The Blog That Isn't A Blog

"My Family Didn't Own Slaves": Argument, or Copout?

2008-03-19T16:49:00.003-07:00

I recently was having a complex and sophisticated interaction about race and racism at, of all places, YouTube. One of my interlocutors offered this argument: "none of my ancestors were slave owners (italian family)" . Another on a different site offered this observation: "My great-great grandparents came here from somewhere else, so kindly don't count ME in with the people that may have oppressed YOUR great-great grandparents."

Indeed, this seems to be the white national mantra: "I wasn't alive for slavery." "My family had no involvement in slavery". "My ancestors were dirt poor farmers." It is such an effective standard because of course everyone falls under it. Even direct descendants of slaveowners with access to intergenerational wealth can claim that they weren't around for slavery. Since many of us (myself included) are descended from immigrants more recent than the end of slavery, and the slaveowners formed a tiny elite, it is a perfect apology.

But it is also a microcosm of everything wrong with the white national narrative about race. The amount of things wrong with this argument is so staggering that saying it should require an instant remedial US History and Government class.

The first mistake it makes is to imply that the only bad thing that has happened to the black community as a whole, institutionally, is slavery. As if blacks as a whole never suffered under Jim Crow, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, restrictions on where they could take a drink or go to the bathroom, lynchings and terror. As if black life trajectories and possibilities weren't reduced by racial covenants, inability to access Federal Housing Assistance loans (an amount in the TRILLIONS of dollars, or as Tim Wise put it, "more than the outstanding mortgage debt, all the credit card debt, all the savings account assets, all the money in IRA's and 401k retirement plans, all the annual profits for U.S. manufacturers, and our entire merchandise trade deficit combined."), rampant employment discrimination, inability to acess GI Bill benefits, and so forth. Many of these injustices are in recent memory, such that there are those alive who remember them and were affected by them. Certainly their immediate descendants continue to feel the loss of these opportunities. So the very claim shows a complete contempt or ignorance for the suffering that blacks went through, as if segregation is not an injustice that deserves to be righted.

It also implies that we do not bear responsibility for what our government and communities are doing right now to virtually every black man and woman, a claim that inspires not only amusement but contempt. I hope I do not have to go into the extensive documentation on institutional racism, nor answer claims varying from "What about the Oprahs?" (yes, what about them? as if individual success stories invalidate an extensive backdrop of evidence) nor "What about the white poor?" (yes, social categories are complex, but to be black and poor is to be worse off on average than to be white and poor, even white poor have a benefit from being white and even the black rich have a disadvantage from being black). Instead, it should be sufficient to say that given the extensive racist treatment and barriers blacks endure in education, employment, treatment by police, selection for prosecution, prison sentences, loans, mortgages, housing, firing, and so on, this claim is a call for whites to ignore their responsibility to terminate currently existing injustice.

Third, it obscures the notion of intergenerational wealth and thus intergenerational responsibility. For while only those who owned the slaves directly injured those slaves, everyone from the Founding Fathers to the man on the street to the early capitalists benefitted from the slave's picking of cotton, rice, sorghum, tobacco and other crops. They also bore both the benefit and the cost of the racial hierarchy enhanced (if not actually created) by those in power to turn poor blacks and poor whites against each other rather than against the rich masters. That wealth continues to this day. There are millions of families living on homes provided almost exclusively to whites under the Homestead Act. The Naturalization Act of 1790 and other laws enabled the very presence of our ancestors by naturalizing whites and giving them rights far beyond people of color. The wealth produced by the South was even instrumental in the Revolution, meaning that slaves are owed part of our very existence as a nation! So while those whose ancestors immigrated after slavery may not have been quite poor, they nonetheless benefitted from slavery and from the existence of other laws occurring under the rubric of the racial caste system.

In line with this, it also ignores institutional and social responsibility. After all, when Volkswagen and other German companies were forced to give reparation to some Jews they had victimized, while it is true that they did not pay to Jews writ large and only paid to living people, they nonetheless had changed as an organization, but the organization owed restitution. The American state owes the same to blacks. And even if it does not, in that sense, it would make sense for social policy to be designed to engineer social equality instead of inequality. In this sense, the "my family wasn't responsible for slavery" is the racial equivalent of buckpassing on a national level.

Why Reject Genetic Food?

2008-03-19T16:49:00.001-07:00

So reviewing another group of pro-environmental yet anti-environmental-group centrist-type computer nerds' comments on Cracked.com, I felt the need to comment on genetically modified food. It's been awhile since I've written about this issue. It's an issue that anyone with an opinion on seems to be set in. Per usual, I have a different opinion than a lot of the left and 99% of anyone right of Dennis Kucinich. (On a side note: Applause to Dennis for JUST NOW getting out of the race. Fight the good fight, man.)

Let's get the bombshell out of the way:

I don't have a problem with the idea of genetically modified food.

*gasps*

Yes, despite being anarchist, leftist, pareconist, feminist and polyculturalist, I don't have a problem per se with genetically modifying organisms, or with nuclear power, or with a lot of other things I think the Left is dogmatic on for no especially good reason.

Why?

Well, because I agree to some extent with Bookchin's notion of humankind as intelligent guide for evolution and nature. I note that we have already engaged in massive genetic modification for the entirety of human history: It's called breeding, animal husbandry, crops, etc. Any vegetarian environmentalist type who decries Frankenfood then eats lettuce, or corn, or spinach, or tofu has to feel just a BIT hypocritical when bearing in mind those crops' conscious engineering for superior traits for millenia, right? After all, what the Native Americans originally cailed maize looked NOTHING like what we call corn. It was scraggly grass. The brilliant genetic engineering and scientific work of Central and South American tribes turned it into the juicy yellow beauty we have today. The same can be said for a lot of New World crops.

Using genetic modification in line with safety standards and a fully holistic ecological sensitivity could allow us to potentially clean up our environmental catastrophes, produce more food per hectare and therefore allow more room for crop cycling or reduce the amount we irrigate, etc. Smart application of technology should be part of our toolkit for a sustainable human race.

So what's the problem?

There's a lot of them.

1) Safety and food regulatory issues. The difference between the type of breeding our ancestors did and what currently goes on in Monsanto's lab is obvious: It's qualitatively different. There are attempts to splice spider silk into goats to mass produce said silk for industrial applications. There are ideas to take genes from plants and put them in animals, fungi and put them into plants, and all sorts of swapping from between kingdoms, phyla, and every other taxonomy one can imagine.

A few thousand years of effective product testing is a pretty good way of insuring that what you produce is safe. If a particular breed is obviously toxic or massively destructive, one will be much more likely to pick up on it. But the way that GMOs are being produced now, one is lucky to have two decades between theoretical development and appearing on shelves. This has caused innumerable debacles which forms a large part of the anti-GMO material.

One can argue that patent and regulatory agencies should take care of that. The problem with that reasoning? I wouldn't trust the FDA to regulate my Corn Flakes. That ties into our second problem...

2) Capitalism. These developments are occurring in for-profit labs whose job is to provide wealth for the shareholders, period. Companies like Monsanto are profit-seeking corporations, and that causes a number of problems.

a) Years and years of fomenting by radical business groups have eroded at the effective enforcement of a number of regulatory agencies. They simply don't have the time, energy, funding or people on the ground to do an effective job.
b) It gets worse. In principle, many of the free trade agreements and organizations like GATT, the WTO, NAFTA, etc. make it so that if a panel of corporate lawyers and scientists determine a product to be safe, a government CANNOT ban it from their shores. This has been a major sticking point for Europeans in particular, where the backlash has been especially strong. So even if the FDA DID its job, it's entirely possible that a private unaccountable body would overturn their decision.
c) The way that these foods are being produced violates the "holistic ecology" criterion I mentioned above. Some of them, for example, have powerful toxins growing in the plants that are deadly to bugs. Even when it can be proven they are always and invariably harmless to humans, no matter the mutation, these plants are often quite destructive to the soil and to the bugs themselves who do after all form part of the ecosystem. Some of these plants are quite aggressive indeed, functioning as invasive species and devastating local ecologies. The vast majority of these products occur in a Green Revolution-type environment which uses conventional massive irrigation, massive capital investments particularly of fossil fuels, no crop cycling, etc. etc. So the potential of the technology is subverted for profit. This is no big surprise, of course.
d) The patent problem. Companies like Monsanto patent their "inventions". This prevents innovation, like most patents do, wherein farmers take their neighbors' strand and experiment, making something even better. But it gets worse. Farmers have been tried when Monsanto seeds that were on their neighbors' property took over their fields and they gave up and simply grew the Monsanto seed as part of their crop.
e) In line with the patent problem, companies like Monsanto include things like "terminator seeds". A standard model of agriculture, particularly among peasants the world over, is to grow a lot during harvest then save some for reseeding the next year. The problem is that Monsanto's seeds die. You have to buy new ones from Monsanto. They genetically engineer dependance on the company. That ends up producing monoculture as well as poverty and destruction... but we'll get to monoculture at point #4.

3) The right of people to not accept or buy products they don't want or trust. Whether or not the GMO corn is the best, tastiest, most efficiently grown corn in the world, if I find it disturbing for whatever reason that octopus DNA was part of it, I have a right not to purchase that product. And I have the right to be informed of what I'm purchasing when I buy it. And I have the right to demand that companies be legally obligated to tell me what I'm buying.

The problem is that the aforementioned free trade laws are being used to undermine this right. Europeans are asking for the right to informed consent: If they don't want to eat something, they shouldn't have to, no matter their reasons. But because a GMO label is a major damper on products, companies are resisting even being required to label their foods. If by some arbitrary standard the end product is identical, totalitarian unaccountable organizations have decided that you should have no problem with where your food comes from.

This was part of an extraordinary explosion of racist indignation. African countries have refused to accept aid of GMO corn for their people, expressing safety concerns. Western commentators lambasted them as dictatorships and idiotic for doing so.

So let me get this straight. Their estimation of their own safety is stupid, whereas our own insistence on giving them food they don't want instead of just agreeing not to subsidize our GMO corn and simply send over the regular stuff instead is prudent?

How racist is that?

4) Monocultural agriculture. The problem with any GMO crop, no matter how awesome, is that it's frequently used as the one crop that a farmer grows. Monocultural agriculture is well known to exhaust soils, require massive capital input (fertilizer, oil, machinery, etc.), and so on and so forth.

5) Dubious advantages. As R.C. Lewontin has documented extensively, many of the crops in question actually do worse, and most of the rest have only marginal benefits. While I think there is potential in the technology, it has yet to unambiguously show itself.

6) In line with #5: The propaganda that this is how to solve the starvation crisis in the world. Monsanto and the rest of the rogue's gallery behind "Frankenfood" frequently like to run a guilt trip argument. How dare these environmentalists resist feeding the world! Don't they know that if we could just produce 20 more units of corn per acre, there would be no more starvation in Africa!

It'd be a good argument if it weren't blatantly false. It'd be an argument that didn't curdle the stomach and enrage the heart if it weren't the VERY SAME COMPANIES who are some of the principal roadblocks against feeding the globe.

There is enough food to feed the planet. In fact, as Kofi Annan points out in his Facts, it wouldn't take that much money. We produce so much food that we actually subsidize farmers to destroy some of it. The problem of starvation has always been a problem of access, not of availability.

The problem? Monsanto and food companies in general are those who keep the food away from the poor.

This is the debate that goes into the GMO discussion.

Now, I imagine that some of you have heard some of these points, but very few have heard all of them as a unified case. Why is this the case? Well, sometimes environmentalists make it an issue of dogma and don't present the points back to back to make their argument compelling.

But the much more serious phenomenon? Reasonable commentators on all side are being shunted aside by powerful media institutions to make the debate one-sided and repetitive. We don't want to acknowledge that there's enough food out there, so go Monsanto spokesperson! Castigate leftists for starving Africans! Never mind that this is wholly out of character for them to do so!

Whatever people's opinion on genetically modified food, it behooves humanity to have a reasonable discussion about it, with evidence and without propagandistic distortions. And the same thing that makes genetically modified food insures that that conversation must occur despite effort to stop it: The destructive organs of state capitalism.

A Militant Rejection of Militant Atheism

2008-03-19T16:48:00.001-07:00

Some of you may have heard arguments from a growing militant atheist movement among intellectuals. Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and others have launched frontal attacks on religious institutions, belief and faith. Though their critique focuses on "Abrahamanic" religions like Islam, Judaism and Christianity, they rarely spend the rhetorical effort to differentiate Abrahamanic religion from religion per se. They argue that religious and spiritual philosophies are inherently destructive, spreading intolerance, and that scientific and rational thinking must be atheist.

Dawkins in a speech featured here in front of TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) reiterates these arguments: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/113 . They don't hold water.

For one, he tries to correlate IQ and religious thinking. But any serious scientist has to know that the IQ test is in no way, shape or form a serious metric of "intelligence". It tests a particular type of intelligence poorly and is heavily class and culturally biased. The same data is used across populations to declare people of different races to be stupid. Dawkins compounds this error by implying that religious thinking is also negatively correlated with socioeconomic status and education. But neither of those vectors are true indications of intelligence otherwise, because we do not live in an intelligence-based meritocracy. We live in a class, race and gender-riveted society where perfectly capable people are artificially denied equal wealth and educational opportunity.

This social understanding is one of the Dawkins/Hitchens school's most severe misunderstandings and utter failings. There was hardly a more antagonistic atheist on the globe than Bakunin, who as an anarchist declared that were there to be a Lord of the world he would try to overthrow that Lord as he would all others. But Bakunin also knew that scientific oligarchy or rule would be just as onerous and disgustinig as rule by a priesthood. I think quite a bit of people's knee-jerk reaction to Dawkins and his ilk is their extreme contempt for people's views and their quite clear implicit belief that those people do not have equal capacity to discharge their rights as human beings.

Why have we seen an upsurge in fanatical religious thinking the globe over? Well, globalization and American foreign policy have intentionally deprived governments of the capacity to control their own societies. There is a "democratic deficit" that is quite alarming. When people's faith in secular political institutions decline, their faith in religious institutions as an alternative civil society grows. This can occur even without religion: The fascist uprisings in Europe were roughly the same phenomenon. One can harshly oppose fanaticism and inflexibility of
all kinds while bearing in mind their structural causes.

One might argue, as a good friend of mine has, "So what? Everyone has their battles. Why not let them focus on the religious fanaticism?" The problem with this is manifold. For one, Hitchens in particular are in support of the very institutions that propel fanatical thinking. Putting aside Hitchens' support for globalization and conventional "capitalism", he also has been in support of the American imperial project in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet a greater hotbed of Abrahamanic fanaticism could hardly be found. "Christians" (read: radical statists subverting authentic Christian belief) use crusading rhetoric and real bombs to devastate Muslims (both ordinary, innocent, decent people and a tiny nasty minority), while "Jewish" Israel slips further and further away from democracy and towards a military-run state.

Second, people like Harris go further and even let their monomaniacal focus on religion obscure obvious truths. Harris has declared that there is a "problem with Islam" that inherently drives terrorist acts. The fact that this argument could fit in George W. Bush's living room does not seem to bother him. This kind of rhetoric that views the beliefs of Arabs and Muslims as somehow inhuman and less than worthy is an integral part of the problem. Of course, the true phenomenon is that butchers on all sides point to justifications as they always do while fighting for their own interests.

Third, religion per se is not the problem. One can look superficially at the Crusades and see that, yes, people of varying religions battled. But then why the siege of Constantinople? Why the horrible atrocities on all sides? Why the enslavement of the Children's Crusade? The answer: Religion was the pretext. The Muslim empires and the rising European empires were destined to battle. The way to mobilize ordinary people was religion.

One could look at the above and say, "All right, religion was still a problem though, it was still the pretext used for recruitment." But religion is by no means the only way of getting the message out. Nationalism, racism, fear, greed, any number of justifications and appeals can be used to spread war and violence. The solution is to eliminate the war and violence, not the religion.

One can go down the line with this logic. Religious fanatics? Get rid of fanaticism, not religion. Religious intolerance? Get rid of intolerance, not religion. Religion leading to closed minds? Get rid of closed minds, not religion. There has been no argument anywhere, precisely because it's absurd, that religion can't be separated from those bad outcomes, that there is no way to have faith and spirituality without accepting negative consequences.

Dawkins also makes a quite abusive analogy, taking advantage of Douglas Adams (a man who I have nothing but admiration for), by pointing out that religious thought has been made socially inured to challenge. I agree that this is unnecessary and problematic. So do almost all religions. The Trickster mythos in almost every religion I'm aware of, from Nasrudin in Islam to Coyote to Ananasi to Buber's irreverant interpretations of Judaism, is a myth that defiles the sacred in order to remind people of what really matters. Being able to discuss openly any aspect of life, religion included, is essential, and anyone who opposes that because they favor their dogma is wrong. But that includes atheist dogma. What many Christians and religious people derive their hostility to people like Dawkins and Hitchens from is not the notion of having the discussion but the notion that the discussion will inherently be from militantly hostile people who have it in their minds that the only right answer to the questions they're asking is their own. No one willingly gets into that conversation. The answer to dogmatic religion is not dogmatic atheism.

Dawkins goes on to extend Adams' analogy far beyond what it was ever intended to say. For Dawkins, anything that we can't subject to rigorous scientific analysis is bunk. Well, say goodbye to ethics then, because there is no litmus test in the world that will tell you why murder is wrong. One must have an ethical edifice that says so or not. Indeed, most human inquiry is largely immune to scientific analysis. Some of it is simply the limits of science: Things like human emotions, say. But others are in PRINCIPLE beyond any empirical or objective argumentation: Aesthetics, morals, etc. Dawkins doesn't dispense with these because he sees that there is more to life than science. But he inconsistently dispenses with religion on that ground. Unfortunately, the reasoning is just as bad in this context.

When faith and science clash, that is when there is an empirical fact that science has observed that faith disagrees with, who should win? By and large, science. But that's neither here nor there.

Dawkins focuses almost entirely on Hitchens' Abrahamanic religions, the monotheisms of Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Buddhism, Hinduism, Jainism, any number of other religious thoughts simply do not fall under his criticisms. For example, it is not actually the case that we are all atheists except for one God. Most polytheistic religions are perfectly fine with throwing in another God from another culture. But Dawkins nonetheless repeatedly says the term "religion".

This is a problem much deeper than semantics, though. Dawkins has irresponsibly coupled dozens of aspects of religious and spiritual inquiry, including myths, faith, spirituality, organizations and institutions of religion, dogma, laws, etc. Religion is not a monolith: There are dozens of facets, some not so good and some quite good.

Dawkins reminds me of the anti-science postmodern crowd. For these people, science's failures, its creation of the nuclear bomb, make it completely destructive whereas its successes, say the theory of relativity, are irrelevant. The entire project begins with the notion that we should deliberately throw the baby out with the bathwater and hope a new baby springs to life when we run the tap again. The answer to Dawkins is the same answer given by scientists to postmodernists: Get rid of the bad and keep the good, because the bad is not intrinsic to the structure.

Has religion done destructive things? Yes, depending on how you define your terms; so has science. Have religious people been dogmatic, been jerks and warmongers? Yes; same for atheists, science, people with political or economic dogmas, people named Jeff and Bob and Nancy, and indeed pretty much every person alive at some point in their life. But what these thinkers are never able to do is make the argument that would say that there is no context, no proper deployment, for spiritual thought, precisely because the argument would be both offensive and stupid. If spiritual feeling is kept within its sphere of inquiry, it can be the source of brilliant and wonderful passion, philosophy, ethics, and beliefs.

One can look into the stars and see the wonder of the universe, or into the woods and see the wonder of life, and be profoundly moved whether one sees God or not. One can embrace basic human decency, respect, tolerance, compassion and ethics whether one is religious or not. Religion can help with acquiring such moral guidance, but so can other means. The point is that the questions of faith and spirituality are ones that we should answer ourselves, and that there are an array of rational choices, not just one.

I reject militant atheism. I support people embracing their beliefs, whatever they are, and being ready to proudly discuss them. I look forward to a revival across the globe of what China succeeded at: Realizing that many spiritual ways are all in fact on one path, trying to resolve core questions about who we are, what makes us happy and what is out there. Across the millenia, if we commit to a society of discussion, might we find that all of the spiritual thought we had was deeply inadequate? Absolutely, as with science, philosophy and any other worthwhile sphere. Will atheists have a part to play in our journey? Yes. Atheism is the null hypothesis. It answers the spiritual question by saying "Nothing on the table is valid". If we can't explore the null hypothesis, we cannot fully explore the question. Atheists act as skeptics, as people who will help to buoy our wildest notions and anchor our philosophies. In the end, I hope we will collaboratively as a human species find a spiritual truth that resonates as brilliantly and logically as any other essential philosophy we have discovered.

9/11: Shifting Blood

2008-03-19T16:43:00.000-07:00

Reviewing South Park's take on the 9/11 truth movement ("The Mystery of the Urinal Deuce"), a classic bit of satire, I began thinking to myself about the 9/11 truth movement. I was wondering, as I often do, what common ground progressive and radical people could have with these folks. And I began to realize: Neither story of what happened that day, the conventional explanation of a cell connected to the bin Laden-oriented movement or the various 9/11 truth hypotheses about sleeper cells or the US government having advanced warning and allowing the planes to hit or bombs being planted in the basement or missiles being fired at the Pentagon or any permutation, really actually changes anything. Either or both could be true and we as Americans, we as a species, would face some irrespective truths.

It wouldn't change that thousands of innocent people died for no justifiable reason, and millions more were collectively terrified of losing loved ones, saddened by death, and angered by violence. It wouldn't change that Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush, and their respective systems are without question responsible for innumerable atrocities and should be brought to justice.

It wouldn't change that the US government used the atrocities of that day and sullied the memories of those who had died by launching a new cycle of hatred. It wouldn't change that the US government and its elites had a vested motive in seeing their own people die because, whoever the perpetrator, the attacks facilitated military, economic and political objectives of an extraordinary reactionary nature. It wouldn't change that we have a political system that benefits from, indeed in a twisted sense needs and feeds off of, chaos, disorder and violence.

It wouldn't change the fact that, either way, the events of that day in September are extraordinarily poorly understood given their extensive study by just about everyone in the world. And it wouldn't change the fact that this ignorance is due to the imperial system refusing to investigate what happened, blocking the 9/11 Commission and others trying to discover everything about how and why the events transpired. It wouldn't change the motive for this refusal: That a simple myth of Osama masterminding the entire enterprise on dialysis in a cave in Afghanistan is far more useful to imperial prerogatives than the truth, whatever that truth is. (Of course, if the US government were behind the attacks, it would provide an additional motive, but the one I mentioned is more than sufficient). It wouldn't change Chomsky's sobering argument that even months after the invasion Mueller and US intelligence agencies could only be "probably" sure about what precisely happened and about Afghanistan's ties. It wouldn't change the fact that funding for the enterprise supposedly came from Germany and the United Arab Emirates, nor would it change that neither of those countries were bombed (unlike Afghanistan), because that would have been insane.

It wouldn't change the fact that the attacks opened an exceedingly short window wherein the majority of the world expressed compassion for the United States, compassion that in large part stemmed from their own knowledge of what it feels like to have your buildings blown up and your people in terror. It wouldn't change the tragic reality that the Bush Administration squandered that opportunity to advance their and their true constituency's core interests at the cost of insuring that hatred and violence would become even more entrenched. It wouldn't change the alternate reality that could have been, where that sympathy for the globe was parlayed into a sea change wherein America would abandon its imperial domination of the globe and work with others to root out terrorists whereever they may be and bring them to justice, even if those terrorists are white and on cushy book tours or even American Presidents, current and former.

Osama bin Laden could have hijacked every single plane and escaped in a Cobra Commander-esque rocket pod and it still wouldn't change that he, and the mujahadeen, and Saddam, and Islam Karimov, and the Shah, and a long list of others owed their power and existence in no small part to the CIA and American imperial power. It wouldn't change that the bombings of Afghanistan and Iraq were criminal idiocies that turned both countries into cauldrons of chaos, terror and death. It wouldn't change that Saddam Hussein had no connection with Osama bin Laden and no plausible connection with any serious terrorism, yet the invasion of Iraq caused an explosion of new opportunities for radical Islamic terrorism. It wouldn't change that al Qaeda as a whole is stronger now than in 2001, that Osama bin Laden has not been brought to justice, or that the State Department estimates that terrorist actions are becoming more, not less, common in the world. (And it wouldn't change that the State Department's interpretation of terrorism would never include US terror against the globe). It wouldn't change that justifiable rage at what Osama did was no justification or excuse for anything that came after, for retribution and death being visited upon Afghani civilians who had done nothing to Americans and were Osama and the Taliban's victims.

It wouldn't change the fact that all one needs to know about the bankruptcy of the system is in plain view, easy to find. It wouldn't change the fact that one can tell something about the bankruptcy of mainstream culture when it can be seriously argued that it is justified to bomb a country and turn it into a terrorist battleground because that way "we'll" fight them "there" not "here"; in short, using innocent people who have done no wrong to you as human shields so you don't have to be inconvenienced. Or that no one bothers to mention that bombing a country that has weapons of mass destruction is not especially likely to allow one to secure those weapons, but is much more likely to lead to those weapons and materials being looted and sold on the black market. It wouldn't change the fact that conservatives may end up being vindicated in a tragically ironic way when Americans are killed in a chemical weapons attack or by a dirty bomb facilitated by the capture of Iraqi material... thanks to the invasion. It wouldn't change the fact that the average American needs no more reason to resist the system than what their own eyes and ears tell them. They know how bad it is: They suffer from the poverty, the failing health care system, the myths of opulence juxtaposed against the failure of slowing growth rates, the "outsourcing", the mind-numbing work that condemns them to eight hours of servitude daily in a supposed democracy. It wouldn't change that all that is needed to foment change is not stories about US government complicity in yet another crime (as if adding a few thousand more dead really turns the government from saint to sinner compared to their millions) but a movement that can unmask both the injustices of the system and its vulnerability to courageous resistance. And, as South Park's creators Trey and Matt point out, it wouldn't change the fact that, barring hope that the system can be confronted, all the majority of the population accepting their theories would do is further amplify the belief that the system is invincible.

It wouldn't change the fact that the mainstream corporate media is structurally designed to obfuscate essential truths, to safeguard the egos and guilt of the rich that it serves, that power in our society is concentrated in a very small set of hands.

And even if the CIA planned every step of the hijackings, even if the Pentagon was struck by a missile, even if the plane sent to hit the White House was shot down, even if bombs were planted in the WTC buildings, it still wouldn't change that the 9/11 truth movement seems to cling to some disturbing myths. Like the quasi-racist notion that a group of Muslims couldn't pull this off: It had to be white people and their intelligence agencies. Or the apparent belief many of them have that America was at one point a city on a hill and only recently has it been corrupted by bad politicians. Or the lack of insight they have into the core fact that all the conspiracy theories would prove is that a small group of people did something horrible, saying very little about the whole systemic injustice the world faces. It wouldn't change that their singular and often fanatical focus is used by the mainstream media to ridicule those who resist atrocities. It wouldn't change the fact that a large portion of the population does already believe them and that there has nonetheless been no revolutionary upturn in activism, a sign of the real impact of their critique: Hopelessness and cynicism.

And what if the American government were somehow behind the attacks? Would it change the extraordinary incompetence of FEMA in New Orleans (an incompetence especially palpable to those with a better "tan"), or the inability of regulatory agencies to stop massive corporate fraudsters from ripping off even the rich the government protects, or the failure of the strongest military on the planet's surface to battle an underfunded and underarmed insurgency in Iraq? Would it change that the private insurance system the US runs by costs more per person to operate and is therefore by definition deeply inefficient?Would it change that the system as a whole is riddled not only with criminality but actual inability to perform basic tasks?

And what if the American government were not behind the attacks? Would it change their complicity in creating a climate of hate and violence that facilitates attacks like 9/11? Would it change that even Eisenhower knew that the perception of America and Americans as evil had to do with the US government's campaigns of warfare, overthrowing elected regimes, installing dictators, blocking economic growth, and securing control of other peoples' natural resources, and that he and every President after made a decision to continue this pattern even if it would harm Americans? Would it change that many of the organizations that are responsible for these atrocities were created by the CIA to punish the Russians during an invasion that Brzezinski claimed he was responsible for? Would it change that the US government should have been able to prevent the crimes of that day had they not made several crucial mistakes along the way? Would it change that the FAA should have noticed the planes making massive deviations from planned flight paths, that the FAA should have alerted trained scrambler jets, and that if they were not in on the attacks the US government's bureaucracy must then be guilty of truly colossal ineptitude? Would it change that even the CIA admitted sadly that had Clinton not been so determined to crucify the Sudanese he could have accepted data they had compiled that may have allowed arrests and investigations to be made that would have prevented 9/11? Would it change Time's allegation that, due to the government failing to actually adopt Richard Clarke's recommendations, that "many of those in the know-the spooks, the buttoned-down bureaucrats, the law-enforcement professionals in a dozen countries-were almost frantic with worry that a major terrorist attack against American interests was imminent. It wasn't averted because 2001 saw a systematic collapse in the ability of Washington's national-security apparatus to handle the terrorist threat[?]" Would it even change the fact Michael Moore decried post-2001 that people were being allowed to bring lighters on board thanks to pressure from tobacco companies?

I suppose if the American government was behind 9/11, one might be skeptical about moves like PATRIOT and undermining the Geneva Conventions to reduce civil liberties in the hope of catching terrorists; after all, 9/11 truth activists point out, the terrorists are right here on American soil. But a conservative could accept that the US government planned 9/11 and nonetheless argue that there are real threats from abroad and that there needs to be enhanced means to deal with them. More importantly, perfectly mainstream understandings are more than adequate to respond to PATRIOT and moves to justify torture. After all, if the US government had been doing its job, it wouldn't have needed PATRIOT. It could have stopped antagonizing Arabs, or not created the mujahadeen in imperial war games, or accepted the Sudanese data, or listened to the warnings and fears of its intelligence agencies. It could have prevented the attacks years ago by making any number of different moves. Adding more plays to the playbook of a team that can't throw the ball, to use an oft-maligned sports metaphor, seems hardly the correct move. If even after the US stops behaving in ways that the Left has rightly predicted would spread hate and the desire to strike back with terror, if the US' bureaucracy is brought under control and actually does its job with the knowledge and capacities it had, if the US military stops creating enemies by invading countries and killing innocents, we still have a risk of terrorism, then perhaps we can talk about curtailing civil liberties (and not simply be rushed into doing so by fear and unaccountable political systems). And the usage of torture's mainstream success record has been providing "intelligence" that Osama was connected to Saddam Hussein and that Saddam Hussein was imminently capable of destroying the world, hardly a stellar performance. (And, of course, that "intelligence" is not only obviously wrong in hindsight, but was clearly and transparently wrong then, and the CIA knew it). After all, torture has been banned not just because we have come together to say that there are minimal standards of human decency and treatment but because torturing people causes them to tell you what you want to hear, not necessarily the truth. All PATRIOT and easing of human rights restrictions allow is the capacity of the American government to harass peace activists, innocent Muslims and Arabs, and all sorts of other groups it doesn't like.

Oh, and I almost forgot about racial profiling, which 9/11 truth movements would theoretically undermine. Of course, racial profiling is idiotic and unfair because it assumes that because of the actions of a tiny minority of any population, however disproportionate to that population, it is justified to harass the majority. It is idiotic and unfair because no one recommended looking for white skinheads after the Oklahoma City bombing. It is idiotic and unfair because it is not the case, as Bill Mahr seems to think, that al Qaeda is exclusively Arab: As anyone who pays attention knows, it can recruit Asian Indonesians, black Sudanese, and even the occasional John Walker Lindh. It is idiotic because such policies alienate precisely that group of people who need to be most communicated with: Muslim and Arab communities, who could be valuable assets in preventing terror. It is idiotic and unfair because ordinary people's ability to identify "Arabs" or "Muslims" has been severely called into question by their abusing Sikhs, who are generally neither but wear a turban and therefore match the stereotypical concept of those groups. It is idiotic because it makes people look for criteria that have an infinitesimal chance of true positives and a colossal chance of false positives, i.e. people's skin color and appearance, rather than criteria that all terrorists of all colors and ethnicities share. And, as rude as it may be to point out, it's idiotic and unfair because we will never racially profile for those who are truly responsible for massive terrorist acts: Primarily rich old white men.

Neither truth about that day would change corporate malfeasance, or ecological destruction, or the omnicidal risk of nuclear war that has not declined noticeably since the Cold War, or the major nuclear powers' undermining of non-proliferation norms and treaties, or cruise ships dumping their waste in resplendent coral reefs, or the thermostat being slowly and inexorably turned up on the world, or Bill Gates and the Walton family having more wealth than most countries, or the utter failure of market and corporate economies in providing for the majority of the world, or the criminal Israeli persecution of the Palestinians, or the elections Bush stole in 2000 and 2004. It wouldn't change that the American economy is being spent on a seemingly endless imperial war, that several thousand American soldiers died for this unjust cause, and that both the latter charges are mainstream but the million or so innocent Iraqi lives and the million or more refugees are beyond the pale to mention.

No, I'm afraid that the 9/11 truth movement's ultimate goal is even less effective than swapping deck chairs on the Titanic. It is simply reallocating blood from one set of hands, the al Qaeda network, to another, the American empire. The crucial insight is that both hands are already soaked with carnage.

I'm not saying that there's no utility in investigating the truth of what happened, nor at taking the American government to task both for its inability to actually close the books on 9/11 (i.e. figure out what happened and bring all the perpetrators and connected individuals to justice) and for its cynical usage of 9/11 to promote its own goals, damn the consequences. I'm not saying that it's impossible that the US government could have performed such a task. I'm skeptical if only because the political ramifications for being caught would make Watergate look like South Park's Closetgate. I'm also skeptical because motive alone does not prove a crime: After all, in some ways the US government benefitted from the tsunami, yet no one alleges that the US government built an earthquake machine. Questioning the government about the true meaning and implications of 9/11 in all its forms is vital. And I think that many in the 9/11 truth movement are expressing skepticism about the motives of leaders and hope that they can be brought to justice, motives that no one in the Left should lambast.

There's one more thing these critiques don't change. They don't change the courage and humanity of the global resistance to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They don't change the need, the possibility, the responsibility to replace our existing systems of death and violence with systems that promote peace, justice, tolerance, diversity, efficiency and freedom. They don't change the bankrupt nature of the nation-state, or archaic forms of authority, or capitalism, or racism, or sexism. They don't change the fact that it is possible for us to create a new world, one where all the above facts chang, hopefully even the need to be angry at institutional injustice. Because if we do our job right, all of the above will be a sad memory of a time of hate and violence long since transcended.

The Human Rights Council and Israel

2007-10-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

The United Nations Human Rights Council has come under some attack recently. The extent of the hysteria on this topic was recently revealed to me when, on a David Peterson blog post about Iran (http://blogs.zmag.org/node/3226 , the debate heats up on the bottom of the first and the whole of the second page of comments), a commenter accused the HRC and the Left of demonizing Israel (whether it was because of anti-Semitism or other motives was never quite clear). The argument is that the HRC's resolutions against nations overwhelmingly focus on Israel. I will contend this is wholly justified.

(Let's dispense immediately with any Nazi/David Duke/conspiracy theorist garbage about the tail wagging the dog, Israeli interest groups controlling everything, Jew-run media, etc. American white supremacist imperial power controls Israeli “Jewish” power, not the other way around. Period).

It is utterly absurd, by the way, to argue that this focus by the HRC suggests anything about the Left, or the mainstream European culture, or the UN. Indeed, the UNC is the exception that proves the rule. Israel has long been out of compliance with a host of international laws, ranging from the UN Charter to the Geneva Conventions. It flouts nuclear non-proliferation norms (it unfortunately can't be accused of violating the NPT because it didn't sign it). It receives unprecedented aid and support from not only the US but other Western countries. Even countries that used to be in support of an authentic peace have changed their stance in the last two decades (see the Oslo Accords). Its military occupation of the Palestinians is almost entirely dependent on Western, primarily US, arms. For all this, it has gotten slaps on the wrist, largely due to the protection the US affords it thanks to its Security Council membership. (Even Israel's entry into the UN was contingent on it doing things it never did). The one deviation from this overwhelming international silence and/or inaction has been met with a storm of condemnation, including by both Kofi Annan and Ban ki-Moon.

But what are the core arguments against this demonization position?

Firstly: The evidence for this claim is extraordinarily weak. The HRC has also launched condemnations against Sudan, Myanmar, Belarus and Cuba, among others. Yes, condemnations of Israel have been more frequent and possibly with more strident language. But the argument that people who put forward this hypothesis comes down to, “Israel gets specified more often.” That may be true. But the majority of the HRC's resolutions do not mention particular states. They have authored resolutions on issues such as the right to food, the right to access to drugs for HIV/AIDs and other diseases, torture, the use of mercenaries, etc. And while the US is guilty of either directly engaging in or funding such behavior, a number of the nations that people lambasting the HRC say deserve more criticism (such as many African nations) are guilty of these crimes as well. If one notes the nations that would be criticized by these recommendations, the anti-Israel bias becomes a non-issue.

Further, many of the nations and groups that people say deserve the HRC's criticism (Sudan, Russia, China, etc.) already get criticism. They get resolutions and efforts to send peacekeepers (which the US usually blocks or at least fails to assist). They get condemnation from human rights observers, mainstream media outlets, etc. Many are at least in principle willing to negotiate on the outstanding issues. Israel, as I will go into later, is truly unique in terms of its ability to continue to prosecute genocide (not just in the sake of extermination but in the sense that Jews after the Holocaust insisted upon: the organized destruction of people as a people)

Second: The scale of Israel's crimes deserves condemnation. It's not just the 3-to-1 death rate between Palestinians and Israelis, or the crimes of aggression Israel is guilty of against many states in the region (Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, etc.). It also includes the curfews that have wrecked 100,000 families in Gaza; the 8000 citizens deprived of water in Urabdiya and the Palestinians drinking sewage while Israelis have lawns and golf coursesl the 40% of Palestinian children born anemic, blind or deaf; the 80% of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip living below the poverty line; B'Tselem's estimate that 400 Palestinians a month in 1991 were interrogated and tortured; etc. There is extensive documentation for all of these statistics and a long list more. It is truly soul-crushing.

Third: It's not simply the scale of Israeli atrocities. It is that these crimes against humanity have continued for decades without interruption. That this dispossession of the Palestinian people has been codified by laws. That the Israelis are able to unilaterally control Palestinian tax funds if they don't like who's been elected. That the legal apparatus defending the occupation is further enhanced by Security Council members. South Africa received similar international condemnation, with the same responses from apologists: Why not focus on Russia? Or even apartheid in America? Yes, all those are relevant, but to have a member of the supposedly civilized club able to institute racist apartheid while being called a democracy and receiving extensive Western aid is a uniquely destructive crime against humanity.

So I propose a test. Let's not dismantle the HRC until their issues with Israel have been resolved to the satisfaction of Palestinians and of external observers. Let's continue to hold Israel to task until such issues as the treatment of Lebanese detainees in Israel, or the occupation of Palestine, or the statistics above have been changed and reparations made. Then, if the demonization of Israel continues by anybody, we can fairly allege that anti-Semitism is rearing its ugly head and consign such organizations to the dustbin of history.

"Interventionism?"

2007-09-26T22:20:00.000-07:00

While reading Howard Zinn's perennial People's History of the United States, I was considering a thought about language as it pertains to politics with a perennial debate: The isolationism vs. interventionism debate (always closely tied with the appeasement debate as it pertains to World War II).

Isolationism is almost always talked about in the context of two wars: World War I and World War II. But it does intellectual injustice to the notion of non-involvement to use those as examples. The American economy was practically dependent exclusively on the shipments of war material to the Allies in World War I. (Not to mention that the US, by then with a pretty substantial sphere of influence in Latin America, was hardly interventionist: That's what the isolationists of the time, including some amazingly moral business leaders forming the Anti-Imperialist League, pointed out. Oh, if only business nowadays could approach those heights...) And in World War II, America backed the fascists then found all sorts of clandestine ways to assist the Allies when the fascists turned sour. After the war, they continued to back the fascists (though by then the Cold War was beginning in its infancy and thus America could hardly be considered isolationist anymore). That doesn't fit any definition of isolationism I can think of.

The same thing applies to appeasement, of course. Did America and the European powers really appease Nazi Germany because of fear or some other motive conservatives impute to them? Or was it simply because the victims of the Nazis weren't important enough to merit challenging the right of imperial states, not to mention someone who was very good at fighting off the Commies? Obviously the question is a difficult one to ascertain (there's probably elements of all of the theories involved, though of course I lean substantially to the latter hypothesis), but insofar as the answer was that the West simply could care less, "appeasement" is the wrong way of thinking.

This, of course, bears on Kelvin's point to some degree, but I think it illustrates a difficulty [Kelvin's initial article can be found here: http://blogs.zmag.org/node/3220#comment-62980]. Is the problem that the words "isolationism" and "appeasement" are inherently tainted? Maybe, but it doesn't seem so: While the exact definition may vary according to power preferences, the terms seem to be coherent enough. "Isolationism" pertains to the theory that America should be uninvolved insofar as possible with global affairs, while "appeasement" pertains to the attempt to "buy off" dictators with treaties and other means. What is the problem is the context: The mistaken belief that America is just too kind, too naive, and needs to buckle down and be prepared to deal harshly with the unwashed of the world who have yet to have reached our pinnacle of achievement and prosperity. Myths about World War I, II, American empire, the efficacy and justness of military force, etc. all are involved. But they don't bear on the language, though I guess Kelvin's point about "consumer tropes" would be fair enough: They bear on the context that the language is deployed in and the connotations of the words themselves and the context. That means that we have to go beyond deconstructing language. We have to present alternative contexts, alternative ways of thinking, which is a completely anti-postmodernist way of thinking. (Kelvin cites pomo, and while I don't think he matches with the priests of that bizarre little segment of academia, there has nonetheless been a bit too much of the bathwater taken).

Now, I tend to think the term "isolationism" in particular is just the wrong way of thinking about the problem. I think all nations' authority, including ours, should be subordinated in relevant areas and jurisdictions to a global system of governance, which is the first step in constructing a post-statist society that can be authentically free and equal. I think America has so much to do in context of this global arrangement to repair more than a century of privations and atrocities. I think that cultural exchanges, immigrations and emigrations, etc. are overwhelmingly positive. And so on. But I have to give some kudos to the Pat Buchanan type, or to the business and elite leaders so long ago, who seem to at least recognize that empire is wrong.

To put it succinctly: If the choice is between playing in our own sandbox and beating up other kids in theirs', the obvious choice, the only moral choice, is to confine oneself to the playground. It's up to Americans to determine if a third alternative is possible.

"I Love My Job"

2006-12-03T22:54:00.000-08:00

Recently I had to sit through a training session on a certain supermarket's secret shopper program. As you all know, during the hiring process for many companies there is a period where the many benefits of the company are hyped, its superiority to competitors is extolled, and an attitude of blind subservience and corporate jingoism is instilled. (This isn't to say managers are bad people or anything of the kind, to be clear.) The particular mouthpiece for the company in question described how she was once a bagger (or "Courtesy Clerk") and has now ascended the rungs of the company. She then said, "I love my job."

Of course, my political mind is always operating, and I was wondering how I could rebut this presumption on her part. I don't know her; might she enjoy her job?

Absolutely. After all, being in a managerial echelon, she had some degree of self-management and control. And even if she had been a menial worker at the bottom of the totem pole, one can always find individuals in a society who, for whatever reason, collaborate with oppression or at least tolerate it enough to lie to themselves that they "love" the roles that they play. But comments she made indicated a lot of what lay even under her attitude.

For one, she mentioned that it's not "worth it" to lose a job over theft. While this is somewhat ambiguous, it seemed to me that this indicated that, like everyone else, she viewed a job as an economic asset, not a treasured personal one. She surely did not speak about her labor the same way she spoke about her children. She went on to further imply this by saying that, were she to lose her job over a commodity, it would be a "$900,000 car" or something very valuable. It's pretty clear that she views her job in economic, not personal, terms.

Just ask yourself for one moment: Imagine any of those people you have heard who say they love their job. Now, first, ask how many of them were janitors, fry cooks or even bottom-of-the-corporate-ladder programmers. Then ask what I think is the most important question: If they won the lottery tomorrow, winning, say, $30 million after taxes (just to give them enough that they really wouldn't need to work ever and could survive on $200,000 a year for 50 years with $20 million left), would they come into work? Any kind of work?

I can think of virtually no person who would do so. A possible exception would be the Professors at my university. People animated by passion in a generally much freer environment who can define their own work conditions, despite working very hard.

The point? Until we replace our economic system, most people won't love, or even like, their job. They will loathe it, no matter how large their insincere smile.

The Best Case is That... We're Cowards?

2006-11-01T17:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, my blog has seen virtually no action for some months; this will hopefully change as of now.

There has been an argument, famously lampooned on the absolutely genius Colbert Report, that in essence says, "Fight the terrorists there, not here", regarding Iraq.

Now, this argument should be laughed out of any serious person's mind and consideration. It is a sign of total desperation, an absolute smokescreen. First of all, the argument takes advantage of the coincidence (and that is what it is) that there have been no mainland terror attacks post-9/11 (aside from the anthrax scare, Reid, etc.) Why can we be certain it is a coincidence? Because terror cells don't attack on a set timetable of any kind. Consider the most famous al Qaeda actions of the 90s: Participating in the war in Bosnia on America's request, the USS Cole and the first WTC attack. Only one occured on American soil during Clinton's entire presidency, and it was a failure in a way 9/11 wasn't. How this history proves that Bush is fighting terrorism is beyond me. Yes, no attacks have been made on the United States; instead, al Qaeda is seemingly with impunity attacking European nations writ large, including Spain and Britain (assuming the British subway bombing was AQ-involved). In fact, terrorist attacks have increased during the Bush presidency across the world. (By the way, that conclusion was reached by a no less august authority than the State Department, which would be just SLIGHTLY friendly to Bush: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/28/AR2006042802181_pf.html ) In fact, during 2005, attacks increased fourfold.

The assumption of the "Fight them there, not here" argument is a few-fold: First of all, that we're actually "fighting them" ; second, that al Qaeda is the only Muslim or Arab terrorist organization that could ever exist and that its membership can never grow or alternately is growing; and, third, that this strategy has somehow increased security for the world or America. But all assumptions are stupid and uncontroversially so.

The first is very clear: While some high-profile al Qaeda members have been captured, Osama bin Laden is famously at large, and in terms of actually undermining any real capacity of al Qaeda to prosecute attacks, the Bush administration has done virtually nothing. To be fair, it is very hard to bomb a loosely-tied affinity network that ranges from Indonesia and the Sudan to the entirety of the Middle East into submission... only that's exactly what the left and liberals have been saying to no rebuttal for six years. The way to deal with non-state criminals is police work. The few states who we are confident have actually been funding or have had funders in their borders, such as Germany, the UAE and Saudi Arabia, have obviously not been victims of US bombing, and with the exception of Germany have been attempting to be allies in the US war on terror. Remember: al Qaeda is an American-created phenomenon, and its funding, membership and training come from a shadowy set of institutions that are all US-created or attuned and backed.

The second is even less controversial. New and old organizations aside from al Qaeda are being formed or exist, such as Hezbollah, which has been scarcely harmed whatsoever (in fact helped) by the war in Iraq and the Israeli bombing campaigns. Recruiting by radical Islamist organizations has skyrocketed since the Iraq war, and radical Islamist groups are very clearly saying that the war in Iraq has been a boon to them. Indeed, the best way to think of the conflict is a cycle of reinforcing barbarisms, to borrow another left writer's brilliant phrase. Every al Qaeda attack causes Americans to back even more reactionary candidates, who in turn prove al Qaeda's statements about American policies and people right through violence and strutting and thereby increase the power of al Qaeda and similar groups. It's a cycle of violence where only the crazies win. So while some are indeed fighting the "infidels" in Iraq, and thereby costing American taxpayers money, American soldiers their life and sanity, and military families their sons, daughters, husbands and wives, others are using the new level of recruitment

Remember: There never was a suicide bombing in Iraq before the US invasion. Whatever the terrorist status of Iraq (pretty obviously none, since the groups like Ansar al Islam that the US argued were terrorist links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were actually in US-controlled regions and had no substantial connections to AQ anyways) before the invasion, it is obvious to any reasonable observer that its status has become much more dangerous.

The lynchpin of the argument is that, since terrorist activity has gone up in Iraq, it must have gone down everywhere else. This assumes a constant of terrorism. Actually, the Bush administration has increased terrorism EVERYWHERE, giving them a new arena to fight in in addition to (not at the exclusion of) the old.

And the third is also clear: North Korea has possibly tested a nuclear weapon, Iran is becoming more dangerous, and proliferation and terrorist threats to everyone have increased. There is no single provable improvement in American security since the war in Iraq and several obviously harms.

All of the above was just because I can't resist debating stupid arguments ad nauseum. Luckily, it's a ploy that American voters aren't buying, precisely because it is so transparently laughable. But there is something very disturbing (though funny in a very dark way) about the argument's logic.

What it says is that we are willing to sacrifice at least 30,000 lives (by Dear Leader Bush's admission) and more likely 400,000 to 800,000 lives (see the new John Hopkins/Lancet report), invade a sovereign country and depose its leader in violation of basic tenets of international law, all to turn their innocent people who have never (regardless of the crimes of Saddam Hussein) done anything to Americans, Europeans or indeed much of anybody into flypaper so that they, their loved ones, and our soldiers can die, all so our comfortable lives on our "city on the hill" need not be confronted or disrupted.

What the Republican Party is loudly saying, hoping people don't hear it, is that Americans are craven cowards who, far from saving another people or liberating them, are in fact using them as human shields. Their own argument, said in smarmy and self-righteous tones, proves only their utter inability (or unwillingness) to question their racist, classist privilege. They hope that American voters will not understand this, and further will not notice this position's utter incompatibility with the notion that we are liberators (a claim that itself requires a full blog post to summarily dismiss) fighting out of sheer generosity and not out of lurid oil desires and geopolitical considerations. Now consider just for a second how antagonistic to authority our "liberal media" must be: Which talking head have you seen utter this elementary point of logic derived from the Republican's very own arguments? Has Alan Colmes or Bill Mahr confronted their Republican opponents? Have you seen any of our vigilant Democratic Senators do so?

If Americans vote in Republicans in 2006, they will be proving to the world that they are indeed the type of cowards who would use others as proxies for their own security, or at least the type of fools who can't call their ruling party on such backhanded compliments. Obviously voting Democratic won't prove to the world that America has had a change of heart, nor will it accomplish anything of real value in the long run. But it will be a marginal improvement.

Contradictions On Exposition Round CXI

2006-02-22T14:18:00.000-08:00

Some of you may have heard about Kofi Annan and others' comments on Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Now, given the confirmed pictures not to mention the numerous outside observers and other testimonies that there was torture and violence, the response of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show is quite apt (a paraphrase): "Oh, so you only tortured BEFORE? Those pictures of degradation are old news?" This from the same people talking about Saddam's treatment of the Kurds and telling lurid tales of rape rooms.

The contradictions only get more ironic. You see, the response of McClellan and Rumsfeld has to Kofi Annan has been, "They haven't even been to Guantanamo!" And crime scene investigators are sometimes not and George W. Bush was not at the area of the crimes that they speak confidently about. Moreover, the reason why this is not the case is because the US put roadblocks in the way of such investigations, including not allowing UN or other investigators to speak to prisoners. The reason? "They've been trained to lie." Clearly unlike administration officials or CIA agents. Of course, with actual people (not the Arab or terrorist subhumans), the accused have rights and all relevant witnesses must be asked. Since these prisoners presumably would have allegations, and if they are perjuring themselves that must be proven since they have a presumption of innoence, this response indicates nothing but a contempt for human and Constitutional rights. To use a common conservative mantra: Why be scared if you have nothing to hide? (Whatever responses these neo-cons use, such as the possibility of an unfair trial in the literal sense or in the court of public opinion, are wholly fair to throw back at them in the domains they offer the above excuse.)

And, the final point of irony I will note: While these war criminals may mistrust the testimony of these prisoners when it besmirches "America" (read: the reputation, already stained, of the imperial machine), they have no difficulty using such testimony to provide a justification for an illegal and immoral colonialist war.

Socialism: Dream or Institution?

2006-02-15T17:50:00.000-08:00

I have been questioning the meaning and value of the word "socialist" and "socialism". There are roughly two outlooks that the Left generally holds. The first is held not only by Marxists but also anarchists like Noam Chomsky, while the second is held by other anarchists (a primary example would be Michael Albert).

The first is that socialism is a good dream which has been conjured for evil causes. This view describes socialism through the dreams of all the revolutionaries who have been inspired by it, talking about worker's control of the means of production, the end to capitalism (or, at least in the early days, its reform and humanization), and the sharing of the resources of society to benefit and enrich all. I am sympathetic tot his view because of the extensive history of the term, because of the acceptance of it in the majority of the world, and because I don't feel I should have to back down from a term because capitalists or tyrants have sullied it through propaganda. If the Left backs down from every such word, they will have given the field to the powerful. These men for institutions often point to the soviets or parecon or libertarian municipalism as socialist institutions.

However, the second points out that there is something disingenuous to the way that each generation of the Left attempts to recapture the term while describing concretely quite distinct institutions. Further, most socialist parties that come to any kind of power advocate market or central planned socialism (whether democratic or totalitarian). While it is true that most socialist advocates reject what happened in the USSR, indeed calling the collapse of the USSR a victory for socialism, there is also something disingenuous about dismissing the ideology of it too quickly as not socialist. Those men could spout Marxism and offer paeans to freedom just as well as anyone else, and Lenin had some quite libertarian writings. Whether it was something unique about Russian culture, or the influence of the state, or what have you, something went wrong... or did it? That may not be the most authentic formulation. It may have been that Marxism or Leninism or socialist institutions propelled the USSR by design. Further, when someone says "socialism", whether in Europe or America, what is implied (aside from connotations, whether negative or positive) is what happens in Europe: good to be sure, but not remotely the ideal a serious libertarian socialist or anarchist would commit to. Even completely non-capitalist market socialism is not my goal. Even the word, "socialism", implies a social focus rather than a libertarian or individualist focus.

So I'll open this up to whatever viewers I have. What would you argue is socialism? What comes to mind when you hear it? Should parecon advocates or advocates of other alternative economies call themselves socialists or not?

Communication? That Was My Major!

2006-02-14T19:53:00.000-08:00

Communication seems so natural if unexamined. One uses the best words one can find to express what one is feeling. Of course, virtually everybody knows that this is a simplification at best: misunderstanding, confusion, limits of vocabulary, preconception and all sorts of other barriers are an everyday occurrence. What is not so clear is the remarkable degree to which culture (as well as polity, economy and gender) impact communication, negatively if interlocutors do not pay sufficient attention. Everything from eye contact to hand gestures to conversational pace and perception of interruption varies according to cultural distinctions (Blauner 2004, 144-146). Because of this fact, attention to such variation is vital for any discussion group, especially one occurring within multicultural societies.
The first, and relatively surmountable, difficulty with intercultural communication is the semantic difficulty. Language is fundamentally arbitrary: There is no objective problem with calling a dog “a cat”. What different individuals mean by the same term can be quite distinct. One of the ways that these terms become variegated is across cultural lines. For example: In my experience, what radicals or many black commentators mean by the word “racism” are any forms or practices, especially institutional ones, that have the effect of privileging or benefitting one group or another, whereas most liberals, conservatives or white commentators typically believe it means concrete prejudice (the classic “racist effect v. intent” debate; incidentally, I am not alone in this position: Bob Blauner describes precisely this phenomenon in “Talking Past Each Other” and Tim Wise does as well in “White Like Me”.1) In a discussion about racism in a multicultural classroom, a whole conversation could be sidetracked by whether or not a practice should be called “racism” rather than discussing the content of the practice. This is relatively surmountable if the atmosphere in the discussion is at all informative and if the instructor is sufficiently attentive to the distinction between semantic and substantive argument. Obviously there may be difficulties if literally different languages are being employed, but those are relatively trivial cases and can be surmounted by a facilitator with tact and grace.
Next, distinct cultures provide differences of substance in belief and opinion. For example, even two very closely aligned individuals (i.e. a black or Aboriginal feminist and a white feminist) may end up having drastically different tactical judgments and indeed understandings about the nature of oppression owing to distinct cultural backgrounds (Lake 2001, 7).

This may also manifest itself as silence. For example, Native American interlocutors may be hesitant to describe their unique cultural practices because of fear of being dismissed as primitive or silly (Robinson and James 2003, 81). Unfortunately, silence cannot be enumerated or responded to.

Further, the very way that people discuss will be altered by culture. A Greek participant in a forum may view impassioned argument as a sign of respect or flattery, while a Asian participant might view this as problematic and prefer to change the subject (Bucher 2004, 155). People from different cultures will vary in the way they perceive issues to be resolved or discussed.
And the very perception of the existence and nature of institutions and authorities will alter across cultural, political, etc. lines. Someone from an activist culture or childhood will be more likely to view authority as an adversary or at best something to be tolerated than someone raised in a military environment.

In each of the above cases, various prejudices and preconceptions interfere with the resolution of the barrier. Someone with sufficient prejudice may refuse to alter one's terminology or explain themselves, or respond with a kneejerk to a position that is viewed as offensive without questioning if there is simply a terminological quibble at stake. The fear of prejudice may cause silence, and challenging of substantive differences may be viewed as an attack upon one's person. Misunderstanding of anothers' relationship or understanding of institutions or authority figures and their perception of the proper way to discuss may artificially abort discussion or cause unnecessary conflict.

As I argued in a discussion group [and on this blog], our culture is one wherein serious discussion with attention to logic and relentless questioning of stated positions, in other words with the prerequisite for any authentic comparison of ideas, is abandoned in a majority of cases by a metaphorical rush to the state, to repressive mechanisms that allow one to win. The solution that most multicultural advocates end up proposing as an alternative is a strategy often described as “dialogue versus debate”: Everyone has an opinion; ergo, one should treat each opinion as inviolable, and discussion is largely based on opinions proferred in some kind of relevant order. I view this as people retreating into hermetic containers only sticking their head out to look for crossfire. This is superior to angry and acrid argument, but that is a “lesser of two evils” position. The alternative? Respectful and attentive debate, with no disruptive interruptions, with ideas being proposed, discussed, compared and rebutted, with warrants and evidence insofar as is available and people being asked to provide reasons for conclusions and premises. This strategy has any number of subsets, but it resolves the above difficulties by providing a mechanism that is only as limited as the available logic and evidence. The cause of truth and learning is served by such comparison because even ideas brought up that end up being rejected served a purpose in causing thought and, if the logic was sufficiently rigorous, being eliminated thus eliminating an unsatisfactory idea and thus establishing more worthwhile discussions.

It may be worthwhile to notice the various roles that people play in such a well-regulated discussion. The first is the Debater. The Debater is actually adopting a position, whether she believe its or not, for a prolonged period of time, arguing from that perspective and defending it from rebuttals. The Debater can be affirmative and/or negative: that is, they may argue to defend a particular concrete position or proposal, argue to undermine another such position or proposal, or do both. The Debater is typically the centerpiece of this strategy: whatever the agreed upon topic being discussed in a group is, she provides the meat. Everyone in a group may be a Debater, but this is unlikely. To keep track of the distinct positions and rebuttals offered by seven other speakers is a task likely only on an Internet forum and even then with substantial investment of time. Typically, the people with established or passionate opinions and experience in the area in question will be these voices.

But they are not the only possible role, and indeed the best conversations will include more. Another vital role that should be played, at the very least by the facilitator or group leader, is the Devil's Advocate. This classic position is to argue for a moment from a different perspective or with different reasoning than one would normally agree with or utilize, so as to make sure that an obvious position is heard and that those arguing a different position have taken it into account. There are a few caveats. The devil's advocate should announce that they are function as a devil's advocate. They should do so sparingly, as the risk of the Devil's Advocate is that unimportant, irrelevant or unenlightening positions may be advocated without an appropriate check. And, while this is difficult to detect, some may use the pretense of being a Devil's Advocate as a way to express what they actually believe or perhaps a slightly more extreme variant of what they believe. Unfortunately, this has the risk of devolving into immature discussions or simple controversy or offensive statements for their own sakes (what in Internet parlance would be called “trolling”). When this is occurring, it may be because the forum is not sufficiently open to dissident or alternative viewpoints.

Two more roles individuals play are the Commentator and the Questioner, very closely related. During the course of discussions, topics will come up that some may not have extensive argumentation to provide for but that do beg questions or invite comments. These participation types should be encouraged almost without limit as they are very brief, vary the pace of the discussion, and can be quite insightful and valuable. However, if the questions or comments are excessively rhetorical or confrontational, they should be aborted.

And, of course, no one should be afraid to provide their own personal opinions, experiences, outlooks and philosophies, to whatever degree and in whatever depth they wish to. If they are personal experiences, they should not be denied, though it is fair for someone to question the relevance of the experience (respectfully), and if someone flags that they wish to not have an opinion challenged, it should be only responded to generally or used as a springboard rather than an argument. My model does not exclude opinions being presented and then not challenged or at least not challenged directly. Another thing to note is that value claims can not be demonstrated to be “wrong” per se, and since it is quite likely that people will come to the table with rather distinct value sets and estimations of the worth of various entities, the majority of the time if the remaining debate is upon distinct values the debate should be jogged along, as those debates are not likely to end in resolution.

The facilitator or discussion leader's job in such a system is complex. If the debate and discussion does not represent a sufficient cross-section of viewpoints, she should broaden the debate and discuss new viewpoints, hopefully proposing readings. She must make sure that there are sufficient pauses, prompts and opportunities to allow everyone a sufficient chance to chip in, especially if the grade in a discussion section is linked to participation. Part of this includes enforcing a reasonable limit on discussion time (most of the time this shouldn't be necessary, but if it becomes a problem comment “tickets” can be used, or perhaps a timer or hourglass circulated around the class), including cutting off someone who has spoken for some time or who is rambling. This may mean stopping the thought process of someone who thinks vocally, but unfortunately time is limited; however, if possible, the person should be allowed to continue if it makes sufficient sense. In line with this, the facilitator should be prepared to allow substantial backtracking to make sure people who had a thought can bring it up. When an argument is developing in ways not likely to be productive or conducive, they should be prepared to gently shove the discussion a different direction. If factual difficulties are encountered, the ideal situation would be for the facilitator or the relevant participants to do some research and circulate it through group e-mail. And the pace of argumentation and discussion must be controlled.

We have an obligation to tolerance. But we also have an obligation to truth. The way to resolve these values is to not simply incorporate and tolerate more viewpoints, not to simply look for and applaud what is good, but also to identify and discuss what is bad, to test and compare viewpoints. It is the only way to truly respect and tolerate others, to move past simple multicultural tolerance to polycultural interaction and exchange.

1. Blauner, Bob. “Talking Past Each Other.”

I'm On Top Of The World! (Now Can I Get Off?)

2006-02-14T05:42:00.000-08:00

We all like to think that our position is due only to our own skill, our own ability, and yet we know that cannot possibly true. Regardless of our political opinion, it is simply a point of logic that without a great social system that created roads, educational facilities, and in general the whole economic and social thrust of society, we would be as nothing. Clearly those in other societies had at least as much merit and skill as us, yet throughout history living standards have obviously changed. The reasonable question is not, “Is success socially defined?”, but rather “Is this social definition based in justice?” To be intellectually honest, I should put my own life under examination and see how much justice was involved.

My parents were both white professionals with college degrees. But privilege is not a simple thing. For the first eight years of my life, my mother was a homemaker and my father a small and somewhat lazy businessman, both involved with a spiritual community. Yet my parents could still turn to their parents, who had homes and saved income, if they truly needed help, and I never went to school hungry or couldn't get a toy I really wanted. Moreover, when my father, after probably a decade of barely working, was able to parley his connections and MIT Math diploma to almost immediately get cushy management jobs in programming firms and become upper-middle class, while my mother became a rather successful translator able to work less than forty hours a week and continue taking care of the house and providing for my needs, it implicated me in privilege no matter my preference. Privilege is more than a high salary; it is connections, resources, educations, acculturations, and accesses that can surpass and even replace a high salary. Why wasn't a black candidate who had actual recent work experience hired over my father? Not least because there weren't many out there thanks to educational inequity, but that can't explain everything. Rather, that even those qualified black candidates had not made good with the bosses in the past (owing to not attending elite colleges or not having rich and well-connected parents), so their work experience was almost irrelevant. Even my parents' relatively hardtack beginnings were nothing compared to the reality of the truly poor in this country.

Early on, teachers recognized that I had a certain degree of talent and intelligence that put me into the “gifted” track, the position in the educational hierarchy involving extracurricular activities, spelling bees, honors and AP classes, debate clubs. Though my community was white enough as it was, in retrospect the honor track was even more white than usual. Even Northwestern University recognizes this fact; this is why they have pioneered an approach wherein they look at the context of the student's life, including economic and educational opportunity, in order to evaluate the “objective” indices of GPA, SATs and AP scores. It should be elementary that a student who went to a school without AP or honors courses should have their grades looked at differently. Yet few colleges have the resources or ability to perform such analysis with each application. Inaction sustains the system just as much as action: like the Red Queen's Race, one has to run as fast as one can to stay in the same place.

And what of my friends in high school? Those jocks, geeks, preps and emo kids who all spent their weekends drowning their sorrows with liquor and weed? Did any of them face consequences for illegal activity? Or rather was it, as I remember from a football meeting (long story short: I was in Football PE but not on the team), covered up and “forgiven” on the rare occasions it was even detected? Did anyone go to prison when the cops finally busted parties that had over a hundred people attending, including Sacramento gang members? Yet those excuses and those courtesies, while wholly proper (indeed, drugs should be legalized), are only extended to the whiter and richer among us. When Rush Limbaugh (who even admitted that “[T]oo many whites are getting away with drug use”) was caught abusing Vicodin and Oxycontin, he went to a rehab center, almost a health spa, not federal prison1. This anecdotal piece of evidence generalizes. As the Sentencing Project reports (“Crack Cocaine Sentencing: A Racist Policy?”), “The 100:1 quantity ratio in cocaine sentencing causes low-level crack offenders to receive arbitrarily severe sentences compared to high level powder cocaine offenders. The quantity distinction has also resulted in a massive sentencing disparity by race, with African Americans receiving longer sentences than the mostly white and Hispanic powder cocaine offenders.” And it's not just crime where white offenders consistently get their excuses listened to and their habits made unproblematic by institutional fiat. Gregory Squires' piece, “The Policy of Prejudice”, establishes that, “mystery shoppers' [were matched] in terms of the structure and value of their homes, their incomes and occupations, and other socioeconomic factors. The only difference was the racial composition of the neighborhoods.. when testers from white areas called to inquire about the availability of insurance agents generally attempted to sell them a policy. But when callers from minority areas inquired... [agents] discouraged the callers from pursuing a policy with them.” (147-148).

And what about my male privilege? I can't isolate many concrete incidences when being male helped me, but that is just as much the problem as anything else. As Steven Lukes argues in his three-dimensional model (Power: A Radical View, page 366 in the reader), “...the bias of the system can be mobilized, recreated and reinforced in ways that are neither consciously chosen nor are the intended result of particular individuals' choices.” How many times did I stand idly by when a sexist joke was made? When a female companion of mine was made uncomfortable but pretended to be “fine with it” precisely because of the consequences of not being fine with it? Recently, friends of mine created a “point system” as an incentive for them (quite geeky friends, to be fair) to engage with women. The “point system” did not offer incentives for what men call “playing” (and what with women we call “sluttiness”, owing to differential sex roles, often called “The Madonna and the Whore” in the literature), but it still had not occurred to most of them how disturbing many might find it that women were being reduced to “points”. My debate partner in high school was a Latino girl one year younger than me, and I can't imagine how many times I must have tried to force a submissive relationship, especially in the male, white and rich-dominated world of competitive high school debate (luckily, if nothing else, she was a spirited woman, and would not take that crap). And recently, after having read “You Just Don't Understand” by Deborah Tannen, I had come to realize that the way I had perceived my mother as supposedly interrupting me was created by gender, race, and geographical reality, and in fact she had just wanted to assist or to handle other topics (though admittedly she still did try to change the conversation a lot). To quote, “Women and men feel interrupted by each other because of the differences in what they are trying to accomplish with talk... Nothing is more disappointing in a close relationship than being accused of bad intentions when you know your intentions were good, especially by someone you love... And a left jab meant in the spirit of sparring can become a knockout if your opponent's fists are not raised to fight...” (122). More subtly, Arlie Hochschild in “The Second Shift” describes the phenomenon wherein women (women like my mother or any wife or girlfriend I might potentially meet and become involved with) work just as hard (incidentally typically still making less, as they are not perceived to be the primary breadwinners) during the day and then work an additional eight hours a day spread out among the week, typically meaning late nights, early mornings or weekends. That means that any woman I live with is highly likely to be more stressed and poorer than I am, a major advantage. Yet is it an advantage I really want? Is it worth it to have someone in your house who is too tired to do anything? The institution makes that choice for me, the cost of privilege.

Arguably, all this is nothing compared to American privilege, or imperial privilege, or the substantial advantages that come from living in the most economically and militarily powerful First World nation. Walton's chapter on The World System describes the history of European colonial plunder and economic control, then goes onto point out that, “The new stage is no more favorable to the underdeveloped nations of the periphery than the last two. On the contrary... they may be less obliging in particular ones.” And make no mistake, these systems of class, race, empire and gender are united. Anton Foek offers a poignant example in “Sweatshop Barbie”: “I cannot help thinking of Cindy Jackson... who has had 19 cosmetic-surgery operations to make herself look like Barbie – at a cost of some $165,000. I wonder what Jackson would say if she could see these sick and dying women and know how brutally they have been exploited in order to make dolls for First World children. Pramitwa, Sunanta and Metha have never heard of Cindy Jackson, but my guess is that they are glad not to be in her shoes.” The terms of trade are increasingly being rigged for the already powerful. Going to a relatively elite university like UC Davis virtually insures contacts, expertise, social standing and a perception of skill and ability that guarantees ostensible success. And once I'm in that position of success, I am quite likely to not only see my class grow richer and stronger, but also not be knocked out of that class. Robert Reich describes the well-known statistics that describe enhanced global inequity: The poorest fifth of American families became 8% poorer and the richest fifth became 13% richer, and this inequity generalized across the world, both inbetween and internal to nations. Reich makes clear that this problem is structural: “The conservative tide... certainly has many causes, but the fundamental change in our economy should not be discounted... It is now possible for the fortunate fifth to sell their expertise directly in the global market, and thus maintain and enhance their standard of living, even as that of other Americans declines.” And this has also manifested as a lack of social mobility as well.

Now, I am admittedly not always a recipient or beneficiary of privilege. My parents were once poor, and still are not in the highest echelons of society. Being involved in the activism I have been doing has led to death threats (but not actual assault or death), punitive responses from school officials (though not the same degree as “problem students”, disproportionately poor or black), and have been misquoted and misunderstood by journalists and people who can only hear limited parts of my arguments because of the script of the society.

But even my lefty principles and action implicate me in systems of privilege. I'm not just talking about how movement leadership tends to skew upwards in terms of class and race, as Lipsky in “Protest as Political Resources” indicts. Rather, that if I express opinions, my opinions are not taken to be emblematic of a group as such, a privilege not afforded to blacker individuals; when I do express my opinions, it is likely they will get a far more attentive audience than the same opinions expressed by those less privileged; and expressing my opinions is not likely to actually end up harming me. Consider Dave Chappelle's comment in his stand-up Showtime special, “For What It's Worth”: “I almost protested the war [in Iraq] to begin with, almost. Until I saw what happened to those Dixie chicks. I said, 'Fuck that'. If they'll do that to three white women, they'll tear my black ass to pieces.” Of course, Lipsky's comments are quite relevant, particularly about the skewing upwards of protest organizers.

And do I have to be involved in activism? Is it a matter of survival for me? Not especially. Actually, the things that I propose, like tax equalization across school districts, progressive taxation, full employment, etc. are likely to harm me. If I quit, or “sell out”, does anyone besides a small and insular group care? Indeed, doing so might give me more opportunities, as I join the ranks of David Horowitz and other former lefties who “saw the light” and get book deals and conservative think tank funding. Further, what makes me, and all those other rich and/or white leftists out there, think that success is possible or necessary? Why should I have to convince someone that doing the right thing might have good consequences? Shouldn't they do it anyways? Leftists despaired when the Iraq war was declared despite incredible resistance. This was ignoring that any protest before a war began was historically unprecedented, let alone principled international opposition. But hadn't the Iraqis fought for their rights for decades, and blacks against segregation and slavery for centuries? What made us think that a few years camping on college lawns and shaking some signs would stop a war machine of that magnitude with that degree of social backing? In short: The famous propensity of the Left to conceptually snatch defeat from the jaws of victory is also implicated in classist and racist biases, that the notion that we can fix anything we see is an illusion that only those who have had relatively easy lives can maintain.

I even have the option to use a different language to speak about race (or class or gender or empire or...). As Blauner indicates in “Talking Past Each Other”, whites often speak about race and racism as a problem that occurs when overtly racist people behave in a particular way, that “Whites saw racism largely as a thing of the past. They defined it in terms of segregation and lynching, explicit white supremacist beliefs, or double standards in hiring, promotion, and admissions to college or other institutions”, as contrasted with the black language of racism as a combination of history, governmental and economic policies, and acculturation practices.. Now it is quite true that whites often hold illusions about even those things, but the point is that blacks could understand, indeed had to understand, the complex interplay of forces that create “institutional racism”, whereas a white man or woman could afford to live in ignorance, as it might never affect them.

Had even a bit about my class, or race, or gender been different, my life would have been radically different, and likely for the worse. Had I been in a black neighborhood, chances would be much higher that I would be going to a poor or underfunded school even if my parents were well-off, like one of those schools Kozol describes in “Savage Inequalities”; and even if I went to a rich school, I would likely be tracked into remedial or non-honors classes. My radical activism would be simultaneously necessary to survive and often punished. Were I a woman, many of my successes would be viewed as “bitchy”, and my already often competitive attitude would be magnified; moreover, I would face lower wages and my educational possibilities would be artificially circumscribed by sexist pressures leading to certain majors and certain occupations. Were my parents less rich, they could not have afforded to pay for the high school debate that almost assuredly secured my place at this university, the camps and the flights and the long trips to Los Angeles.

My whole life has been corrupted, tainted and made impure by the presence of inequity and domination, just as surely as the victims of that inequity and domination. My position at this university, and this university, are no less implicated. This is not a reason to feel guilt. If anything, it is a reason to feel rage. But the most important thing: to act.

1. Michael Bradley, “Stoned Rush Limbaugh Makes Hypocritical History By Demanding Harsh Penalties For Other Drug Users”. http://www.bradleyreport.net/commentary/StonedRush.htm

Bureucratic Tunnel Vision

2006-02-14T02:44:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, one of the underlying themes of my leftism is to point out that the supposed dichotomy between efficacy and liberty that is implied by the classic debate about anarchism/socialism and libertarianism is an utterly false dichotomy, that in fact those institutions of domination (capitalism, bureaucracy, the nation-state) are inefficient at accomplishing human ends, among their many other debits. If that is the case, the statement "Anarchy [or parecon or so on] doesn't work" becomes even more problematic: aftter all, such a statement implies a comparative, i.e. not just "It fails" but (if the argument is to be relevant) "It fails worse than what we have".

In line with this, I extend an ironic line of reasoning: the critique of bureaucracy commonly argued by conservatives. And one of the many problems is what I call "tunnel vision", or more precisely an effectiveness-efficiency mismatch: The adoption of normalized standards and practices that end up being counterproductive to the broader goal of the institution. A perfect satirical example is the episode of South Park where the detectives do not arrest a man with severed human hands on his wall because the serial murderer they are looking for does not cut off that side of hand.

Today I experienced another such example, from my midterm:

"Answer the following questions in a clearly written essay of 5-6 pages in length (typed, single sided, double spaced, with normal font and margins). Your essay is due on February 14. Please e-mail the essay directly..."

Notice a problem? I'll let you all read a second.

For those you haven't figured it out:

If I'm e-mailing it to you, what does it matter if it is set to be single-sided or double-sided?

This is a prestigious university with a well-respected lecturer making this mistake.

It's funny. And on another level, completely disturbing.