Category Archives: Politics

New definition requested: "Stable"

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I’ve pretty much given up on ever getting a definition of “victory,” so I might as well move on to the next bit of ambiguity. Laura Bush had this to say on Larry King:

Many parts of Iraq are stable now. But, uh, of course, what we see on television is the one bombing a day that discourages everyone.

I guess it depends on what your definition of the word “stable” is. Mine doesn’t allow much wiggle room on the issue of daily bombings.

And damn those insurgents for harshing our buzz with their daily bombings!

I try to flippant to keep from losing my mind, but this is just getting fucking depressing.

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The Swift Boating of Al Gore

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Say what you will about Al Gore, but he made a good movie and he doesn’t deserve this:

Last night, Al Gore got very favorable national press and worldwide television exposure.

This afternoon, a group calling itself “The Tennessee Center For Policy Research” sent out a press release denouncing Vice President Gore for the size of his household electrical bills.

Apparently the attempt at a smear has spread throughout much of the internet already–heck, it’s been nearly 24 hours since the awards show. The question is, will they get away with it this time? I have long been of the opinion that Al Gore was too freakin’ polite for much of the 2000 campaign, but I am conflicted about the best way to deal with it long-term. Maybe progressives need a shadowy corps of smear artists to go head to head with Fox News and its ilk. There are two principal problems with that idea, though: (1) most progressives have too much integrity/self respect/human decency to routinely engage in the lying/twisting/manipulating of basic common sense and reality so common in their opponents, and (2) progressives may be too darned independent-minded to take the kind of marching orders that would be necessary for this sort of plan. This is not the kind of problem that will go away if you ignore it (it would if everyone ignored them, but that ain’t gonna happen.)

So I am calling on all intelligent independent-minded people to resist all these b.s. attempts to deflect attention away from what people like Al Gore say and towards misleading innuendoes about who they are. See, there probably aren’t very many actual counter-arguments, so the goal is to distract attention from that fact. I’m still trying to get my head around the arguments of those who doubt global warming–highlights seem to include that liberals hate America and that science can be determined democratically if enough people simply refuse to believe something (I choose to reject Avogadro’s number. I’ll get back to you on how that works out.)

Don’t just ignore this, though. It may not be worth dignifying with a response, but silence is really no longer golden.

Sigh.

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The USA’s slick new marketing campaign (UPDATED)

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This one really threw me off for a while:

This was apparently created as part of a campaign to combat rising anti-Americanism in the UK and elsehwere in Europe. I hate to be a spoilsport, but I have to argue with the some of the “history” presented here–if there were no America, would everything else have proceeded exactly the same way except with right-wing-talking-point-friendly side effects?

Just a thought: if America never existed, there might have never been a French Revolution, so no Napoleonic Wars, no dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, no Franco-Prussian War, no World War I, and therefore no World War II in which the Soviets could liberate Paris first. That may be going a bit far, so let me slow things down a little.

If there were no America during World War I, but otherwise everything else was the same, how long would the Allies and Central Powers continue slugging it out on the Western Front? It has been suggested that, without U.S. intervention on the Allies’ behalf in 1917, the war in the west might have eventually ended in a draw of sorts. Here is one interesting scenario:

In World War I, America remained strictly neutral until the beginning of unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. To this, America had to respond, but as the President pointed out, this did not commit America to taking part in the disastrous ground war being fought on the French frontier. Instead, a vigorous and ruthless naval campaign was carried out against both German submarines and surface vessels, whether civilian or military. At the same time America’s scientific establishment cam into action, developing a sonar device as early as 1919 and effectively ending attacks on American vessels. Without American intervention, neither side could prevail, and in 1921, with both Germany and France physically and financially exhausted, and threatened from within by Communist revolution, the Western Powers concluded a peace treaty that left matters substantially as they had been in 1914. Without the indignity of military occupation or the vindictive conditions of an imposed peace, including vast “reparations” from the defeated, radical right-wing German parties could gain little traction; an obscure agitator called Hitler was killed in a beer garden brawl in 1937.

My point is simply that nothing about history is pre-ordained (a point I’ve tried to make in earlier posts) and that hindsight is 20/20.

All the same, it is kind of nice to have the UK stumping for us, isn’t it? USA! USA!

UPDATE:

It occurred to me that it sort of sounds like I’m saying that, without America, there would not have been any war for the past 200 years. There certainly would have been wars, just not the same ones. The Crimean War may have occurred unchanged without a US, as well as the Russo-Japanese War. A lot of things would have been different, though, and “better” or “worse” is hard to say. I’m inclined to say worse, though.

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Humor, Fox News style

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The Blog Bob Cesca: Step Away From The Jokes, Fox News, Before You Hurt Yourself The Huffington Post

I don’t have much more to say that isn’t said in the posted linked above.

There appears to be a Fox News response to “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” premiering soon. From the brief teaser available on YouTube (I’m not embedding it because I don’t want to help them get hits), it looks like the format of the Daily Show, but with conservative jingoism replacing the humor.

A few years ago Comedy Central ran Straight Plan for the Gay Man, an enjoyable send-up of that Bravo show. It was funny because it lampooned the source material without really negating its premise–that gay men have a lot to show straight men about fashion and hair care, or something like that. Straight guys have a thing or two to say about chilling the fuck out every once in a while. The show’s humor may also have benefited from the fact that it only ran for three episodes–the joke didn’t have time to get old.

Fox News’ “The 1/2 Hour News Hour” (sigh…), from what little I’ve seen, fails because it does not acknowledge its superior source material. All it does is imitate–also, I honestly believe that “The Daily Show’s” principal motivation is humor, and the “liberal” slant derives from the fact that there are far greater resources to mine for humor in that area. Fox’s show’s principal motivation is conservatism, and it proceeds on a snipe hunt for humor. The show seems to proceed from the belief that conservatives can do their own funny fake news show even better than Comedy Central can–then again, how the hell do I know what they’re thinking? All I really know is that it isn’t funny…in fact it’s so unfunny that it’s painful to watch.

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Losing the war of ideas

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How did we win the Cold War? Because people in East Germany preferred McDonald’s to communism, to put it simply.

How are we winning the War on Terror? Can we win it by blowing more and more shit up? Or is it really a war of ideas, the same as the Cold War? The ideas are different, and the difference between cultures is greater, but this is still more a war over whose ideas are m more compelling–western civilization or whatever the alternative is. What is it that makes western civilization so great? Maybe, just maybe, it is not self-evident to every human being on earth that western civilization is the model that should be followed. And maybe the reason for that is not a flaw in the message, but in the messenger. Maybe our actions in the Middle East fail to effectively demonstrate all that is worth emulating about western culture.

What is so great about western culture, anyway? I could list about a thousand things or more, but here are a few:

  1. Habeas corpus – Protecting us from government overreaching since 1215.
  2. Separation of church and state – America has it, and churches are overflowing. Europe doesn’t, and churches are not overflowing at all. Do the math.
  3. Freedom of the press – Sometimes “reporting the good news from Iraq” is just a polite way of saying “propaganda”
  4. Freedom of speech – It was difficult for Soviet citizens to overcome those pesky communists, largely because they tended to kill people who didn’t say nice things about them
  5. George Washington – In 1781, he could have taken his Continental Army and made himself a king, but he didn’t. That changed the whole course of human history.
  6. The Fourteenth Amendment – What good does it do to protect you from infringement of your rights by the federal government if the states can do as they please?
  7. The Ninth Amendment – We do too have rights, Mr. Gonzales.
  8. Women’s rights – Wouldn’t it get boring pretty quickly if all women were subservient?
  9. Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, Marshall, etc. – They had their flaws, to be sure–they were human, after all–but they were also freakin’ geniuses. No other country in history has ever been so lucky as to have so many wise people working together.

I could go on and on and on and on, but you get the picture.

These are the tools that will ultimately win the war on terror. And we seem to be dismantling them one by one. In the minds of many who support the tactics of the Bush administration, a decent summary might be that it was necessary to destroy our freedoms in order to save them (ironic analogy to Vietnam intended). We have seen much jingoism, but very little progress. And are no nearer to a clear picture of victory than we were yesterday.

This war is not about freedom, or democracy, or safety from terrorism, or defeating extermist ideologies wherever they may be found, or whatever other rationale is offered as old ones are shown to be false. It is about power. I would say American power, but I’m not even sure that is entirely correct. And lest I sound like a tinfoil hat crackpot, it is not some global conspiracy run by a SPECTRE-like syndicate. It is much more disappointingly mundane than that. A group of people, generally accustomed to getting what they want without much effort, found an opportunity to experiment with power in upsettingly predictable ways (at least in hindsight for most), and now they can’t bring themselves to admit how bad they’ve f—ed things up. We’re America, dammit, and if America does it, then by definition it is the right thing to do. Anyone who says otherwise is a traitor (and possibly a child molester, or a drug addict, or a habitual Zima drinker, and so on).

I’ll end with words from a more artful blogger than I:

The first plan the Pentagon geniuses came up with was to intimidate the Iraqis into submission by demonstrating our invincible might, kind of like a huge fireworks display in which only very narrowly targeted, and deserving, victims would be killed–presumably the bombs would serve as judge, jury, and executioner only for resolute followers of Saddam, and if we could label other victims as “collateral damage”, we could get away with the inevitable mistakes. What the geniuses were aiming for was some sort of veneration by the Iraqis, as if the US were God-like in its power. But the Pentagon could not pull off the plan because technological war is by nature vast and messy. Technological war could not help killing, wounding, and alienating civilians, missing the well-protected ruling class and Saddam himself, and being the first demonstration for the Iraqis and the rest of the world, of who the Americans were–heartless, careless, murderous, robotic aliens intent on interfering in a country that was not generally agreed to be the Americans’ business, no matter what the Americans themselves asserted.

Let me end on the most positive note I can think of at the moment: I hope I’m wrong.

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"Victory" defined???…Holding my breath………..

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There’s a new kid on the block, goes by the name Victory Caucus.

Anyone who knows me at all knows that my biggest pet peeve is when people complain about something but fail to state an alternative to whatever has them up in arms. By this standard, I have bones to pick with both major political parties. An equally insidious pet peeve is when a proposed solution is stated so vaguely as to not be a solution at all–which brings me to “victory.” So many have lambasted Democrats and anti-war activists for being against “victory.” The word has enough emotional resonance to take a toll on those being criticized, and it is also vague enough in meaning to not require anything whatsoever from the person making the criticism. It is my sincere hope that someone, anyone, will offer a coherent vision of what “victory” means in this context. Could the Victory Caucus be the answer?

Let’s take a look at their mission statement:

  • Deliver the perspectives and news on the war effort which the mainstream media neglects to help the American public understand the nature of our conflict and its true progress
  • Provide tools and infrastructure to help citizens who are committed to victory organize into a recognized and influential caucus
  • Identify opportunities for the caucus to act and exert influence on America’s leaders and to directly aid and support the men and women of our military

Emphasis in original. A few thoughts:

“Deliver the perspectives and news on the war effort which the mainstream media neglects to help the American public understand the nature of our conflict and its true progress.” It would be easy to accuse the writers of this point of falling into the old blame-the-messenger fallacy. The news media is to blame for not reporting enough good news. I have no problem with offering news of positive developments in Iraq, but the big picture still looks bleak. A quick scan of the news offerings did not show much relating to “true progress,” but I did find quite a bit about Iran’s influence–influence it did not have before the U.S. invasion, for what it’s worth.

“Provide tools and infrastructure to help citizens who are committed to victory organize into a recognized and influential caucus.” Super. Are you all psychically linked by a shared vision of “victory,” or will someone explain it at some point? I’ll be waiting. Good luck organizing if you can’t articulate your organizing principle.

“Identify opportunities for the caucus to act and exert influence on America’s leaders and to directly aid and support the men and women of our military” That is a superb idea, seriously. Especially since the Pentagon still isn’t supporting them enough. The people who demand victory from the troops, regardless of whether they know what that means, owe it to our troops to support them in that mission, regardless of whether they know what it is.

I do not mean to make light of the sacrifices of our troops. I have friends in Iraq, people I care about deeply. And it is for that reason that I want to know why they are there, and what it will take to get them out of harm’s way. I want America to succeed in Iraq more than anything, but I am also not blind to what has been going on for the past four years. When things do not go as planned or promised, the administration tries to pretend that they never had such plans/made such promises all along. Truth be told, I have no idea what “success” in Iraq would look like at this point, and I am not convinced that any of the people behind the Victory Caucus do, either. I feel some personal responsibility for this, for not speaking up sooner. America as a whole bears most of the responsibility–we need smart people, super-hyper-intelligent people, if there is to be anything that could objectively be described as “success” or “victory.” Instead we have a man that much of the American electorate chose because they would like to have a beer with him (a recovering alcoholic, I might add, so maybe not the best drinking buddy).

Will the Victory Caucus add something meaningful or useful to this debate (if you can even call it such–I don’t hear much actual debating)? It is far easier to call people names than to propose actual ideas. Democrats –> Defeatocrats. The sad truth, that brings me no satsifaction at all, is that the course so far is not working. Nothing we say about it one way or another is likely to embolden anyone, because the reality is in plain view. We need smart, serious people to propose serious alternatives. The Democrats did that, even if many people do not like the alternative. The only response they have gotten so far is name-calling. This tactic was effective on the playground, but it ceased to be a good way to resolve a conflict around the time most of us hit puberty.

“Democrats are against victory.” That about summarizes the argument.

It is hard to respond to such an argument, as the argument contains no points to be refuted. This leaves our national leaders channeling Pee Wee Herman saying “I know you are, but what am I?” The greatest nation on earth should be above this.

Will anyone step up and say something meaningful about “victory”? Let’s look at the Victory Caucus’ beliefs:

  • We support victory in the war against radical Islamists. We supported the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and we believe victory is necessary in both countries for America’s self-defense.
  • We believe that the radical regime in Iran, while not representative of the Iranian people, is a menace and that it cannot be allowed to obtain or build nuclear weapons.
  • We believe that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization that has killed hundreds of Americans and which waged war against Israel in violation of every law of war this past summer, and will do so again in the future.
  • We believe Israel is our ally and friend and deserves the full assistance of the United States in its battle with radical Islamists. We believe that Israel has repeatedly shown its willingness to negotiate a just and lasting peace, but that its enemies do not want peace, but the destruction of Israel.
  • We believe that the American military is the finest in the world and indeed in history, well led and superbly trained, and populated at every level by America’s best and brightest.
  • We support the troops, and those organizations which assist the wounded in their recoveries and support the families of those who sacrificed everything.
  • We support leaders who support victory.

I’m going to skip over most of these and jump straight to the last one. “We support leaders who support victory.”

Sigh.

I’m going to the source:

Victory: 1 : the overcoming of an enemy or antagonist. 2 : achievement of mastery or success in a struggle or endeavor against odds or difficulties

That really doesn’t help either.

I’m not ready to write off the Victory Caucus just yet. I know one or two of the principals involved, and they are people I respect. I just hope someone can formulate an answer to what seems like a simple questions. If no one can…I’d rather not think about it this late at night.

I am reminded of a poster I saw back in college, from a girl running for student body president against an opponent who did not seem to take the race, or the mpending responsibilities of president, very seriously: “It’s not whether you win or lose; it’s whether you even know what game you are playing.”

Well said. I wish it didn’t have to be.

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Postmodernism, redux

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The smarmy genius behind the Sokal affair has written a great piece in the LA Times about Washington’s general aversion to science that conflicts with prescribed policy positions.

It’s amusing to me (for so long as I can keep from vomiting), the way opponents of such concepts as evolution and global warming seek to use politics to prevent observable scientific phenomena from seeing the light of day. Not too long ago, it was postmodernists–usually painted into the same rhetorical corner as “liberals,” “secularists,” “abortionists,” and presumably vampires and werewolves–who made the most impassioned arguments about the inherent unreliability of science. It would appear the wheel is still spinning.

Postmodernism essentially said, inter alia, that scientific observations cannot be trusted because everything is influenced by cultural dialogue, or something like that. I have never been a student of postmodernism, so I may be misstating its premises somewhat. Nevertheless, it is not clear to me how cultural perceptions can affect gravity.

The Sokal affair was an amusing effort to address the general lack of scientific rigor in postmodern thought. From the Wikipedia entry:

The Sokal Affair was a hoax by physicist Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editorial staff and readership of a leading postmodern cultural studies journal called Social Text (published by Duke University). In 1996, Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, submitted a pseudoscientific paper for publication in Social Text, as an experiment to see if a journal in that field would, in Sokal’s words: “publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions”.

The paper, titled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 “Science Wars” issue of Social Text, which had no peer review process, and so did not submit it for outside review. On the day of its publication, Sokal announced in another publication, Lingua Franca, that the article was a hoax, calling his paper “a pastiche of left-wing cant, fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense”, which was “structured around the silliest quotations I could find about mathematics and physics” made by humanities academics.

In short, this event exposed the intellectual bankruptcy of much (if not all) postmodern thought.

Now if only someone would do something similar for attacks from the opposite side of the political spectrum.

The motivations of critics of global warming seem clear to me. There are many financial interests at stake, and who wants to give up their big cars, frequent flyer miles, and giant houses if they do not absolutely have to?

The motives of intelligent design proponents, on the other hand, are less clear to me, at least insofar as financial interests are less readily apparent. It seems like we have a dispute over the philosophical implications of either (a) accepting the reality of widespread observable phenomena, regardless of any metaphyiscal implications; or (b) clinging to the dictates of an ancient, repeatedly translated, poorly-edited book of which no original drafts remain (Am I talking about the Bible or the original scrolls describing Yggdrasil? You decide. I don’t even know if Vikings used scrolls.)

What we really have here is a dispute over the nature of reality–is our purpose in this life to be gleaned from what we can observe about our physical reality, or can our purpose be determined based on what we really, really, really, really, really want to be true?

I’m going to go with the first choice, that any purpose in this life, to the extent there is one, is determined from what we can see and prove about the world. A cell phone is not powered by faith (sorry, creationists). Neither is it powered by cultural memes (sorry, postmodernists).

Here are the points I am trying to make in this post:

  1. Postmodernism is an unverifiable load of crap.
  2. Intelligent design is an unverifiable load of crap, as well as a breathtakingly dull cop-out. To say that life is so complex that it just must have been created by something, end of story, has about as much intellectual heft as the arguments I painstakingly crafted in high school to get out of doing homework–at the end of the day, many questions were left unanswered.
  3. Therefore, both “liberals” and “conservatives” have, at varying times, put forth worldviews that are at staggering odds with observable reality.
  4. No postmodernist has ever been elected president, held a leadership osition in Congress, attempted to subvert school boards or state boards of education, or generally ventured off campus.
  5. Intelligent design proponents and global warming critics have done all the things listed in #4. That’s what makes me want to vomit.
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Apocalypse soon to follow…

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Texas Gov. urged against cancer order – Yahoo! News

I never thought I would see the day, but I agree with Texas Governor Rick Perry on something. The apocalypse cannot be far behind.

I don’t normally like government mandating much of anything, but mandatory vaccines are generally fine by me, unless there is clear evidence of adverse side effects that are worse than whatever they are vaccinating against.

Here, the adverse side effect, if I am understanding critics of the vaccine correctly, is rampant teenage fucking.

I have yet to see any particular study, or even an argument, demonstrating some likelihood that, if this vaccine becomes widely available, then we will all have to navigate through a dense gauntlet of naked adolescent flesh in flagrante delicto just to but groceries.

“Perry defended his decision, saying his fellow conservatives were wrong to worry that mandating the vaccine will trample parents’ rights and promote premarital sex.

“‘Providing the HPV vaccine doesn’t promote sexual promiscuity any more than providing the Hepatitis B vaccine promotes drug use,’ Perry said in a statement. ‘If the medical community developed a vaccine for lung cancer, would the same critics oppose it claiming it would encourage smoking?'”

Do people honestly believe that, upon being administered the vaccine, young Texans will instantly shed their clothing and go at it? They can’t, really. Do young Texans fell they need adult approval before doing that anyway? Of course not. Do kids even pay attention to what is being injected into them? I doubt it.

There must be some other rationale behind this opposition that has not occurred to me. The effect of the opposition, however, is clear. Women will continue to get HPV and, as a result, cervical cancer.

Answer me this, David Dewhurst, et al: why are you in favor of exposing children to the risk of HPV? I mean, if you have the tools to fight a threat, and you deny people said tools, aren’t you just as culpable for the harm caused by that threat as the threat itself?

Wake the f— up, people. People have sex. Remember when government officials told people they couldn’t drink alcohol? How’d that work out? Now imagine telling a bunch of kids not to shag. If you can be honest with yourselves for even one microsecond, you’ll see my point.

If one can accept the blindingly clear fact that people will have sex no matter what, the actions of a determined few to (a) deny young people education about sex and (b) deny young people the tools to do it safely are notihng less than criminal.

If you persist in opposing tools to help people protect themselves from illness, at least have the common human decency to personally visit every single HPV-positive cervical cancer patient in America to explain why your politics is more important than their lives.

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Irony

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From the February 3 Washington Post:

President Bush, forced by circumstance to reach out to some of his strongest adversaries, appealed directly to House Democrats on Saturday to work with him to reform the immigration system, limit the cost of Social Security, curb the consumption of gasoline and balance the federal budget.

Visiting the Democrats’ annual retreat for the first time since 2001, the president told lawmakers there are “big things” they could accomplish by working together and sought to defuse any bad blood with self-deprecating humor. He opened his public remarks with an allusion to his tendency to mispronounce the name of the rival party by calling it the Democrat Party, seen by many party activists as a
calculated insult.

“I appreciate you inviting the head of the Republic Party,” Bush said to laughter. He drew scattered applause a few moments later when he used the correct name in calling on the “Democratic Party” to work with him to address the mounting future liabilities of Social Security and Medicare.

Democrats rose to politely applaud Bush before and after the speech, a sign of the outwardly cordial and respectful nature of the day’s session.

From the Merriam-Webster Dictionary:

Irony: (1) : incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result (2) : an event or result marked by such incongruity.

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I’m already tired of making jokes

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The Blog Larry Gelbart: One From the Spleen The Huffington Post

Since it’s easier to link to other people’s writing than to come up with an entirely original piece of writing, I will let Larry Gelbart express my feeling about presidential jokes:

He has the flexibility of an I-beam combined with the IQ of a houseplant, and I am finding it increasingly difficult to keep shaking my tiny little fist, employing whatever is left of my wits and my wit to point out that not only is the emperor naked, but that his new clothes come with two pair of pants.

…

Writing jokes about him has become far too easy. This messianic miscreant is much too convenient a straight line — a line that is surely leading him — a whole lot of dutifully blogging stragglers in tow — even further into a hell which we all stood by and watched him create, while we continued to fire our funny bullets at him.

I suppose I should note, for my part, that “funny bullets” is purely metaphorical.

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