Printouts of my recent comments
I (Acilius) am a frequent commenter on Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For blog. As regular readers of Los Thunderlads are all too well aware, I can get pretty long-winded, so I try to restrain myself. I was doing pretty well on the current thread, until I broke down completely and left a multi-screen essay about The Nature of Democracy. After the jump, an explanation of how I came to display such poor manners.
Posted by acilius on November 9, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/11/09/acilius-being-long-winded/
For me, the highlight of this issue was a review of Mary Beard‘s The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found. Beard’s “down to earth portrait of Pompeii” is informed by her grasp of “the latest research in demography, the history of Roman politics, architecture, ancient economics, feminist and post-colonial studies.”
The same issue includes a number of articles about the war in Afghanistan. As the editors summarize this symposium:
The principal rationale for America’s expanding military commitment in Afghanistan is that a Taliban takeover there would directly threaten US security because it would again become a safe haven for Al Qaeda to plot attacks against the United States. But the essays by Stephen Walt and John Mueller strongly refute that assumption, pointing out that a Taliban victory would not necessarily mean a return of Al Qaeda to Afghanistan, and that in any case the strategic value of Afghanistan and Pakistan as base camps for Al Qaeda is greatly exaggerated and can be easily countered.
Similarly, proponents of sending more troops to Afghanistan argue that Taliban success would embolden global jihadists everywhere and destabilize Pakistan in particular. Yet, as the essays by Selig Harrison and Priya Satia show, this narrative does not fit the realities. While American policy-makers and Al Qaeda may think of this as a grand meta-struggle between the United States and global jihadism, many Taliban fighters are motivated by other factors: by traditional Pashtun resistance to foreign occupation; by internal ethnic politics, such as rebellion against the Tajik-dominated government of Hamid Karzai; or by anger over the loss of life resulting from American/NATO aerial attacks that have gone awry.
As for Pakistan, the essays by Manan Ahmed and Mosharraf Zaidi explain why the Taliban threat to Pakistan is not as serious as many assume, and why a newly democratic Pakistan has turned increasingly against Islamist extremists. As Ahmed and Zaidi suggest, Pakistanis are quite capable of defending their country–not for American interests but for their own reasons–and Pakistani stability is more likely to be threatened than enhanced by military escalation in Afghanistan.
And finally, Robert Dreyfuss offers an exit strategy: as it winds down its counterinsurgency, Washington should encourage an international Bonn II conference that would lead to a new national compact in Afghanistan.
Well, not quite “finally.” The issue also includes a piece by Ann Jones about Afghan women. Jones mentions groups like Feminist Majority that argue for a continued US troop presence in the name of Afghan women’s rights. She mentions her own years of experience working with women in Afghanistan, and gives it as her assessment that “an unsentimental look at the record reveals that for all the fine talk of women’s rights since the US invasion, equal rights for Afghan women have been illusory all along, a polite feel-good fiction that helped to sell the American enterprise at home and cloak in respectability the misbegotten government we installed in Kabul.” In light of the fiercely patriarchal Shi’ite Personal Status Law (the SPSL, “or as it became known in the Western press, the Marital Rape Law,”) she goes on to say that “From the point of view of women today, America’s friends and America’s enemies in Afghanistan are the same kind of guys.” She is unimpressed by the number of women in the Afghan parliament:
But what about all the women parliamentarians so often cited as evidence of the progress of Afghan women? With 17 percent of the upper house and 27 percent of the lower–eighty-five women in all–you’d think they could have blocked the SPSL. But that didn’t happen, for many reasons. Many women parliamentarians are mere extensions of the warlords who financed their campaigns and tell them how to vote: always in opposition to women’s rights. Most non-Shiite women took little interest in the bill, believing that it applied only to the Shiite minority. Although Hazara women have long been the freest in the country and the most active in public life, some of them argued that it is better to have a bad law than none at all because, as one Hazara MP told me, “without a written law, men can do whatever they want.”
Jones sees little hope, and much tragic irony in the possibilities facing Afghanistan:
So there’s no point talking about how women and girls might be affected by the strategic military options remaining on Obama’s plate. None of them bode well for women. To send more troops is to send more violence. To withdraw is to invite the Taliban. To stay the same is not possible, now that Karzai has stolen the election in plain sight and made a mockery of American pretensions to an interest in anything but our own skin and our own pocketbook. But while men plan the onslaught of more men, it’s worth remembering what “normal life” once looked like in Afghanistan, well before the soldiers came. In the 1960s and ’70s, before the Soviet invasion–when half the country’s doctors, more than half the civil servants and three-quarters of the teachers were women–a peaceful Afghanistan advanced slowly into the modern world through the efforts of all its people. What changed all that was not only the violence of war but the accession to power of the most backward men in the country: first the Taliban, now the mullahs and mujahedeen of the fraudulent, corrupt, Western-designed government that stands in opposition to “normal life” as it is lived in the developed world and was once lived in their own country. What happens to women is not merely a “women’s issue”; it is the central issue of stability, development and durable peace. No nation can advance without women, and no enterprise that takes women off the table can come to much good.
Jones knows Afghanistan quite well; I know it not at all. I can only hope that there is something left in the local culture of the seeds from which a relatively woman-friendly Afghanistan once grew, and that those seeds will again send up green shoots once foreign armies leave the country .
Posted by acilius on October 24, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/24/the-nation-9-november-2009/
Nigerian Child Witch Hunt Protest
Nigerian families pay pastors to exorcise, torture, and kill suspected witch children.
Posted by CMStewart on October 18, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/18/christians-torture-witch-children/
Of several pieces on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Barack Obama, the best is by Alexander Cockburn, who recounts the genuinely gruesome records of other recipients of that prize. Of the three US presidents who preceded the incumbent as winners of that revered accolade, Cockburn declares the least wicked to have been Jimmy Carter. That is the same Jimmy Carter who “amped up the new cold war, got Argentinian torturers to train the Contras and above all dragged the United States into Afghanistan.” In closing, Cockburn lists some recipients of the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples. It’s rather hilarious sobering to look at the murderer’s row of Nobel Peace Prize winners and then consider that figures as substantial as Paul Robeson, Bertolt Brecht, and Pablo Neruda won something as disreputable-sounding as the International Stalin Prize for Strengthening Peace Among Peoples.
Two pieces tell of changing attitudes towards Israel/ Palestine among American Jews. Adam Horowitz and Philip Weiss (of the Mondoweiss blog) report on the refusal of established American Jewish organizations to follow the people they are supposed to represent and start looking for peaceful solutions to the conflict. Another article reports on Tom Dine, a former top lobbyist for the hardline American-Israel Political Action Committee who is now working to promote a two-state solution and calling for a warming of relations between the US and Syria. The online edition of The Nation also carries a noteworthy piece this week about Palestinian children in Israeli prisons.
Posted by acilius on October 16, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/16/they-cry-peace-peace-when-there-is-no-peace/
or: “A Comprehensive Manifesto on American Political Life”
It’s true that Democrats and Republicans are little more than two feuding factions of the same corporatist political establishment. But there could be actual differences between them, inasmuch as they aspire to inflict slightly different kinds of grievous damage on society. Both parties claim to champion “ordinary man” and accuse the other of elitism (a bit truer, obviously, in one case than in the other). The constant, endless sniping back and forth between Democrats and Republicans (or “liberals” and “conservatives,” as they are called by those with a taste for trendy euphemistic language), while it most assuredly is not about the things we are told it is about (e.g. a conflict between elitism and populism), must ultimately be about … something or other (?).
To some degree, the two parties are certainly “in cahoots” with one another — as both parties adore the image of being locked in bitter struggle with the other. (A kind of yin-yang symbiosis, as it were.) The dumb struggle furnishes robust spectacle to the public; and encourages “ordinary man” (l’homme ordinaire, so to speak) to choose a side and then squander his energy and time gushing vitriol upon the opposing side … denouncing them as “agents Goldsteiniens” or dumbasses etc. In short, the “conservative”/“liberal” duality is merely a distraction, a device to get the public involved in “straw issues” and all manner of vacuous controversy … and so prevent the really crucial issues from ever coming up. It generates the illusion of vibrant, contentious, democratic debate; whereas in reality the discourse could hardly be more boxed-in by the forces of indoctrination and mind control. But I do think there is something at stake.
As simplistic as it may sound, I think the core difference is, the Democrats want the corporatist agenda to triumph, along with some concessions to the tolerable functioning and survival of “ordinary man”; whilst the Republicans are prepared, quite simply, to steamroll the country into a fun playground of the hyper-rich, imposed atop a barren landscape of bad education, low-wage unskilled jobs, decent health care facilities that no one can fucking pay for, and flashy new Ford models – fresh off the Chinese assembly line and accruing much “gelt” in the coffers of high-level auto company executives. The Republicans’ only concern with “ordinary man” is that he remain thoroughly enough indoctrinated, so that he will never rise up in any substantive way and thereby inconvenience the Republicans’ stranglehold and their grand plan to rape America.
During my long, protracted, and horrendously-hellish engagements with political AM radio, I have developed at least one trusty, unfailing guiding principle: To wit: Whatever is being asserted about so-called “liberals” or “liberalism,” is in actuality the rightwing describing itself, i.e. projecting their own uncomfortable semi-conscious self-realizations onto “the other,” “the villains.” And when you think about some of their more hysterical declamations regarding “the left,” and translate them into a confession of their own real intent … one shivers in the chill, dank, autumnal breeze.
To give just one brief, simple, accessible example of this phenomenon: These “commentators” could hardly be presenting a more succinct capsule-description of the type of really egregious scenario they themselves are so hellbent to bring to fruition, when they claim that Obama [a] represents something *radically different* from anything we’ve ever known before, and [b] also represents something *terribly destructive* to the foundations of the republic. A fine summary of GW Bush … and, in all probability, of the next Republican president we get foisted with.
In the gigantic, neverending, and fabulously-tiresome propaganda war between the two corporatist factions, the Democrats seem to have an extraordinary knack for failing to ever say much of anything that cannot be instantaneously chopped to shreds by rightwing pundits. By contrast, rightwing propaganda, by virtue of its moronic simplicity (its tendency to repeat, over and over, three or four extremely jejune, threadbare notions), has this amazing ability to “stick” in the popular mind.
The Democrats’ problem is their particular brand of propagandization is just too closely intermeshed with an actual constraining reality of some legitimate complexity – as opposed to the far-more-accessible simpleminded fantasyland of the Republicans. This restricts the Democrats (most inconveniently!) from disseminating their message in the full gamut of mad, phantasmagoric textures-&-tones available to Republicans. Stated differently, the Democrats’ narratives are “boring;” they talk too much about “real stuff,” e.g. the gnarled complexities of health care overhaul. They err in tending toward the reflective and the reality-based. (And insofar as Democratic politicians sometimes give great speeches and promise the possibility of great things to come, they are apparently far too complicit with the corporatist agenda to actually ever deliver any of it.)
To the contrary, you are more appealing, and garner more support, if you are bombastic and in loo-loo land, e.g. haranguing vociferously about death panels, the radical socialization of society, Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East, the vile traitors amidst us who lack sufficient spine to carry out “the mission” etc. Stated yet differently, when it comes to persuading hearts and minds, the “sound byte culture” massively favors some doofus’s verbal farting over a considered explanation that takes longer than five seconds.
That is why our society will just keep getting stupider, as more and more people slowly fall away from any point of contact with identifiable reality and jump on-board the bandwagon of collective masturbatory fantasties about “Naughty Li’l Goldstein” … until one day the whole country will finally crawl up its own asshole and wink out of existence. Obviously the fact that I would write this means I hate America. (PS The prior sentence was sarcastic, in case that might be unclear to somebody.)
Posted by lefalcon on October 14, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/14/miscellaneous-reflections-on-us-politics/
Click on the image to view the comic full-size at Salon.com.
Posted by acilius on October 14, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/14/the-idea-of-obama/
Stuart Klawans reviews Alain Resnais’ Wild Grass, in which the 87 year old master filmmaker returns once more to his great theme of memory and desire. Resnais excels at depicting characters who cannot quite tell the difference between the past and the future. In this film, two middle-aged Parisians think about flirting with each other. Confused as to which of their feelings are hopes for the future and which are regrets for the past, they struggle to see each other as they are and their relationship as it might be. Successful lovemaking, apparently, requires us to find a way to distinguish between the future and the past.
Many have said that the purpose of philosophy is to teach us how to die. This line always reminds me of what John Silber said in 1990 when he was running for governor of Massachusetts and a voter asked him what the public schools should teach children: “Teach them that they are going to die.” Silber was not elected, needless to say. A review essay considers the idea of philosophy as a preparation for a good death. There are some interesting quotes and paraphrases along the way. For example, Freud contended that such teaching is pointless, because we cannot imagine our own death. Thinking of Resnais’ films, we might add to Freud’s argument an appendix that although it may be certain that our future will end with death, there is nothing like it in our past. We cannot envision death, because we cannot remember it. Nor can we accept it as long as our hopes for the future pervade our minds. To accept death, we would have to break from both the past and the future, and feel only the present instant as real. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross saw this, and at times preached a Buddhist-inspired doctrine urging us to emulate death in life by emptying ourselves of ego, and to see only the present, unaffected by memories or regrets, hopes or fears. But she could not follow this through; as she neared death herself, Kubler-Ross clung to Hollywood-inspired fantasies of indefinitely long life. Dying, like lovemaking, requires us to distinguish between the future and the past.
Posted by acilius on October 12, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/12/the-nation-26-october-2009/
People interested in space-based warfare often talk about the “kinetic missile.” If developed, this would be a type of bunker-buster, that is, a weapon designed to destroy underground facilities. The concept is simple. Put a metal rod, mounted with rockets and controlled from the ground, into earth orbit. When you choose, you can aim the rocket at a target on the ground and drive into that target at orbital velocity. This has the same effect as a meteor strike. The destructive potential of the kinetic missile is so great that the common nickname for them is “the Rod from God.”
Today NASA drove a rocket into a target on the Moon. The stated purpose of this operation was to find water under the surface of the Moon. It also showed the world that the USA is ready to deploy kinetic missiles at any time.
Who would be frightened by this demonstration? Some feverish minds have speculated that the US may be planning a kinetic missile strike on Iranian nuclear facilities in the near term. Official US sources have fed this speculation by acknowledging that the Defense Department is trying to develop a new generation of bunker-busters specifically to have available against facilities like that at Qom.
Whether the Iranians are frightened, we don’t yet know. The Norwegian Nobel Committee certainly seems to be; they responded to the test by immediately awarding Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize. The Committee’s official announcement gives the reason for Mr O’s selection as “that international policy and those attitudes for which Obama is now the world’s leading spokesman.” I suppose that sounded better than, “We didn’t want to be the next ones he bombed.”
Posted by acilius on October 9, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/09/us-bombs-moon-us-president-wins-nobel-peace-prize/
Here’s a video that is intended to make a political point.
Posted by acilius on October 8, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/08/neoliberalism-as-water-balloon/
Juan Cole looks at the generally accepted facts about Iran’s nuclear program and argues that there is one hypothesis that covers them all. Iran, Cole argues, is not seeking to build a nuclear weapon, as hawks in the US and Israel claim; nor is it simply maintaining long-established civilian facilities, as others have said. Instead, it is trying to achieve “nuclear latency.” That is to say, the Iranians do not want actually to build a nuclear weapon at any particular time; what they want is the ability to build a nuclear weapon on short notice. Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and several European countries have nuclear latency, and it has served their security interests quite well.
Posted by acilius on October 6, 2009
https://losthunderlads.com/2009/10/06/juan-cole-is-making-sense/
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