When discussing his non-voting, Keith Olberman recently said:
“It is driven by the same thing that used to make me keep my distance from the athletes I covered. I don’t want anything, even that tiny bit of symbolic connection, to stand in between me and my responsibility to be analytical and critical.”
H/T: Lew Rockwell
It’s done a lot. We have a lot of prisoners in there totally naked.
— Timothy Swanson, Sheriff of Stark County, Ohio.
Trigger warning. The link is to a local news story, which includes a video with short clips from a police video which may be triggering for experiences of sexual assault.
For the past several months, Sheriff Tim Swanson has refused all requests for interviews about the Hope Steffey case, claiming that it was inappropriate to comment on the case in the media while it was still being reviewed in court. Of course this was complete bollocks; as he just proved, the real issue was that he had an election coming up in November, and he didn’t want to say anything on teevee that could be used against him, and now that he has been safely re-elected he is happy to wallow around in front of a camera and say any damn thing he pleases about the case. For example, that his gang of hired muscle down at the jail are doing this sort of thing all the time, and it’s not his fault because he can’t ship people down to the local mental ward anymore and that it’s O.K. for his crew to strip down women with men in the room because he just can’t be bothered to figure out how to hire enough women that he won’t be routinely sexually traumatizing women in his jail, for their own good,
but, hey, it’s all O.K. for the Stark County Sheriff’s office to be running their own personal Abu Ghraib, because the mixed-gender hired muscle that strips women down in cells and leaves them there naked for hours at a time has a nifty four-letter acronym, which makes it all official and O.K.
There is absolutely no conceivable excuse for treating anyone this way, ever. Whether man or woman, calm or belligerent,
nice or nasty, crazy or sane. This is gang rape, professionalized and excused by Official Procedures. What is becoming clear is that Sheriff Tim Swanson and his goon squad, not only have convinced themselves that this kind of brutality is sometimes acceptable, but also that they have an especially broad understanding of the sort of situation that calls for it. They are a pack of dangerous predators, and their uniforms and badges don’t make them any better than any other gang of serial rapists.
Just following ordersedition
“To turn Americans against their government the very first step is has always been appealing to their patriotism. America: We Kill Kings. America: We Don’t Need No Fucking Leaders. America: We’re Too Patriotic To Be Nationalistic. America: Freedom In Your Face. America: I Own A Gun To Shoot Cops. America: We Invented The Fucking Revolution. America: We Invited Empire Into Our Living Room For A Reason. America: It’s Only A Matter Of Time Before We Do The Fuckers In. America: It Didn’t Happen Over Here.
America: The Only Conceivable Ground Zero For The Revolution.
To understand where to go from here, we have to understand that Americans are in no way attached to Obama the individual, Americans are attached to the way Obama makes them feel.
It won’t win us any points to stick to our guns and pointing out just how sick and twisted of a psychopath Obama must be to want to rule us all and to actively seek out that position of domination over us. But if we suck up to the sentiment of the moment, pander to localized interests, and accept the image of a noble man while questioning his effectiveness under “the system” we do make three mistakes:
1. We look stupid, shifty and unprincipled.
2. We sound cynical and outdated.
3. We attack the individualist dream.
In short we throw away our strongest points! Anarchism is the most logical and principled position there is. We automatically win every ethical argument vigilantly taken to its conclusion. Anarchism is embedded in every advance and hope for the future. Every modern ethical awakening has struck against hierarchy, every successful component of the information age adopts more and more anarchistic attributes. Anarchism IS the individualist dream. You, you personally, can singlehandedly start the motherfucking revolution. You’re going to have to.
Anarchism is not some mechanical proletarian revolt, nor is it some impersonal mathematical reality of laissez-faire economics. And it’s certainly no throwing up your hands and saying to hell with it. Anarchism is a simple ethical and philosophical realization: to be a fully living, thinking human being you have to let go of your power over others. They must let go of their power over you.
The thing is, you already know this. (You’re awesome.) So why don’t you embrace it further. (And be more awesome.)
Things like pesky little election soap operas are just getting in the way. Never mind that Obama cat, he’s no where near as awesome as you. So, and I’m just saying this, what have you done today to spread your awesomeness?”
Comrade Gillis just blew me away with his latest post. I give him a hearty bravo! And no: I am not going to go shoot cops. Don’t take the wrong message from this post — especially if you’re one of America’s spooky NSA people.
The Danny Bonaduce of the Blogosphere responds to Roderick’s Cato Unbound article on left-libertarianism in Politics Compromises the Libertarian Project:
The central point of Roderick Long’s essay seems completely correct to me—powerful actors in society seek to use their power in order to manipulate the state apparatus to get what they want. Corporations are powerful actors in our society, and they want money. Thus, what corporations are after in politics is political action that gets them money and whether or not this coincides with the dictates of a purist laissez faire vision is a matter of mere happenstance.
In what I find a puzzling move, Long thinks that the main upshot of this is to cast doubt on the legitimacy of castigating libertarians as corporate stooges. I would say the real upshot is to cast doubt on the cogency of the libertarian enterprise. Thinkers affiliated with the libertarian movement have had many smart things to say on individual topics, but the overall concept of a state apparatus that simply sits on the sideline watching the free market roll along is impossibly utopian. People are going to try to manipulate the state to advance their own ends.
Well, I certainly agree with that.
That’s part of the reason I’m a market anarchist, not a Constitutionalist or a minimal-statist. And, while I can speak only for myself, last I checked, that’s why Roderick is a market anarchist, too.
But DBOB is puzzled, apparently because it hasn’t occurred to him that a libertarian might envision forms of social organization (and forms of resistance to corporatism) outside of the political apparatus, and so he concludes that libertarianism offers no realistic proposals for resisting corporate power-grabs and big business’s domination of the public policy space.
Apparently disarming your enemy doesn’t count as a realistic or desirable strategy; Yglesias prefers to shoot first and ask questions later. And, he figures, as long as everyone’s going to be going around robbing each other anyway, we all ought to get together and get some of it while the getting’s good.
As far as political strategery goes, Yglesias’s article is perfectly correct as a critique of what he calls libertarianism
—that is, the sort of thing engaged in by soft limited-govermentalist outfits like Cato or the Libertarian Party. (Whether it’s morally acute is quite another matter; not having any realistic way of achieving anti-robbery goals is no reason to jump wholeheartedly into counter-robbery instead, unless you think that the desirability or undesirability of particular political-economic end states overrules any consideration of the propriety of the means by which you promote or avoid them. Maybe Yglesias thinks that; but he’s given no argument in favor of it.)
But be that as it may, his complaints of utopianism seem strangely selective. As Yglesias himself points out, Cato is hardly alone in its failure to achieve practical results: American progressives aren’t doing all that great a job
of resisting corporate power or stopping the government from sticking its hands into workers pockets for the benefit of endangered capitalists, landlords, and moneylenders. He then uses this as an opportunity to praise the Institute for Justice and to throw out a recruitment pitch for libertarian allies
in Progressive
causes. But what he seemingly fails to consider is that maybe the problem isn’t with a lack of numbers, but rather with the toolkit
itself—that those tools
are really traps, which end up enveloping and smothering any attempt at realizing your primary goals in the tremendous secondary effort required just to be able to wield them.
In Anarchy, there is another way. If we stop trying to build the structures envisioned by the Left using the tools of the ruling class, and if we refocus our efforts on achieving our goals by means of people-powered organizing, voluntary association, grassroots mutual aid, and person-to-person solidarity, then workers can get what we need through free markets and free association. When the things that matter most in our lives are the things that we make for ourselves, each of us singly, or with many of us choosing to work together in voluntary associations, there will be no need to waste years of our lives and millions or billions of dollars fighting wars of attrition with back-room king-makers or trying to keep erstwhile friends
in office on the right track—because we will not need to get any of the things that they are trying to hoard. When we expect the State to limit itself through the very process that gives it power, or when we go after the State’s patronage, politics makes prisoners of us all. But freedom means that when the powers that be try to rope you along for something stupid, or try to snuff out something brilliant, we can turn around, walk away, and do things for ourselves—whether they like it or not.
The week before the election, I complained about an ad that DNC political hacks sent out, which (wrongly, and dangerously) suggested that political change amounted to nothing more than, and ended with the success of, an effot to get some millionaire professional politician installed in office. It turns out that MoveOn agrees with me, and they’re working on organizing Fired up and ready to go
gatherings in every community the can, to keep their grassroots organizing moving forward. I know because they sent me an e-mail about it. <Well, bully for them. However, having read some of the comments that MoveOn specifically selected to represent the sentiments they were hearing from their members, when they asked about what to do after the election, I can't say I'm terribly heartened by their idea of what kind of organizing you do after an electoral victory:
From: Nita Chaudhary, MoveOn.org Political Action
Date: 3:01 PM
To: Rad Geek
Subject: Fired up and ready to go[…]
We need to continue the same level of involvement and commitment to whatever this Presidency needs of us to accomplish all that we believe can be done. Yes we can, Yes we did, and Yes we will!—Judith C., Salem, MA[…]
We have to be prepared to go through with whatever we need to—even if that means some sacrifice. Obama will lead the way!—Sarah A., Greer. SC[…]
Let Barack know that we stand ready to go to work. Take advantage of our energy and enthusiasm for the common good, put us to work.—Jeff R., Boulder, CO[…]
Be willing to work with him and make personal sacrifice for the good of our country and our children’s future.—Stephanie L., Laguna Niguel, CA
I don’t know whether these sentiments are actually representative of the MoveOn membership, or whether MoveOn selected a few unusual comments that seemed most useful to their purposes. But in either case, this sort of sentiment — that grassroots, street-level organizations should stand ready, not as a countervailing social force to direct recently-elected politicians and to keep them on track for the grassroots’ own agenda, but rather as shock troops for some messianic leader to issue marching orders to and put … to work,
even at great personal sacrifice, for whatever the leader may require — is the sort of thing that ought to disgust anyone who genuinely believes in people-powered community organizing, and ought to terrify anyone who believes in the principles of a free and open society.
I’ve seen that movie before, and I know how it ends.
I guess it really is time to Move On.
“Even a peaceful landscape…even a meadow in harvest, with crows circling overhead and grass fires…even a road where cars and peasants and couples pass…even a resort village with a steeple and country fair…can lead to a concentration camp.” So begins the narration of the most devastating documentary film ever made. Before Hollywood determined it takes at least three hours to effectively grapple with the Holocaust — a Schindler’s List or a Pianist, for example — long before, some four decades and more, there was Alain Renais’ 31-minute Night and Fog.
I first saw and was shattered by this remarkable short movie while in college in 1975. I’ve just seen Night and Fog a second time, because Criterion recently released a new digital restoration of it on DVD. And 28 years later, Renais’ film remains for me not only a chilling record of Hitler’s "final solution" but the most powerful cinematic indictment of the State I’ve ever seen.
More startling are Suskind’s revelations about the Iraq war and the handling of prewar intelligence regarding weapons of mass destruction. In one instance, Suskind says that denials by the foreign minister of Iraq, Naji Sabri, that his country possessed W.M.D. were simply rewritten —
almost certainly altered under pressure from Washington,Suskind writes — into a false assertion that Sabri had substantiated suspicions about active Iraqi biological and nuclear programs.Even more disturbing is the story of a former Iraqi intelligence chief named Tahir Jalil Habbush. Suskind describes in gripping detail secret meetings between Habbush and British intelligence in January and February of 2003. Habbush insisted that Saddam Hussein had abandoned his weapons programs but would not publicly admit it, so as to maintain a facade of deterrence against regional rivals like Iran. Not only did the White House dismiss Habbush’s statements, Suskind writes, but an irritated Bush even asked whether the Iraqi could be asked for
something we can use to help us make our case.A subsequent $5 million C.I.A. payment to Habbush, disclosed by Suskind, has the smell of hush money.Then comes what may be the ultimate bombshell: that the White House instructed the C.I.A. to forge a letter, backdated to July 2001, stating that the 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta had trained in Iraq and, furthermore, that Iraq had received suspicious shipments (presumably of yellowcake) from Niger with Al Qaeda’s help. The letter was to be written and signed by Habbush on Iraqi government stationery and addressed to Hussein himself. This preposterously convenient summary of what a perfect case for war might look like almost resembled some wry gag from The Onion. But at the end of 2003 the letter did, in fact, turn up in a British newspaper, before seeping into the American media.
Suskind does not establish who dreamed up this pernicious document. But he says one of his sources, a former senior C.I.A. operative named Robert Richer, recalls being ordered directly by George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, to have Habbush transcribe it himself from a draft produced by the White House. Richer even remembers
the creamy White House stationery on which the assignment was written,as Suskind puts it. Since the book’s release, however, Tenet, Richer himself and another key source have adamantly denied that such a thing occurred. (Tenet also denies that Habbush’s prewar claims were muffled.)Even in the context of the past seven years, the stupid brazenness of a forged letter drafted on White House stationery does test credulity. But any claims made by Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and a Pulitzer Prize winner, should not be casually dismissed. That no credible challenges have been made to numerous other scoops in his book suggests an attempted covering of exposed derrières. Still, his release of partial transcripts from recorded interviews with Richer has not definitively affirmed his reporting.
Suskind’s point isn’t about proving liability. Rather, the Habbush episodes, if accurate, illustrate a creeping amorality in the way America has managed its war on terror.
—from Michael Crowley’s New York Times review of Ron Suskind’s The Way of the World
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