around to it, like the laundry I need to sort, or those slaves Jefferson never quite got to freeing. … And this is an old and hallowed American trick. On July 4th, 1852, Frederick Douglass blistered the ears of his white audience with prophesy … Douglass reveals that, “interpreted as it ought to be interpreted,” the Constitution is in fact “a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” He embraces and celebrates the Constitution as a bulwark against slavery. …

At Seneca Falls in 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton cribbed Jefferson’s words for her Declaration of Rights and Sentiments, the intimation being that “of course” the patriarchs of 1776 must have intended equal rights for women. … And so on and so on down through history, with every kind of American reformer looking backward to move forward, couching their goals as nothing more radical than America’s alleged founding ideals.

Maybe this is why we're not the center-right country that the conservatives and media claim we are after each election. The US Constitution, Declaration, and other founding documents provided an aspirational model of progress, which allows change to take place as the fulfillment, not the negation, of the nation's founding promise.

It almost doesn’t matter what Jefferson “really meant” by “all men.” No, that’s not it. It matters. It matters each and every time great and noble promises are broken. But here’s an idea Greil Marcus put in my head: the promises made in the Declaration and the Constitution are so great that their betrayal is an inevitable part of the promise. And that’s what makes them work. Marcus … calls that betrayal “the engine of American history.” The “more perfect union” is a limit approaching infinity. As each generation discovers–inevitably!–that the promises made to them were false, they battle to make them a little more true.

USA! USA!

unacceptable!

Via a Detroit Fox station... Grosse Point woman "accused of denying children candy" if they or their parents support Obama. And that is just too much! LOL. Love that phrasing there -- "denying children candy" -- what a villain!!

and another one gone, another one gone....

Another one bites the dust. Well, dust not bitten yet. But this last-minute homophobia might finish of Mitch McConnell in KY. As always, I'm torn about the situation. No pity for Mitch himself, who whether gay or not sold his soul to the Republican right a long time ago. (And geez, is his record poor across the board!) But it's another chapter in the exploitation of homophobia by traditional labor faction of the left (who it appears is responsible for this).