George Orwell describes the right-wing blogosphere
The Scott Beauchamp affair is reminding me of this, from 1984:
A Party member…is supposed to live in a continuous frenzy of hatred of foreign enemies and internal traitors, triumph over victories, and self-abasement before the power and wisdom of the Party. The discontents produced by his bare, unsatisfying life are deliberately turned outwards and dissipated by such devices as the Two Minutes Hate, and the speculations which might possibly induce a sceptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline…called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
At first it seems amazing that Orwell could have precisely described today’s right-wing blog world sixty years ago. But the right-wing blogs are just an outgrowth of human nature, which never changes. (In particular I’m always been struck by the consistency with which such people are unable to understand analogies.)
When I saw Angels in America, I thought the closeted gay Mormon character was a little too heavy handed, but in retrospect I’ve come to realize that Tony Kushner understood something about the world that I did not.
I attended [a recent conference] in Italy with a group of European and American counterterrorism experts. A large team of U.S. Department of Justice officials, drawn from its uppermost echelons, was there, including three of the principal architects of the legal policies for the war on terror. In not-for-attribution comments, one openly acknowledged that the war on terror was cast in the first instance as a political ploy and that it was a conceptual failure. It was now essential for the Americans to move on to something else, he argued. None of the others challenged that view; indeed, two of them said that they agreed with it. So even inside of the Bush Administration, the war on terror has been written off as a scam that served its limited political purpose and is finished.
So let me get this straight. For a few years now, the financial industry has made billions in risky subprime loans by essentially tricking people into believing they can borrow more than they’ll be able to pay back and now that this brilliant idea is going south, people are floating the idea of a government bailout. Well, screw ‘em. If you’re foolish enough to loan hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who can’t even balance their checkbooks, then you deserve to be as poor as your customers.
Then again, this is all assuming that these creditors were giving out loans in good faith in the first place. The way it looks to me is that these subprime loans were always about locking people into high interest loans for a few years until they went broke after which the banks would take back the house and any more money they can squeeze out of the debtors (thanks, bankruptcy reform!). Once they unload the house, which has almost certainly grown in value, they make a nice profit on top of the cash they gouged out of their now-homeless former customers.
The reason this has all come back to bite lenders in the ass is because they lacked the foresight to realize that when their customers were going broke, everybody else would be going broke as well, which would drive down the value of their repossessed houses and make them harder to unload to the next poor sucker who just wants to move out of an apartment.
In a truly free market economy, we’d be pointing these idiots towards the back of the line at the local soup kitchen, but these guys had a backup plan. They bribed (I mean, “lobbied”) every level of government that’s willing to cash their checks, insisting that if they pay the price for their moronic business practices, the entire economy will suffer. In short, they don’t need government bailouts to help themselves, but to help us.
Tom adding: relevant cartoon here, particularly the last panel.
Dennis Perrin has returned from his panel at YearlyKos with Juan Cole with the exactly the kind of high quality malcontentment you might hope for:
I found the registration area and went to formalize my arrival. The woman at the counter confirmed my place on the afternoon panel, gave me my personal plastic badge, along with a YearlyKos tote bag filled with all kinds of crap. Now I was part of the scene, though I immediately noticed a blue ribbon adorning my badge that read “Speaker.” Looking around, I saw different colored ribbons on various badges. Orange was for attendees, bloggers who were not on panels. Green was for the media. And, naturally, blue was for we “experts” who would shed light and wisdom from our various perches.
From the jump, I was pissed off and dismayed. Why the fuck was there color-coded distinctions at a supposedly “democratic” convention? I thought the whole point to blogging was to democratize political expression, to allow people who didn’t attend an Ivy League school or had friends in the corporate media to reach a wide audience with their views and concerns.
Incidentally, I mention this in the Sudan chapter of my next book, which will be out next month. But the book is a series of very short essays, so Harun gets all of two or three sardonic sentences. All I could squeeze in. I’ll be eager to see this given wider attention.
The Times story gives photos and a much fuller picture, including some very dark conjecture about Harun’s eventual poetic fate. Well done, and good reading.
In the current New York Times magazine, war proponent Michael Ignatieff issues a mea culpa of sorts. He spends many paragraphs explaining how it is that academics such as himself often do not understand that ideas can have consequences in the real world, and then toward the end we get this:
We might test judgment by asking, on the issue of Iraq, who best anticipated how events turned out. But many of those who correctly anticipated catastrophe did so not by exercising judgment but by indulging in ideology. They opposed the invasion because they believed the president was only after the oil or because they believed America is always and in every situation wrong.
Why is it that people who got the whole thing so wrong always feel compelled to take a swipe at that ever-reliable strawman, the Dirty Fucking Hippie (tm Atrios)? In fairness he does state immediately afterward:
The people who truly showed good judgment on Iraq predicted the consequences that actually ensued but also rightly evaluated the motives that led to the action. They did not necessarily possess more knowledge than the rest of us. They labored, as everyone did, with the same faulty intelligence and lack of knowledge of Iraq’s fissured sectarian history. What they didn’t do was take wishes for reality. They didn’t suppose, as President Bush did, that because they believed in the integrity of their own motives everyone else in the region would believe in it, too. They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror. They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country of which most Americans knew little. They didn’t believe that because America defended human rights and freedom in Bosnia and Kosovo it had to be doing so in Iraq. They avoided all these mistakes.
The line bout mistaking wishes for reality is at least on the money. Nonetheless, I still find the DFH swipe enraging. Was it ideology to note the PNAC statements detailing the need for a permanent presence in the Middle East, which predated 9/11 and all the lovely talk about liberating the long suffering people of Iraq by several years? And frankly, was it so utterly insane to note that there are vast reserves of, yes, oil under the ground in Iraq, and wonder if oh just maybe that might be playing into the decision somehow?
Ignatieff essentially promises to do better next time, but until he can admit to himself that the DFH’s out marching in the streets were right not in spite of their ideology, but frankly because of it, he still has a long ways to go.
The ACLU is right we should be calling Congress right now (even if you’ve done so already) to tell them to vote no on a modification of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act:
The FISA “modernization” bill is actually an administration power grab — expanding the National Security Agency’s access to all of our international telephone and email communications — regardless of any known connection to terrorists.
The House might even vote this afternoon, so call them now.
When my last book came out, my publisher printed up a very small quantity of posters featuring the cover image, and I ended up with a small handful of them. They’re extremely rare and fetch high prices on eBay, but next week I’m going to have another one of my little contests and give two of them away. This contest is going to be a little more involved than what I usually do, though. Here’s how it’s going to work: at some point on each day from Monday through Friday, I’m going to put up a post containing the Secret Word of the Day, which will only be up for a couple of hours (after which the post will be deleted). In order to submit a valid entry, you’ll have to send me an email with the secret word in the subject line (as well as the word “contest”). At the end of the week, I’ll sort through the entries and choose random winners, giving priority to readers who caught the secret word on multiple days (so be sure to send your entries from the same email address).
JOHNSON CITY, Tenn. (AP) - The minister of a Baptist church has been charged with indecent exposure and driving under the influence, and police officers say he propositioned them.
Tommy Tester, 58, of Bristol, Va., was wearing a skirt when he was arrested last week after allegedly urinating in front of children at a car wash, police said.
Police also said Tester offered to perform oral sex on officers who were sent to the scene.
Authorities identified Tester as the minister of Gospel Baptist Church in Bristol and an employee of Christian radio station WZAP-AM in Bristol.
Rocketbelts: This World is Apparently More Modern That I’d Realized
The 2007 Rocketbelt Convention will be held on August 11th and 12th at the Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station.
How on earth did we not all know about this? How is this not a nationally televised event?
I mean, sure, we’ve got bridges crumbling and schools decaying and violent crime on the rise and a crippling debt and a war with no end in sight. But come on — did I mention the rocketbelts?
And judging from the photos, it’s safe family fun.
Bring the kids! Bring extras, in case you lose one! Strap ‘em in! Let ‘em fly! Find ‘em later!
I can only assume that car pools will form in every corner of the nation.
