The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Lydy Nickerson:

We were at W's last inaugaration. It had a frightening amount of security, and he didn't have 9/11 as an excuse, either. Black SUV after black SUV, with the windows tinted black. Ambulance after ambulance, then more blacked-out SUVs. Black clad men on the roofs of the buildings across from us, presumably snipers.

Then came the presidential limo, with Bush and Cheney. Bush was sitting huddled in his seat, staring straight ahead and looking miserable. He made no attempt to connect with the crowd -- of course, I was in the protestors' section. His compulsive avoidance of anything that doesn't please him is as scary as anything else about him, including his schizophrenic ability to speak to God.

How about:

President George II.

Unfortunately, there isn't enough anti-royalist sentiment to draw upon.

Hey, Greg. I've always found that it worked better to apologize once, and then let it go. Not nearly as tiring that way. Anybody who can't accept the first apology isn't likely to accept the second, or the twenty-second.

Tina: "...a lot of the posts here come across as awfully smug and superior about how your beliefs are so obviously the smart ones and all opposing beliefs are downright stupid. And that's a lot of what turns me off of listening to any political discourse, regardless of whether or not I may have views in common with the people talking or not."

If I didn't believe that my beliefs were superior, then why should I fight for them? If they're just one of a range of beliefs that is roughly equivalent to most of the others, why the hell should I care? This is moral relativism, convenient, but damnall useful when trying to find a moral path. All it does is get me off the hookl

I'm an adult. I get to have opinions. I get to have opinions as passionate and precise as the most appallingly scary Dispensationalist trying to trigger Armageddon. And, I get to think I'm right every bit as passionately as he does. This is another place where the right has taken one of the true strengths of the left and turned into a weapon against us. Multiculturism gone bad. They are the ones that pretend that someone that believes in valuing other cultures also believes in infibulation or clitoridectomy because it is a "cultural value." They try to weigh us down with the contradictions that multi-cultural activities necessarily cause. Oh, we do a lot of soul searching and maek some truly spectacular mistakes regarding these issues, but encompassing many points of view is the life blood of the left, not its ball and chain.

The right use the obvious passion of left because the left believe in facts. The underlying criticism is: "if the facts are on your side, why do you have to yell about it? Surely you should be able to present your case rationally." It's a trap. That's what works with other lefties. The current right are gifted in shifting the frame to the inevitable contradictions in our frame -- they have serious contradictions in their own, but we haven't learned how to put them on the defensive, yet.

I think that the difference between disagreement and condescension has been worn away. Disagreement has become hate, stupidity, and mendacity. There used to be room to disagree without declaring mortal enemies. I think that it's that erosion of the political language that causes you to think the system is pointless.

The system may be broken but it still won't ever stop fucking with you. I'm a bleeding anarchist, I don't approve of governments, but I vote. I live here too. I'd prefer to be comfortable and have at least some chance of affecting the future.

If the system is totally broken, a proposition which I do not currently accept, you still have to get the system into a state where change is possible. I'd prefer it get done in such a way that we don't have to go through a Civil War -- again. Even if the system is broken, there's still a lesser evil.

That's the long form. The short form is: if you believe in something, then believe in passionately enough to know that you are right. Doing right often includes doing incremental, interim actions, ones that are frustrating, but which open up spaces that open up spaces for your beliefs to flourish.

And of course, there's the shortest form of all: It Matters.

Addendum: Believing you are right doesn't mean that you can't change your mind, or can't ever have been wrong in the past. That is the nonsense with which they beat Kerry, this year. Your beliefs will grow and mature over time -- or should. The right frames the left's willingness to reassess a situation and make necessary changes as not having a permanent truth, like they do. They want to sell people on the belief that truth is monolithic. Doesn't matter if this weeks truth isn't identical to last week's. This week's and last week's are framed as perfect and absolute truth, and as long as they remain within that frame, the people who like their truths to come in monolithic chunks don't see the contradictions.

Off on a tangent, I often feel about Fundamental Evangelicals the same way the classic Appalachian big brother feels about his youngest brother: "You don't lay a hand on my brother," and then goes to beat the shit out his brother his own self. I get to pick on them, dammit, they're my people. The rest of y'all keep out. This is, of course, a very silly stance, and I'll try to stop it at once.

Fundamentalists are often accused of not thinking, or not being able to understand a rational argument. In point of fact, within the boundaries of their world, they can be extremely intellectual, and they build logical card houses with amazing number of stories. Their creative thought is impressive. One wishes they weren't wasting it on the nonsense that they're wasting it on, but if you actually look at them with a semi-open mind, it is blazingly obvious that quite a number of them are sharp as tacks, and involved in all sorts of activities of the mind.

Problem is, they won't work outside those boundaries. Nothing about my world can penetrate their world. The things I say, the facts that I present, the impeccable arguments I make are all equally ineffective. What I say hits the boundary of their world, and slides right off.

I think that a lot of Dems, probably especially Dems that didn't grow up in a nutter community of that type, mistake what they see for "not thinking."

There are, also, the ones that aren't thinking. They're busy living their life, and the shorter, easier to understand Conservative message, which is constantly reinforced by the structure of our family life and culture, makes it easier. In the mean time, they're making payments on the McMansion, the Honda, and the SUV, putting their kids in private school... or they're working 60 hour weeks hoping to work 80 to support their family. Gods, do you know that minimum wage now is the same as it was in 1981 when I got my first job. And that was not a large pile of riches, even though before that I was very nearly homeless. But the 'conservative" viewpoint is easy, consistent, and feels like good old common sernse.

I don't actually have any suggestions, by the way. If you take a complicated issue, like wetland preservation in the State of Minnesota, there aren't any short ways of explaining why it's a good idea. I think the Duck Hunters Association did best, with a one line squib about having ducks to hunt in the future. The wetlands do so much more than that. Hear a farmer on a talk show, and he was bitching about the wetland preservation act taking an incredibly difficult piece of his land, and set it aside. Every year, he's paid for that bit of land same way as if he'd farmed it, going rate. The host wanted to know what the farmer would do if they "gave him back his land." He said, Well I'd farm it. Host pointed out that he got the money either way, and the farmer explained that it was his land and it wasn't proper to just let it lie there, it ought to be working. It wasn't valuable as, oh, a place for ducks and geese to layover, possibly nest at, not valuable as part of a much better although more complex flood prevention installation, not valuable because the state flower, the ladyslipper, grows in abundance there. shrug. His view of the land is a single, inseparable truth. The arguments for the wetlands are a complicated set of interlinked effects, which will benefit not only him, but his neighbors and wildlife, and all that. I don't know how you wedge your way into his single frame there, unless he's a duck hunter -- or you use a very large hammer.

There has always been a clear divide between intellectuals and non-intellectuals. This has nothing to do with intelligence, and has less to do with upbringing than one might think.

The huge problem that progressives have when trying to communicate is that their stories are _long_. They're intertwined and they're complicated. People like my mother want everything to come in neat boxes, painted either white or black, with written instructions on how to stack them. If i wanted to choose a word to describe the Democrats -- and I do mean to describe them, not promote them to others, -- I would choose multicultural. And here is where we run into the deep divide. Progressives see more than one choice, and they see how the choices interact. Not perfectly, sometimes really pretty badly, but the concept is clear. Unsophisticated conservatives don't.

Because our stories are long, it sounds like we're preaching. People don't mosly like being preached at, even when they're in church.

Huh, that reminds me of another one of the problems that we really need to overcome. Due partly to multiculturalism, which is our big strength, we lost the moral high ground. We got all tangled in not judging other people's cultures and all that, and only the most ridiculous and extreme examples were publicized, and we got rewritten. "Politically correct" started out as a joke that liberals told each other about themselves, acknowledging one of the fundamental contradictions in the core value of multiculturalism. Next thing we knew, the right had stolen it and was using it as a stick to beat us with. And we let them. Instead of looking at Rush in great disgust and saying "Joke, Moshe" we allowed as how we didn't want to offend people and that was important to us and slunk off.

Politeness is not incompatible with rage. We have a lot of rage, right now, and we should. The damn stuff is dangerous, but so is TNT. It has its uses. No reason why you can't say, "Sorry" to the bridge before you blow it up... But back here in the real world, she said, a bit confused: the Dems have been afraid of real passion for a while. We need to get over it, and start stomping on the necessary toes, even the toes of people we consider to be oppressed. It's time to take strong stands. Rage can help with that, if you use it carefully.

We're right, they're wrong, so why is everybody so mournful? Ok, they're in charge and they're doing their best to loot the country, but that's not a reason for despair, that's a reason for focused rage. Mournful is better applied to situations where you don't know what the right thing is.

I've noticed something interesting, of late. I work in a place that has a lot of college students doing basic, boring clerical work. Their parents are, by and large, Republicans. When politics come up, most of them say some variation on, "Well, but who's to tell who is right. Maybe Bush is right. You just can't tell. I don't see much point." If I tick off my issues, they'll nod and say, "Yeah, but who's to say that you're right?"

And the Rs complain about the Liberals teaching their children situational morality!

It does no goood, probably, but I tell them, You are the one who decides. You are the one who knows whether Bush is lying or telling the truth. Who else can decide this for you? Yes, you might be wrong, that happens, but at least you're in the game. Many mistakes can be fixed later. You have a set of core values. You should believe in them. Fight for them. They're important. I mean, who's to say whether you're right or not?

Once in a while, though. Once in a while...

I hired Munazza about three years ago. She was smart, diligent, sweet, wore the hijab with great dignity, and was just fun to be around. She recently told me that she'd become a lot more politically aware. I said, that's cool. How did that happen? And she said, Well, partly it was you. I'm still really proud of that.

Anna, Larry,

"Eat your vegetables, there are children starving in India" a) does not make the spinach* on you plate any more palatable, and b) does exactly zero for the starving children of India.

This is my country. This is where I live. I don't think it's the best or freest country in the world; I wish it weren't the most powerful. I'm not mourning a great light set at the top of the hill to guide all mankind. I just live here, is all.


* Actually, I like spinach, boiled with butter and a little bit of vinegar. It's liver I can't stand. However, my mother never threatened the starving children in India with liver.

I'm ready to bleed on them, Lydy.

Didn't do the Black Knight much good. Besides, arguing by analogy is like sailing with a bedsheet. Or something. My analogy-generator isn't up to snuff today.

"And yet I swear this oath--America will be!"

Uh, will be what?

I'm probably demonstrating great ignorance, here. Presumably the quote marks mean that somebody famous said it.

I feel like the Black Night in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. First, they cut off one arm, but we fight on. Then, they cut off the other arm, but continue kicking. Finally, we are nothing but a head, yelling, "Come back here, you coward," and getting the response, "What are you going to do, bleed on me?"

For all of you who've said, We'll make it through, we've been through this, that, and the other thing, and we made it through those, I'm sorry, but you are wrong. Each this, that, or the other caused profound changes, many of them very bad. Do you remeber a time before the War Against Some Drugs? Under Bush, do you really expect it to go away?

We fought for abortion rights, and got it, 40 years ago. Despite everything, we were never able to solidify it into a solid win, it's always been a fragile compromise. What happens when Bush appoints a very right-wing, "pro-life" justice? I'm not real sanguine. Likewise sodomy laws.

Meanwhile, Iraq is going to get more expensive, and more deadly. I figure there won't be a draft -- it'll get outsourced. Which makes it prohibitively expensive, but just remember, the deficit is our friend. *eye roll* By most standard evaluations, the US is in serious trouble. If they followed their own rules, the IMF wouldn't lend us money. It's not impossible that we could pull an Argentina. Read Paul Krugman.

In the last 20 years, I've lost so many civil rights I can't count them. Did we "get through" Reagan? Yes, but it cost. Clinton? Not too bad on the economy, but awful hard on civil rights. Bush, first 4 years? So much worse than I had imagined 4 years ago.

I said before the election, we have to fight, and if necessary, we need to learn to fight without hope. I stand by that. I have no hope, but for at least as long as I live here, I will fight. I just wish I was Vaclav Havel, because I don't know how much longer I can keep this up.\

It's going to get worse before it gets better. A lot depends on how much worse it gets. We've lost an arm, but we're still fighting. But if they cut off another arm, and a leg... I don't want to get to the point where the only thing we can do is bleed on them.

"The claim that Weather Underground was founded after the 1968 election "because the election did not provide the group?s solution for the Vietnam War" requires the writer to believe that Weather Underground was founded by supporters of Hubert Humphrey."

*snrch*

The Weathermen were first and foremost a revolutionary movement. They believed in violence at any cost. They didn't want to stop the violence in Viet Nam, they wanted to use it as leverage to "bring the revolution home." One of the more unjust conflations is that of the peace movement with the revolutionaries -- especially the Maoists.

Xopher said: I'm sure you know, Lydy, that Daley actually said "this order" in the second clause, and it was his accent that made it sound the same as "disorder."

I really shouldn't post from work. I get too sloppy.

From Nationmaster.com (chosen at random because Google pulled it up) "One of Daley's most memorable malapropisms was uttered in 1968 in the wake of King's assassination: 'Gentlemen, get the thing straight, once and for all: the policeman isn't there to 'create' disorder; the policeman is there to 'preserve' disorder.' Daley was known for his tangled tongue. He often said he was exhilarating a program, rather than accelerating it, and called a bicycle built for two a tantrum bicycle, for instance. Reporters gathered after his press conferences to work out just what it was that he had said. "

As for whether it was dis or this, it doesn't really matter for me. What charms me about the statement, malapropism or no, is that it captures a truth in perfect, crystaline freeze-frame. There are many things in the world like that, things that are unintentionally perfect, statements or events which perfectly frame a time and place and event. Ronald Reagan explaining that trees cause air pollution is another one that I cherish. It's almost as if the truth will out, and if nothing else, the universe itself will give it voice.

Look, I never said I was sane, ok?

I'd've called Robert Kennedy a presidential aspirant, myself. Maybe not for '68, but that assassination was certainly part of the violence of that electoral season, in a way that Wallace was not. And as long as we're looking at violent politics, the assassination of MLK, Jr. in April of '68 has a lot to do with the politics of terrorism, even if MLK was not a possible presidential candidate.

As for the Weather Underground, what to say? They weren't even formed until June, 1969. One of their battle cries was "Smash the State." They lasted a little more than a year, really, with their last underground communique in September of 1970. They were certainly part of the whole paranoid scene, but they were never a significant political force. Their ghost may have made Nixon's law and order stance more attractive, he had ample material to work with.

1968 did yield my favorite quote from the 20th century. "The police are not here to prevent disorder, the police are here to create disorder." Hard to beat that as a summation of the way power politics was being played at the time.

I'm thinking that it's a whole lot easier for Pakistan to keep a secret than it is for the U.S., what with all our pesky civil rights and all. I don't know how likely it is, but totalitarian societies do "disappear" people. I don't see a reason why Pakistan couldn't disappear and then reappear OBL as is convenient. Of course, I'm saying this having only the very roughest idea of what the political situation is in Pakistan. On the American side, only a few highly placed people need to know, few enough people, and all loyal to Bush, to keep the secret for another three to four weeks.

These are the same people that negotiated the hostage crisis in Iran so that the hostages weren't released until after the election. They seem to have mostly gotten away with that. They don't seem to have lost any skills in that kind of politics in the interim.

Way, way back up the thread, Will complained about Gore only contesting votes in four counties, instead of all of them. This has become part of the accepted narrative. Unfortunately, it's a snow-job by the Republicans. Florida law did not permit Gore to request a recount for all counties. A candidate can only request a recount where the difference in votes is small -- I don't remember the exact percentage. The thing Gore did wrong was not to respond to the Republican accusations about his unwillingness to have a state-wide recount by offering to do one if a way could be found to do it legally.

As for we Democrats, Will, the reason we react to Nader with such particular disgust is that he betrayed us. He lied to us, he knifed us in the back, and he's proud of it. Towards the end of the election season, he said that he wouldn't campaign in areas where Democrats were vulnerable, and then went on to do exactly that. The Green Party is often a strategic ally for Democrats, and in 2000 it pit itself directly against us. One might argue that the Green Party is justly served; the Bush administration has been particularly hard on the issues that the Green Party care most about. It's a type of justice, though, that we couldn't really afford. I don't think that Kerry could roll back all the terrible things that Bush has done in four years, even if he had a majority in both houses, and balls of brass.

Lenny, I think that for encouraging personal responsibility, what you really want is the criminal law, not the civil law. If elected officials are committing crimes, as I believe ours are, then it's important to be able to hold them accountable. It's also vital to safeguard representatives from legal harrassment, such as President Clinton was subjected to. Besides, I'd bet these guys are way more afraid of jail than fines, and I doubt that it's possible to fine them enough to really make an impression.

Lenny,

I'm probably expressing myself poorly, and I have no actual experience at all, only book learning, but what I'm trying to say is that no army capable of functioning effectively can be free of the danger of committing atrocities. Yes, I'm saying that atrocities are one of the prices of war, that they're inevitable. That doesn't mean that I think that we should fold our hands and shake our heads, and say (as people now say about My Lai), "Well, you know, these things will happen in a war," as if it were an excuse. It's not an excuse; it's just a statement of fact, kind of like "gravity works."

Just as we build stairs and bridges and elevators and rockets to deal with the fact that gravity is not always our friend, the Armed Forces has built conventions and standards and social forces which make those atrocities less likely. But ask an engineer, and he'll tell you that X% of bridges will fail. They know that, but it's not possible to design such that all the bridges are 100% safe. It's the same for atrocities. In order to maintain a fighting force capable of fighting, there will be some percentage rate of failure. The challenge is to balance the two vital needs: defense and decency.

We learn more about engineering every day, and the design of bridges and rockets and skyscrapers improves every year. Ideally, this is also true for the structure and strictures of the armed forces. The military is a very conservative institution, and for good reasons. Their mistakes have a high chance of being lethal. I don't think that we've done all that can be done to create the perfect balance point between effective and malignant, but I do think that there have been improvements. Unfortunately, as Graydon pointed out, some of those changes were made assuming that we wouldn't be using the army as a force of occupation -- especially not doing so at the behest of someone who doesn't know the difference between occupation and a hole in the ground. (Do I remember correctly that for weeks after capturing Baghdad, we had combat troops functioning as occupation troops, doing (gods help me) police work?)

I've never had any respect for "zero tolerance" programs. A "zero tolerance" program is, in my opinion, an admission of the failure of leadership. They are put in place because the enforcement of a more nuanced policy has lead to corruption, or because the people enforcing the policy have insufficient information to do so intelligently, or (most common, these days) because there is a perception that somebody's getting away with something. A zero tolerance approach to excessive violence in the military is, in my opinion, the wrong way to go. Instead, I want to see more transparency, and fairer application of the UMCJ. I also want to see actual application of what I had thought was one of the basic building-blocks of a well-ordered armed force: that one is responsible for the actions of one's subordinates. Wish we could apply such to Rumsfeld.

Well, I'm no more enlightened than I was, but I am more unhappy. Thank you for the details, I think.

There was an author on the local National Public Radio station a while ago who had just finished a book on the Rape of Nanking. I had to turn the show off, as the details were getting entirely too distressing to allow me to continue to work while listening. Gotta wonder, sometimes, why humans exist.

An Italian acquaintance with stars explained there was no particular intent to violate Hague rules in the horn of Africa (read Hailie Selassie's appeal to civilized nations) but when the supply train is the local sporting goods store soft point is what you use. Fighting on the cheap leads to cutting corners; don't ever doubt they cut other corners.

Logistics, always with the logistics! Seriously, isn't logistics part of what determines how much rape and pillage happens in the wake of an army? Until the 20th century, armies pretty much had to "live off the land." While there was some attempt to pay the civilians for the supplies the army took, if they were operating in hostile territory, it was less likely. When the food and goods of an area is considered to be valuable to the opposing army, then it's better to destroy it than it is to leave it behind. This is, I believe, some of the reasoning behind Sherman's march to the sea. Firing the fields of the enemy will starve the peasants, but it will also starve the enemy. Armies tend to be focused on the guys that are trying to kill them.

As for rape, I don't understand it. Maybe it's a guy-thing. As far as I know, it's so common as to almost be a law of nature. I don't know of any stories of mass rape by the Allied forces in WWII. I don't know if that's because we didn't think of things like that back then, or if the local girls welcomed the liberating soldiers with more than open arms, or some other factor.

As for Pournelle, as quoted, he sounds no more cynical to me than Jim has sounded, here. The mission of the army is to break things and kill people. That's what they're there for. They aren't the peace corp. If you have doubts about that, go watch basic training for a while. The reason war settles arguments that haven't been settled any other way is because it is the worst thing that we have yet managed to come up with to do to each other -- short of complete annihilation. I don't see that reminding people of what the armed forces are designed to do is cynical; I think that it is something that is too easily forgotten. People think of war as marching soldiers and waving flags, not frightened men wounded in the dark, or MPs torturing naked men in a prison, nor children blown to bits in front of their parents' eyes, nor the flag-draped coffins coming home, nor the 18 year old football hero returning without his legs. The flags and the marching are the least part of it, and we'd do better to remember that.

I keep on trying to imagine how I would feel if my children were killed in my arms, if I lost my father and my husband and two of my brothers all in the same raid, how it would be if my uncle had voluntarily gone to the US and been detained for months, only to return home in a body bag. My imagination isn't that good. All I can think is that it's amazing that there is any good will left for us in the whole country.

Peace is made in circumstances even more dire than those in Iraq. Just as I cannot imagine what it would be like to lose my family to an occupying force, I also can't imagine how you build peace out such a place. It's been done. I wish I had more faith in my government, though.

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