That's not why Kerry lost. Kerry lost because 59 million people could not face acknowledging that their government just might be as bad, as criminal, as venal, as to go to war for money. Twice.
Spot on.
They have a vested interest in believing that when some uniformed McCop tells them to take off their shoes, give up their Bics, and then pats them down without even washing first, that this sordid experience serves to fight Terror.
Now, now. I have to go through the Complete Security Pat-Down And Empying of Every Pocket of Every Bag about half the times I fly (probably a mixture of having a foreign passport and usually having one-way tickets), and I have nothing but warm feelings for the poor bastards working the checkpoints. They've always been unfailingly polite to me, and one even laughed herself silly over my "You don't need to look at my chest. This are not the breasts you are looking for. Move along." T-shirt. (Though I had a worrying moment when she looked at my chest frowning in what later turned out to be concentration).
I don't kid myself for a moment that they are making me safer, but I don't hold it against them.
Well, as I remember it, Avram did not,in fact, say "You stupid moron, you're being screwed and you think you're so smart." He did not even say "I'm sure your boss is happy to let you think so," which is the same couched in slightly politer terms.
He kept quiet.
Now, what I would really be interested in, instead of lecturing Avram on something he didn't actually do, would be what he could have said to this hapless Rayndite fellow.
Because I'm a bit at a loss. What I would say would probably be along the lines of "Well, sure, you probably can, because you're smart, but I bet there are lots of your colleague that couldn't, and would end up screwed. Wouldn't it be better to provide a net for them?"
And my problem is that the prevailing ideology is not about placing value on reliance and self-sufficiency - is about not caring a bit about the others that get screwed. In short,it is a culture in which self-worth is compatible with a total lack of solidarity.
I never know how to counter that, save as by thinking despairingly that too many people are immoral.
OK, I'll bite. where did the term "left" come from anyway?
I'll try to translate an interesting post in the Italian SF mailing list, from a guy called Giuseppe Panella. I don't know how much I trust him but I found this post intriguing:
"As you well know, the left-right division of parliamentary seating arrangement has its origins in the Convention National during the French Revolution. Girondins where
seated on the right, the Jacobins on the left - in the center the Marais, the Swamp...
"The Girondins were not at all reactionary (in the sense of being critical of the Revolution), the Jacobins were hounded from the left (as we would say today) from the enrages like Jacques Roux...
"Today we might say that the Girondins were liberals (admirers that they were of the English governament) while the Jacobins were in favour of a rigorous administration of the commonwealth (that is, the Republic), but not at all ready to deny the legitimacy of private ownership.
"Harking back in part to the Jacobin heritage, a larg part of the Socialism that has been defined "utopian" by Engels (like Blanc and Blanqui) have reinforced the idea that the Left was to a certain extent Jacobin...
"And certainly you can find appreciation of the Jacobin experience both in Marx and Lenin (during the Thirties in France left-wing storiography insisted on the Robespierre=Lenin equivalence, etc.)
"The idea of the equivalence between the Welfare State and the Left is later and due to the experience of German Socialdemocracy (despite the fact that the father of Welfare State was Bismark!)."
(It goes on, but gets very confusing)
Reimer raises a point that has always puzzled me. Here am I, a long standing British liberal where being liberal means being in the middle of the political spectrum, and every time I see a discussion of American politics liberal seems to equate with something the devil would consider too extreme to touch. Why?
My guess is the right in America is a lot more to the right by European standards (or, better, the extreme right is a lot more vocal and, alas, actually in power) so that a fairly timid progressive stand is cast as Rabid Commie Nonsense. It's also in part a rethorical trick repeatedly denounced, IIRC, by our esteemed hosts the Pinko Commie Intolerant Rude Godless Heathens in the past.
You will note that if you start - as the referenced blogger does - from the point of view that of course you're right and the others are too stupid or too steeped in Sin to realize they're wrong, then a position such as the liberal one "I think I'm right but I can't rule out that I may be mistaken" is a) a radical and morally despicable rejection of the One Truth and b) an admission of weakness and invitation to be converted.
It also means that the others, who are, remember, utterly and absolutely Wrong (and go so far as to concede that they might!), are "intolerant" inasmuch as they refuse, out of wilful contrariness no doubt, to recognize the Truth when it stares them in the face. They may be nice people to hang out with but gosh, how can they possibly fail to follow the path of Good?
I'm watching the news on the Italian TV right now. To my everlasting relief, the US election is not headline material any longer. They are gleefully speaking about other messes, like the Mess in the Middle East and the Mess O Potamia.
I derive a small measure of comfort in being finally able to tell explicitly what I kept quiet about earlier: Kerry's plan for solving the mess in Iraq had no hope in hell of succeeding. The nations who went along with Bush hoping to reap political capital (and maybe money) are frantically looking for a way out, and nobody, and I mean nobody, is mad enough to commit other troops to what is obviously a mess that nobody has any idea about how to fix, let alone the means to begin doing it.
Being feared, oh yeah. Americans are feared to the tune of two to five dead every day in their poster-child for a show of imperial might.
Kerry would have been mired in this horror. I'm sitting down comfortably and watching Bush's moves. Of course, it's not as if anybody in their camp is worried about some hundred poor bastards' death, American or, even less, foreigners, but at least it's not our boy making a fool of himself over there.
Meanwhile, the dollar continues to go down compared to the Euro, which is no good thing for Europe but at least makes it easier for me to come over.
I just realized what I need. I need Jon Stewart. Now.
Oh, and another thing. On the aftermath of the their greatest victory, the Kilroys and folks like him still come here and what do they sound? Elated? No. Seething.
People, even in the midst of sorrow, how sorry I am for them. They know no relief to their resentment, anger and fury. No matter how hurt we are now, we still know how to rejoice. They only know anger, spite and hate. And they don't even realize that their anger is used.
People, people, people. Enough of this "America isn't the greatest country in the world any longer, it's not my dream, it's not Utopia, it's not perfect, it's not BETTER THAN ANYWHERE ELSE, I might as well leave." There's news for you: America is a country like many others. There are worse and there are better. America didn't invent freedom, democracy, the right of free speech, the human rights, and even less it patented them. Human beings did that, belonging to different moments in history and different places on Earth. They are concepts that belong to every human being and every nation on this goddamn Earth has had people who have striven to bring them in. Your country is not mystically superior, it's not the Chosen Land, it's just the country you happened to be born in, with an interesting history, just like mine, sometimes an inspiring history and sometimes an embarassing history and sometimes a shameful history. Just like mine. And many others.
I don't particularily like the country I'm living in but hell, I'm frankly offended at hearing people going on about how only their country cares for equality, justice, democracy and all. People here have died for them. People have stayed here and fought for them when the fighting involved SS firing squads and sticks under the nails. Don't you dare say that America is the only country that cares about justice, democracy and the rest. What about the rest of us? What about our history, our aspirations, ideals, struggles, achievement?
This is a tragic case of an influential (no pun intended) country going to the dogs, with dangerous consequences both for its citizens and - probably even more - for certain foreigners. It is not about the Dream of America Dying. America isn't a dream. It's not an ideal. It's a country. Your country. You owe it to your citizens and the Iraqis and, most probably, the Iranians to do your damnest to get it back on track, not mourn over the passing of some mythical America that signifys the passing of all that's great and inspiring in the world. (A decent interval of grief and invective is understandable and justifiable).
You wanna be patriotic? Redeem your country. Don't mourn its fall. This isn't about Grace and Fall and Democracy=USA. It's about corporate power and insane ideologues of a free-market religion hitchhijking some decent folks - your compatriots. Love your country for what it is - a place of rich history, great faults, lots and lots of decent people, and the same allotment of assholes as the rest of the nations on Earth. Some of them clever enough to misguide the decent people. Love it because it's yours to tend and care for, not because it's somehow unique, best, and quintessentially superior. Be enraged when it tortures people not because it spoils it purity but because torturing people is bad for them.
A lot of people have fought long and hard to make America what it is. And of course a lot of people have busily worked to fuck up America. This happens all over the world with varying success. Sometimes it's sane to get up and leave - but not because any one country can have its pristine purity, its unique and never before occurring idealism spoilt by bad governaments- or idiotic electorates, for that.
I love America. I'm happy there. I'd like to move there. I love it despite its tragically evil regime and the bad choices of its people. I love it with all its faults, because it produces kind, smart, generous people. But it's down here in the dirt, looking up at the sky, just like the rest of us in the world.
First the bad news. When I called my mother from London and she told me that Bush had won the popular vote, she added "And this confirms my suspicion that Americans are assholes." And this is my mother. No matter how hard I try to convince people that a good half of Americans are more horrified than we over here could ever possibly be, in the end that is how America looks today in the face of the world.
Now the good news. Well, sort of. What I wanted to say is: we never thought that democracy was magic, that it yields inevitably the best result. People, invested with the sacred duty to choose their own representative and leaders, can and do fuck up. As a matter of fact, they do that more often than not. It's not a good system - it's just the least bad we could invent. It is still the only one that leaves us some hope. We knew that going in, didn't we? And the fact that you work hard and hope does not give you any kind of compensatory guarantee. We are part of the reality-based community, and we know, we have always known, that reality hurts. We will not abdicate it for that.
And: I spent the several hours flying and waiting reading an extremely interesting, now terribly relevant, and surprisingly upbeat book, which has very interesting things to say about why people so consistently vote to shoot themselves in the foot: What's the matter with Kansas? by Tommy Franks. It argues, after having amply discussed why the right has managed to hitchike the working-class vote, that if the right won it the left lost it, and it would do well to reflect on that.
And: this morning, I still think my American friends are the best people in the world. Thank you for trying. Keep trying. There is nothing else to do, really.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Senator Inhofe is a disgrace to the Senate, to his party, and to the United States of America.
Humanity, too.
But this is a very common, widespread reaction to torture, and abuse in general. Bad things happen to this people, they must have deserved it. Sometimes it's wilful ignorance, as seems the case in this case. Sometimes, especially when it comes from people who have not been exposed to a lot of this kind of news, it's a desperate effort to maintain what - I believe it was Jean Amery - called the Just World Fallacy.
We need to preserve some notion that the world is fair, that virtue is rewarded and vice punished, and especially when the punishment is so harsh, to think that it may befell people who are not particularly deserving of the treatment produces a strong anguish, so that the people at the receiving end of torture are believed the guiltier the stronger the horror at the treatment.
Torturers know this - they know that their impunity rests on the shame of the tortured - and so do the tortured, who are often locked in silence by shame.
This is not to say that guilty people deserve torture. But that's a different argument entirely.
I don't think The Life of Brian is anti-religious. It makes fun of the New Testament, but making fun of something is not in itself being against it. The movie's final message is somewhat bleak, yes, but it is never actually biting against religion, unless one counts as being "anti-religion" being against silly bigotry and the determined refusal to think with one's own head. I think the most one can say is that it's somewhat wistfully agnostic. It never actually addresses the problem of there being a divine entity.
The headlines are made by other news here - and people are wondering how come the Japanese get freed and the Italians get killed. The Italian hostage family, btw, got the news from the TV. While the Foreign Minister saw it fit to remain seated on a live talk show instead of, say, go back to his office and make the phone call first and personally. He seems to have mistaken TV for reality: he said with a hurt expression that it seemed more important to him to face the TV viewers than to "hide in a cushy office".
It seems that on the video Al Jazeera says it's too crude to air the guy tried to get his hood off and screams defiantly "Look, this is how an Italian dies." Poor kid. He was a baker's son, and apparently needed money to get married, which is why he ended up in Iraq.
A couple of skeptic friends of mine wanted to go around town spraying harmless bacteria on walls in the likeness of Mickey Mouse. The mysterious and doubtlessly portentous likeness would develop over the span of a few days.
They desisted because they were afraid of Disney suing them, but they still regret not getting around to it.
Well, yes, I have always been impressed with his tolerance and open-mindedness, as demonstrated by the hilarious defenestration of the prince's gay partner in _Braveheart_. No wonder he's ended up as the icon of xenophones and neo-barbarians here at home.
Talk about being honorary Newyorkers! Five days in town and I get to brag about having been in a blackout. I was taking a shower about two blocks from Times Square and at first I thought it was my fault the light had gone out. I had a far less traumatic experience than most people around me: I had a nice comfortable bed within walking distance, cash, water and four Granny Smith apples, and a radio with fresh batteries. I ate the best lamb gyro of my life in the Rockfeller Center and saw Vega disappear beyond the Time-Life building. All in all, fun.
Oh, and by the way, you did know that you can have MacOSX's Services subscribe a blog in NetNewsWire, and that NNW will make a decent effort to locate an RSS feed for it, didn't you? That's how I found Charlie's.
This is great. I pined for an RSS feed but I wasn't about to upgrade to blogger pro because I mean to move to Movable Type as soon as a get a decent host. Now this Blogmatrix is a useful stopgap measure, at least. With the frantic pace at which I update my blog this was something I really needed.
Now if only blogger would let me _see_ my page...
They are _all_ part of our tribe. On both sides. They love coffee, they are fond of cats, they laugh at jokes, they love action movies, they lost themselves in a book, they wrote poetry, they once had the best strawberry with cream of their lives while dining out with their grandfather and his memory will always for them smell of strawberries, they wondered what sex was like, they fell in love, they got horribly drunk with their friends and were embarrassed the day afterwards, they had a dog sigh while it rested its head on their tigh, they love the warm feeling you have just before you fall asleep, they worry about their loved ones. They fear death. They hope for life. Some of them will live and die unloved and unlamented, but most of them won't. A web, a network, ties us to them.
They are all part of our tribe.
I wish it weren't so.
Yes, different country, different situation. Stopping the trains carrying military material has astonishingly had a wide popular support in Italy. Passengers stopped at stations, the kind that would rant and rave at a regular strike, were uniformly supportive.
And yet, one cannot avoid struggle because repression would follow. Time it was when people knew they risked jail or even death by striking, and they were called scum and subversives, and they did it anyway, and they gained much that we now enjoy in the way of rights. I understand the need not to alienate public opinion, it's serious and reasonable, but one has to think carefully were to set the bar. Even marching can alienate some people. And those in favor usually don't speak up.
Doing nothing, on the other hand, will leave all the timid opposers, those who think they are alone in being discontent, isolated and demoralized. I can testify that the display of the peace flags here in Italy has been incredibly emboldening, allowing everybody to see directely and evidently all around them in their towns that they are indeed not alone. But yes, it is a different situation.
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