Don’t give in: an angry population is hard to govern; a depressed population is easy.
Laurie Penny at the New Statesman makes a very good point.
Category: society
We are Doomed as a Society
Preach It, Andrew Bacevich!!!!
He observes the absolute uselessness our foreign policy, and juxtaposes the effects of tribalism in the United States, an which might be the best headline in MoJo this year, Ivy League Eggheads Have Led Us Into a String of Disastrous Wars. It’s Time For Something New:.
Policy intellectuals—eggheads presuming to instruct the mere mortals who actually run for office—are a blight on the republic. Like some invasive species, they infest present-day Washington, where their presence strangles common sense and has brought to the verge of extinction the simple ability to perceive reality. A benign appearance—well-dressed types testifying before Congress, pontificating in print and on TV, or even filling key positions in the executive branch—belies a malign impact. They are like Asian carp let loose in the Great Lakes.
………
Then came World War II, followed in short order by the onset of the Cold War. These events brought to Washington a second wave of deep thinkers, their agenda now focused on “national security.” This eminently elastic concept—more properly, “national insecurity”—encompassed just about anything related to preparing for, fighting, or surviving wars, including economics, technology, weapons design, decision-making, the structure of the armed forces, and other matters said to be of vital importance to the nation’s survival. National insecurity became, and remains today, the policy world’s equivalent of the gift that just keeps on giving.
People who specialized in thinking about national insecurity came to be known as “defense intellectuals.” Pioneers in this endeavor back in the 1950s were as likely to collect their paychecks from think tanks like the prototypical RAND Corporation as from more traditional academic institutions. Their ranks included creepy figures like Herman Kahn, who took pride in “thinking about the unthinkable,” and Albert Wohlstetter, who tutored Washington in the complexities of maintaining “the delicate balance of terror.”
………Over the previous century-and-a-half, the United States had gone to war for many reasons, including greed, fear, panic, righteous anger, and legitimate self-defense. On various occasions, each of these, alone or in combination, had prompted Americans to fight. Vietnam marked the first time that the United States went to war, at least in considerable part, in response to a bunch of really dumb ideas floated by ostensibly smart people occupying positions of influence. More surprising still, action intellectuals persisted in waging that war well past the point where it had become self-evident, even to members of Congress, that the cause was a misbegotten one doomed to end in failure.
The modern national insecurity intellectuals subscribe to what Matthew Yglesias derided as, “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics.”
Basically, like the DC comic book character, the US can do anything, and the only way that it can fail is through a failure of the will.
It is historically and empirically wrong.
It is also batsh%$ insane, and it is the standard wisdom inside the Beltway.
It’s why you frequently hear military leaders repeat the myth that US forces lost no battles in the Vietnam War: (we lost over 70 battles) The lesson that the military learned was that the press needed to be muzzled so as not to lose popular support.
The fact is that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong beat us, but the military, in a stunning display of human nature, blames the American public and the press instead.
In his fine new book American Reckoning: The Vietnam War and Our National Identity, Christian Appy, a historian who teaches at the University of Massachusetts, reminds us of just how dumb those ideas were.
………
These questions are by no means of mere historical interest. They are no less relevant when applied to the handiwork of the twenty-first-century version of policy intellectuals, specializing in national insecurity, whose bullsh%$ underpins policies hardly more coherent than those used to justify and prosecute the Vietnam War.………
At least since September 11, 2001, and arguably for at least two decades prior to that date, US policymakers have taken these propositions for granted. They have done so at least in part because few of the policy intellectuals specializing in national insecurity have bothered to question them.
Indeed, those specialists insulate the state from having to address such questions. Think of them as intellectuals devoted to averting genuine intellectual activity. More or less like Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter (or Dr. Strangelove), their function is to perpetuate the ongoing enterprise.
………
What prompts these observations is Ashton Carter’s return to the Pentagon as President Obama’s fourth secretary of defense. Carter himself is an action intellectual in the Bundy, Rostow, Huntington mold, having made a career of rotating between positions at Harvard and in “the Building.” He, too, is a Yalie and a Rhodes scholar, with a PhD. from Oxford. “Ash”—in Washington, a first-name-only identifier (“Henry,” “Zbig,” “Hillary”) signifies that you have truly arrived—is the author of books and articles galore, including one op-ed co-written with former Secretary of Defense William Perry back in 2006 calling for preventive war against North Korea. Military action “undoubtedly carries risk,” he bravely acknowledged at the time. “But the risk of continuing inaction in the face of North Korea’s race to threaten this country would be greater”—just the sort of logic periodically trotted out by the likes of Herman Kahn and Albert Wohlstetter.
………Let me propose an experiment. Put them on furlough. Not permanently—just until the last of the winter snow finally melts in New England. Send them back to Yale for reeducation. Let’s see if we are able to make do without them even for a month or two.
In the meantime, invite Iraq and Afghanistan War vets to consider how best to deal with ISIS. Turn the op-ed pages of major newspapers over to high school social studies teachers. Book English majors from the Big Ten on the Sunday talk shows. Who knows what tidbits of wisdom might turn up?
We are a tribal society, and the tribe of the Ivy League has run our country for a very long time, the last 4 Presidents were Ivy Leaguers, and they have proven themselves to be incapable of recognizing reality.
Black Cops Fear the Cops Too………
You would think that if there was a group of minorities who would know how to behave toward the police, it would be black cops, but they fear encountering the police as well:
From the dingy donut shops of Manhattan to the cloistered police watering holes in Brooklyn, a number of black NYPD officers say they have experienced the same racial profiling that cost Eric Garner his life.
………
“It makes good headlines to say this is occurring, but I don’t think you can validate it until you look into the circumstances they were stopped in,” said Bernard Parks, the former chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, who is African American.
“Now if you want to get into the essence of why certain groups are stopped more than others, then you only need to go to the crime reports and see which ethnic groups are listed more as suspects. That’s the crime data the officers are living with.”
Blacks made up 73 percent of the shooting perpetrators in New York in 2011 and were 23 percent of the population.
A number of academics believe those statistics are potentially skewed because police over-focus on black communities, while ignoring crime in other areas. They also note that being stopped as a suspect does not automatically equate to criminality. Nearly 90 percent of blacks stopped by the NYPD, for example, are found not to be engaged in any crime.
The black officers interviewed said they had been racially profiled by white officers exclusively, and about one third said they made some form of complaint to a supervisor.
All but one said their supervisors either dismissed the complaints or retaliated against them by denying them overtime, choice assignments, or promotions. The remaining officers who made no complaints said they refrained from doing so either because they feared retribution or because they saw racial profiling as part of the system.
In declining to comment to Reuters, the NYPD did not respond to a specific request for data showing the racial breakdown of officers who made complaints and how such cases were handled.
………
“There’s no real outlet to report the abuse,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, a former NYPD captain who said he was stigmatized and retaliated against throughout his 22-year career for speaking out against racial profiling and police brutality.
Officers make complaints to the NYPD’s investigative arm, the Internal Affairs Bureau, only to later have their identities leaked, said Adams.
One of the better-known cases of alleged racial profiling of a black policeman concerns Harold Thomas, a decorated detective who retired this year after 30 years of service, including in New York’s elite Joint Terrorism Task Force.
Shortly before 1 a.m. one night in August 2012, Thomas was leaving a birthday party at a trendy New York nightclub.
Wearing flashy jewelry, green sweatpants and a white t-shirt, Thomas walked toward his brand-new white Escalade when two white police officers approached him. What happened next is in dispute, but an altercation ensued, culminating in Thomas getting his head smashed against the hood of his car and then spun to the ground and put in handcuffs.
“If I was white, it wouldn’t have happened,” said Thomas, who has filed a lawsuit against the city over the incident. The New York City Corporation Counsel said it could not comment on pending litigation.
At an ale house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn last week, a group of black police officers from across the city gathered for the beer and chicken wing special. They discussed how the officers involved in the Garner incident could have tried harder to talk down an upset Garner, or sprayed mace in his face, or forced him to the ground without using a chokehold. They all agreed his death was avoidable.
Said one officer from the 106th Precinct in Queens, “That could have been any one of us.”
This is arguably a more damning indictment of the inherent racism of the police as an institution than Michael Brown, or Eric Garner, or Amadou Diallo, or any one of hundreds of other black (and brown) men.
I would argue that the picture is even bigger than that. I would argue that this is actually something that we as a society demand.
The police are not a source of this sickness in this society, they are a product of this sickness in our society.
This is a Question that Desperately Needs to Answered
Charles Pierce wonders why Democrats refuse to call batsh%$ insane Republicans batsh%$ insane:
Back in 2010, as part of a biannual act of madness by which the magazine endeavors to analyze every congressional race in the country, I had occasion to talk to Tarryl Clark, who was challenging Michele Bachmann on behalf of the splendidly name Democratic Farmer-Labor Party for Bachmann’s job in Minnesota’s Sixth Congressional District. How, I asked Clark, does one make good use of the rich trove of lunacy that is Bachmann’s entire public career.
“Well,” Clark told me. “I’m not going to call her crazy, if that’s what you mean.”
In fact, that was exactly what I meant.
The great failing of the Democratic party over the past three-and-a-half decades has been the party’s failure to take political advantage of the obvious prion disease that has afflicted the Republican party since it first ate all the monkey-brains in the mid-1970’s. ………
Seriously.
Michelle Bachmann, for example, got started on politics by opposing the Disney feature Aladdin (the one with Robin Williams) because she felt that it promulgated witchcraft.
The so-called expert political operatives in the Democratic Party seem to think that it is either unseemly, or perhaps unnecessary, to point out the complete insanity of many Republican candidates.
I guess that they think it’s a loser, but if it is, why the f%$# did Bachmann get elected for anything?
Not only does it not serve the Democratic party to ignore this mishugas, it ends up defining deviancy down, because silence is most certainly perceived as assent.
People need to remember Hubert Humphrey’s stirring speech at the 1964 Democratic convention, and its refrain, “But not Barry Goldwater,” put the final nail in the coffin of Goldwater’s campaign.
Calling out the crazy is both the right thing and the smart thing to do.
The Wisest Thing Said so Far this Year
Donald Trump is going bankrupt for the 5th time, Richard Fuld is still a rich man, Goldman Sachs is still a going concern, airlines and other businesses routinely declare bankruptcy to cheat their workers.
It’s no surprise that recent studies have found the wealthy to be less ethical than the general populace.
And when a deal goes bad? They just walk away.
Basically, the much of the obscene levels of wealth that have been accumulated, particularly by the MBA class, come from their monetizing our ethics and their lack thereof.
It is Like Goatse* for Star Trek
Interestingly enough, this is from a “Gen”† Star Trek (The Original Series) fanzine from the late 1970s, and you can still find copies on eBay.
Had to be an amazing labor of love, because you would have to pay for a 4-color press to do that cover art, and that would have been some serious bank.
What the f%$# were they thinking with the artwork?
*If you do not know what Goatse is, Do Not Google It!!!! That which is seen cannot be unseen.
†Not containing sexual content, basically what you might find on broadcast TV.
Thank You Richard Nixon (Not a Joke)
One of the things that Richard Nixon did that he doesn’t get credit for is getting lead out of paint and gasoline.
Kevin Drum has written a lot about how falling crime rates 20 years after environmental lead was removed from paint and gasoline crime fell, and now we see lead exposure correlates to teen pregnancy as well:
Jessica Wolpaw Reyes has a new paper out that investigates the link between childhood lead exposure—mostly via tailpipe emissions of leaded gasoline—and violent crime. Unsurprisingly, since her previous research has shown a strong link, she finds a strong link again. But she also finds something else: a strong link between lead and teen pregnancy.
This is not a brand new finding. Rick Nevin’s very first paper about lead and crime was actually about both crime and teen pregnancy, and he found strong correlations for both at the national level. Reyes, however, goes a step further. It turns out that different states adopted unleaded gasoline at different rates, which allows Reyes to conduct a natural experiment. If lead exposure really does cause higher rates of teen pregnancy, then you’d expect states with the lowest levels of leaded gasoline to also have the lowest levels of teen pregnancy 15 years later. And guess what? They do. The chart on the right shows the correlation between gasoline lead exposure and later rates of teen pregnancy, and it’s very strong. Stronger even than the correlation with violent crime.
It’s not surprising.
One of the effects of lead on the developing brain is reduced impulse control, and it seems obvious to me that lack of impulse control would increase the likelihood of high risk sexual behaviors.
I am Happy to be Wrong
Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras have entered the United States, and they were not detained:
Despite fear over detention by the authorities, journalists Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras — the first reporters to meet with Edward Snowden and receive access to his trove of leaked NSA documents — reentered the U.S. without trouble.
Both journalists feared detention or at the very least questioning on returning to U.S. soil. The Justice Department had refused to give any information about whether Greenwald and Poitras might be subject to a grand jury investigation. Furthermore, last year Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, was held at Heathrow airport for nine hours, his electronic devices confiscated, under a U.K. counterterror act. In this age, when journalism is all too often aligned with terrorism, Greenwald and Poitras were understandably concerned. Indeed, Poitras has been questioned for hours on end at U.S. airports in the past over her journalistic work pre-dating the Snowden leaks.
But, as Greenwald told reporters Friday, he “expected that they wouldn’t be that incredibly stupid and self-destructive to try and do something that in the eyes of the world would be viewed as incredibly authoritarian. … That would forever undermine their ability to criticize other governments for imprisoning journalists and for having a constitutional fight over the First Amendment that successive administrations have wanted to avoid.”
And indeed, the U.S. authorities were not so stupid, and Poitras and Greenwald entered the U.S. safely. That the two journalists feared detention at all remains grimly reflective of what whistle-blower attorney Jesselyn Raddack calls the current “war on information.” Lest we forget, Barrett Brown and Chelsea Manning sit behind bars; Edward Snowden faces hefty charges under the Espionage Act; AP journalists’ phone logs were surveilled by the DOJ; Fox News correspondent James Rosen was once named by the FBI as a possible “co-conspirator” in a crime for the journalistic act of obtaining leaked information. The NSA revelations, shedding light on a vast and unbounded corporate-government surveillance nexus, have unquestionably been in the public interest. The whistle-blower behind them should not fear persecution, nor should the journalists reporting the story. But where Poitras and Greenwald can point to the First Amendment (or whatever meek vestiges of it that the U.S. cares to recognize), Snowden has no such recourse and no such protection.
I would anticipate that they are being intensely watched, and that all their communications are monitored, but the fact there has been no official harassment yet is heartening.
Then again, the fact that I, and many others, expected official misconduct on the part of the US state security apparatus speaks volumes about the state of our society.
I am Feeling so Much Schadenfraude Right Now
Its beginning to look like George Zimmerman is starting to learn that there are people out there who aren’t NRA gun nuts with small penises with racial murder fantasies:
Zimmerman taped an interview last Tuesday with Univision and Fusion, and then took his girlfriend, her kid and his brother to the beach. While they were catching some rays, people noticed him, started harassing him, and then someone shouted out George had a $10,000 bounty on his head.
We’re told it freaked him out and they all retreated to the hotel, but the crowd followed them.
Security swept their room to make sure no one tampered with their stuff and then stood guard throughout the day and night. We’re told Zimmerman did his CNN interview early the next morning and then beat it … literally fleeing Miami.
I am not feeling any sympathy, or empathy, for that racist murderer right now.