Children of the Revolution

Have we mocked the pwogwessive bwogosphere lately? Yes? No? No. All right.

Dana Goldstein takes issue with a journalist comparing Brit artist Bansky, the graffiti boy to end all graffiti boys, to bloggers, and after some general boilerplate defense of the blogosphere as the new meme to the old meme to the new meme squared, we get this:

A better analogy between bloggers and graffiti artists would be if we bloggers had defaced en masse newsstand copies of major papers and magazines in March 2003, writing "LIES LIES LIES" in black magic marker. Of course, that's hardly what bloggers do. We're far more effective than that.

Retroactive claims to the efficacy of blog protest in 2003 notwithstanding--though, whew, boy, that is a doozy, isn't it?--we are left only to ponder in what universe a minor blogger on the relatively popular group blog of a second- or third-tier American newsmagazine's webpage images her ponderings to be to greater public effect than, say, an en masse defacing of major papers and magazines with the bold, black text: "LIES LIES LIES."

Pretty Please

Shorter Victor Davis Ozymandis Alexander Hadrian Montezuma Kublai Nelson Hanson: One ah dese days, some Muslim is gonna put the willing in our executioners.

This seems to be a common trait in war boosterism. As popular support for our various martial efforts wanes, the few remaining jingos commit themselves to increasingly outlandish claims about the inevitable, and probably genocidal, response of the American public. Yet their certainty that global pogroms are just around the corner if the damned Muslims don't shape up is tinged equally with vicious condecesion toward the sleeping giant, America:

Most Americans will not remember Fort Dix in a week — just as they have forgotten Salt Lake City, San Francisco, Seattle, Lodi, Portland, and all the rest; just as they want out of Fallujah now and probably Kandahar tomorrow.

Yet, at some point, the jihadists will go too far. Many of us, erroneously as it turned out, thought that, after twenty years of serial provocations, radical Islam had done precisely that on 9/11.

Apparently not. But such forbearance, even at this late hour in the post-West, is still not limitless.

The more a Palestinian imam promises us our death, the more the Iranian president promises a world without America, the more these al Qaedists, like the most recent keystone clowns at Fort Dix, do their small part in trying to reify such mad rhetoric, and the more the sophisticated apologists assure us that we, not they, are the real threat, the more likely the sofa-sitting, channel-surfing American will some day very soon blow up, rather than be blown up.

Get off the couch, America, and kill something! Plaintively homicidal is an odd tone indeed, but there it is.

Cheney, On Carrier, With Candlestick

From the hangar deck of the John C. Stennis, Dick Cheney, the man who put the un- in undisclosed location, issued another dire warning:

Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants believe they can wear us down, break our will, force us out and make Iraq a safe haven for terror. They see Iraq as the center of a new caliphate, from which they can stir extremism and violence throughout the region, and eventually carry out devastating attacks against the United States and others.

I am as pleased as the next caucasian that there is peace at last between the Green and the Orange, but this much-repeated doomsay is a little like accusing the Lutheran World Federation, the Primate of All England, and Pope Ratso Rizzo of colluding toward the reestablishment of the unitary apostolic seat of Leo X. Nah gunnahappen.

Personally, I think this is deeply ineffectual scaremongering. I suspect that most Americans, on hearing words like caliph and sultan and emir, picture first images from Disey's Alladin.

Well, We Thought It Was Weird When He Wore the Brassiere

Let no one say I didn't call it.

It turns out that our jihadis "with cheese" in Jersey were themselves the victims of FBI entrapment. I mean, really? "The men were prepared to kill, and to die in the effort." No: The men were prepared to act hard and, wait for it, practice "maneuvers" in the woods with paintball guns, qualities which describe 90% of the male youth in semi-rural Fayette County, PA, where I grew up. Did they ride quads, too? If we criminalize the fantasy lives of pathetic jerk-offs who imagine themsleves as well-armed last action heroes, then who, finally, will deliver pizzas at all?

The Times story goes on to detail some other instances of government agents provocateurs shanghaiing dubiously capable "potential terrorists" into grandiloquent boasting that serves later as fodder for prosecution. And yet it seems clear that these agents are not, in their own turn, models of mental stability.

Certainly, the work of informers can sometimes seem murky. In one instance, the informer who was the main witness in a major terror financing case in Brooklyn in 2005 almost did not make it to the witness stand after he set himself on fire in front of the White House to protest his compensation by his F.B.I. handlers. The informer helped win a conviction, but wound up being prosecuted himself for writing bad checks while working for the F.B.I.

"Murky" isn't properly the word for it. "Crazy" is about right. He set himself on fire, and he's a check kiter. And you thought that J. Edgar Hoover was odd.

The Medium

In general I try to avoid the univeral liblogger obsession with the continuing story of "Why The Media Is Sooooo Stoopid," but there are times when I'm just like, damn, y'all, those motherfuckers really is stoopid. Today, for example, the Post has published an article by the universally discredited and thoroughly satanic Richard Perle, ostensibly a refutation of an anecdote in the recent book by universally discredited sycophant, George Tenet. It would be difficult to find two characters more overflowing with wrongness on the whole of the Earth. Here are men who were quite literally wrong about everything. Ignore if you can the vast, horrible, international consequences of their wrongness. On a purely vocational level, considering each of them simply as a man with a job, they failed utterly in every capacity: they failed as advisors; they failed as supervisors; they failed as employees; they failed as directors. It's as if Jerry from down in shipping and receiving had mislabeled every single outgoing package in the last fiscal year. Instead of firing him, they put his grinning, gap-toothed mug on the cover of the annual report.

Give Me Chastity and Continence, but Not Yet

So I see that Ratso Rizzo went to Brazil in order to tell the Brazilians to keep it in their pants. Then he canonized what we here in America call a snake-oil salesman. No, really:

Seated on a throne of Brazilian hardwood and surrounded by Latin American bishops and choirs of hundreds, Benedict pronounced the sainthood of Antonio de Sant'Anna Galvao, the Franciscan monk who is credited by the church with 5,000 miracle cures.

[...]

Friar Galvao, who died in 1822, began a tradition among Brazilian Catholics of handing out tiny rice-paper pills, inscribed with a Latin prayer, to people seeking cures for everything from cancer to kidney stones.

Then "[t]he pope also warned against drug use, violence, corruption and the temptations of wealth and power." Because nothing says, "I resisted corruptions and the temptations of wealth and power," like this:

Let's Ask This Scientician

Jonah Goldberg is really Roy Edroso's beat, but some things can't pass without comment.

Jonah is the offspring of Lucianne Goldberg, an unfamous, literary-agent scam artist who became semifamous for her lesbo vampire groove with Linda Tripp and Monica involvement in the Clinton thingamajig, and if that doesn't prove something about science, well . . . Goldberg, notably, thinks that putting an -ism on the end of science--you get the odd pidgin, "scientism"--implicates all godless evolutionists in their own doctrinaire, ideological commitment to dismembering the still-twitching corpse of the Christian god, or something. That sort of thing probably gets them wound up at the convent, but we are made of sterner stuff.

I suppose it's worth quoting the meat of the matter:

Still, off the top of my head, the examples of anti-science bias on the left are easy to come up with. The MIT biology professor who got the vapors like a 17th century wallflower in response to academic speculation about cognitive differences between the sexes seems a good place to start. Harvard devoured Larry Summers because of that. The abortion-breast cancer link might be another. There were thoughtful criticisms to the Bell Curve from the left, but they were few and far between. Most came to a conclusion that any such science had to be bad and then went looking for evidence to support their case. For years, the data on Head Start was fudged because what mattered was keeping the funding spigot open. Similarly, the harms of out-of-wedlock birth seem to still be discounted irrationally on the left. On the environmental left there all sorts of examples of intimidation, scare mongering and de facto censorship of inconvenient facts.

I don't know who this MIT prof is supposed to be, but I read Larry Summers ill-fated speech, and "academic speculation" isn't precisely the description I'd offer. It was more of a "black guys have bigger dicks" sort of thing--appropriate in certain company, but when not, not. I for one don't discount the possibility that cognitive differences exist between the sexes, but the notion that those differences align perfectly with man-made disciplines like "math" and "biology" is rather absurd. The brain as an organ predates the core curriculum, and it isn't wired as an undergraduate course catalogue.

Then we're off to the races. The abortion/breast cancer link, which, as I understand it, posits that the Rosicrucians hold the true cup of Christ, arrives and exits. The Bell Curve appears, which may well be the most roundly discredited "scientism" this side of Jean-Baptiste Lamark. "Most came to a conclusion that any such science had to be bad and then went looking for evidence to support their case." What's humorous here is that they found it, the evidence, whatever their original motivations may have been. Then something about the funding for Head Start. (I hear my grandfather: "This is science? Oy.) Then the "harms of out-of-birth-wedlock." You can see how quickly it devolves, you'll pardon the expression, into a lament about "the left's" failure to support certain core assumptions of the unempirical social sciences of National-Review conservatives. Head Start bad, marriage good. Grunts and squeaking commence.

Finally, Jonah points out that "Marxists" did terrible things to "rational inquiry." They did manage to build the bomb and launch the first man into space, but eh? So what.

Bad Moon Rising

"For the moment," says Jim, "I’m less worried about the possibility of a shooting war with Iran in 2007 or 2008. I’m more worried about the possibility of a shooting war with Iran in 2017 or 2018." Then again, Jonathan Shwarz says, "Ho-Hum, yet more evidence of covert action inside Iran." These are not mutually exclusive categories, as Jim points out in his post, but I'm going to go out on a limb and make a dire prediction here.

A Democrat is going to be President in 2009. (You can stop your giggling. That's not the dire prediction. Not exactly.) There's going to be great pressure on her to "do something." It may be something about something, or it may be something about nothing, but Consensus Washington agrees that a serious foreign policy means killing people. Now the Democrats can probably coast for one more election cycle on the sky-high insanitude of the inmates at the Lazy-Eye Ranch, but if they want a lock on the corner offices in the City of Mausoleums, they've got to shuck the whole "soft on defense" jive and get with the imperial program. Oh, it is true that your average pwoggle and his Most-Important-Election-Ever-sanctioned Donkle rep can raise themselves to raptures and bliss with Support-the-Troops™ standbys like, "Supporting the troops means not putting them in harms way," or, "Supporting the troops means caring for our wounded veterans," or, hell, "Supporting the troops means keeping them well-trained and well-equipped." Yeah, yeah, but here's the thing: No the fuck it doesn't. This is America, boyo: Support the troops means killing some em-to-the-effin wogs because Moslem McJihad over there was lookin' at us funny. The Democratic Party wants to prove that it's got balls, boys and girls--this may, quite literally, be an issue. They are going to have to blow something up.

What Hip-Hop Teaches Us About Rudy Giuliani's Doomed Campaign

Shorty I strickly wanna spank you,
The most I gotta do,
Is spell my name to get your vikki's to your ankles,
I'm serious mami,
You fuckin with the kid,
A-K-A William H, Period, Bonny
You know I'm the type that be crushin and merkin
Havin ladies touchin the herkin, blushin and smirkin,
Early in morning rushin for workin,
Screamin, oh my, F-A-B-O-L-O-U-S,
Each night I'm freakin,
An ma you ain't gonna talk me to death,
Cuz you got free nights and weekends,
Ghetto Fab's all over the place,
Oops--there go my kids all over ya face,
Oh my

-Fabolous, featured in Tweet's "Oops (Oh My)"

Ohmahgawd!

Image the stink she'd make if they installed bidets!

I Rebuke Thee

Afghanistan's upper house of parliament on Tuesday passed a bill calling for a halt to all international military operations unless coordinated with the Afghan government, action seen as a rebuke of the international mission here.

-The New York Times

Let us leave aside any broader questions about what precisely is the "international mission" in Afghanistan and instead focus on one inalterable fact: the international mission keeps dropping bombs on civilians. Last week it was fifty-some in Herat. This week it was 20-some in Sangin. In March, "19 people [were] killed and 50 wounded by U.S. Marines Special Forces who fired indiscriminately on civilians after being hit by a suicide attack in eastern Afghanistan."

Now the larger picture. Regime change, as the euphemism goes, is predicated on the idea that some present government is illegtimate, that Saddam Hussein or the Taliban aren't, to use an older turn of phrase, the rightful rulers of their respective nations. In every Iraqi and Afghani lurks a dusty Montesquieu, yearning for elections and balanced powers and duopolistic political factions and campaign finance reform and presidential libraries and national-flag lapel pins and the business of the country is the business of the country, amen. From this premise, America and a few of its remaining allies have extracted the conviction that it's their right and duty to remove the brutes from power and confer on the noble, long-suffering populations of these distant outposts all the flowerings of democracy. Meanwhile, we insist that our actions never compromise the sovereignty of the invaded nation. It was the Taliban who undermined Afghani sovereignty; it was Saddam in Iraq. The idea is that once these bastards are out of the way, the People will reclaim their legitimate self-rule. And yet.

Whether Dick Cheney in Iraq telling the Iraqi parliament--which in any case has no power to do anything, no mechanism for enacting is prerogatives--to skip its vacation, or American journalists blind-citing military officials claiming that a national government, even a nominal one, requesting coordination before foreign troops act in its country is outside of its rights, it's evident that national sovereignty, once brought into question, isn't easily reacquired, no matter how many purple fingers raise themselves to the dry breeze.

'Cause No One Likes a Fella with a Social Disease

Garance Franke-Ruta's injunction against the unseemly characters who profit from girls who go wild (i.e. show of their little (and big) taters) has--you'll pardon the verb--engendered some controversy on the interweb, and although Roy at Alicublog, whose post initially directed me to Franke-Ruta's secular anathematizing, has got her dead to rights, I'm going to say this about that anyway.

You can't expect children to develop ethically if you deny them ethical agency. Prohibitionism up to arbitrary age-lines doesn't predispose those 16- or 18- or 21-year-olds with newly acquired rights and privileges to act responsibly. It encourages them to go balls to the wall. We've all been to twenty-first birthday parties. That's not to say that we should allow every 15-year-old kid and his buddies to wander unsupervised into any bar, but it is to say that at home or at a restaurant with the folks, there's nothing wrong with giving him a glass of wine or a draft with dinner. Not only nothing wrong--it's a positive benefit. You learn to "enjoy responsibly," as goes the warning-label slogan. Exposure breeds understanding, and understanding enables ethical action.

Of course we're far more deranged about sex than about alcohol or even the hardest of drugs, and so rational minds that would otherwise agree that our prohibitory attitudes do more harm than good reach instantly for the bans when the soft bodies of our young female-Americans are concerned. (To be accurate, though: Franke-Ruta seems generally to approve of the current drinking age. Eh.) As in:

A woman of 18 may be physically indistinguishable from one who is 21, but they are developmentally worlds apart.

Think only of the difference between a college freshman and a recent college graduate, or between a high-school senior and a young woman with a job and apartment of her own. Or think of the difference between a 19-year-old girl--intoxicated by both a Scorpion Bowl (illegally served) and her own newly developed form--and a woman who has been through her first heartbreak and has had to think long and hard about what her value is, both in her personal life and at the office. The second woman is more likely to nurse a chardonnay with friends than "go wild" in the sense that Mr. Francis' cameras are so eager to record. Surely the porn industry can survive without the participation of teenagers.

This, I believe, is called universalizing from your own experience. There are plenty of 18-year-old girls with far greater poise, self-assurance, and wisdom than hard-partying 21-year-old elders. And vice versa. That's the flaw in arbitrary lines of demarcation. The difference between a college freshman and a recent college graduate isn't quantifiable. Those aren't meaningful categories, except perhaps to college juniors and sophomores. Most 19-year-olds don't consider their "forms" to be "newly developed," and if you'd poll them, I'd suspect that a fair majority would tell you that they'd had a heartbreak or two. There are plenty of women well into middle-age who have never thought "long and hard about what her value is, both in her personal life and at the office." Garance Franke-Ruta has taken the timeline of her own peculiar and privileged life--from first high-school experimentation through the cum laude degree at Harvard, through writerly gigs at thinkerly rags full of over-educated social pontificators with time to invest in thinking hard and deep and long about issues of self-worth and gender equity and the fine distinctions between a woman with the independent capacity to show her tits and appreciate the conseuqences versus a girl who in her native, Arcadian state, knew not nor never knew that the goddamn cameras were rolling--and from it determined that no sorority sister on spring break in Florida could possibly appreciate the ramifications of her own actions, "Scorpion Bowl" or no.

Consider:

A new legal age for participating in the making of erotic imagery--that is, for participating in pornography--would most likely operate in the same way [as the legal drinking age], sometimes honored in the breach more than the observance. But a 21-year-old barrier would save a lot of young women from being manipulated into an indelible error, while burdening the world's next Joe Francis with an aptly limited supply of "talent." And it would surely have a tonic cultural effect. We are so numb to the coarse imagery around us that we have come to accept not just pornography itself--long since routinized--but its "barely legal" category. "Girls Gone Wild"--like its counterparts on the Web--is treated as a kind of joke. It isn't. There ought to be a law.

"Honored in the breach more than the observance?" Someone call a priest. "There ought to be a law" that no one will observe. Yes, that is the recipe.

Perhaps it's only the fact of my faggotry, but I don't think of porno as "coarse imagery," to be spoken in a Tipper Gore tone of magisterial disapproval. Why it is that arousal follows from watching other folks go at it is one of the great mysteries of sexual nature, but it's true, and it does. "'Girls Gone Wild'" . . . is treated as a kind of joke." It is! you marvelous prude. And it's your tsking about it that makes it so much more difficult for a woman, confronted with this "youthful indiscretion," to laugh about flashing her tits at Joe Francis and Snoop Dogg at Mardi Gras, 1999, and to go on with the job interview. We don't need a law. We need a laugh.

UPDATE: La_rana has an alternate take.

Your Phony Terror Plot of the Week

Six dudes were planning on "storming the base with automatic weapons and attempting to kill as many soldiers and other personnel as possible." Question mark exclamation point. Brought to you by terrorist masterminds, the Wachowski brothers.

In Which Spiderman Expresses His Extraordinary Longings . . . An Unusual Episode . . . The Unspeakable Vice of the Greeks

SPIDERMAN: [Lying on his back, arms limp, exhausted, barely conscious. He looks to Harry Osborne with great feeling, and says with joy and deep satisfaction] You came.

Plus c'est la même chose

Cernig at Newshoggers has two posts up noting the results of the French presidential elections, and in the latter link (but prior post) he distills to one sentence the lesson that American commentary on the elections seems willfully determined to miss:

Decades of French conservative mismanagement will now continue.

The basic American parochialism, which is no less intense in our elites than in the seventy-or-more percent of the Just Folks who've never held a passport, the French resistance to the American invasion of Iraq, personified by that debonair Gaullist, Dominique de Villepin, and the mytholigized omnipresence of their Socialist social safety net, have obscured the fact that with the long, notable exception of François Mitterand, the Fifth Republic has been a conservative project. (And note that Mitterand was not, by French standards, much of a leftist, particularly after the Left's losses in the 1983 municipal elections.) Today's Elysées tracks a line from Chirac to D'Estaing to Pompidou to De Gaulle.

In other words, Sarkozy promising "rupture" while claiming the mantle of Chirac has all the relevance of our own Republicans distancing themselves from the failed, unpopular presidence of George W. Bush. Chirac was no leftist; the French opposition to the Iraqi adventure wasn't lefty spoilage, but an accurate assessment of the probabilities of success (practically nonexistent) and the possibility of damage to French economic interests (high).

There was a moment in the Sarko-Sego debate when Sarkozy went off on a long tangent about the need for a president who would tackle the tough social ills of suburban dislocation, dissatisfaction, and crime. Yes, French insiders can run against Paris the way American insiders run against Washington. In perhaps her pithiest comment of the debate, Royal asked him who'd been in charge of the police for all these years. Sarko, of course. This typifies the successful sales job perpetrated by the Sarkozy campaign. It's true that Chirac didn't like him very much, but French politics are Byzantine and no man likes a potential rival. Still, Sarko represents not rupture but tradition. The structural problems in the French economy, the failures of proposed economic reforms, the social dislocations of a population with growing immigration and aging natives: these are problems that came to a head under the government for which Sarko was once a principal architect. The idea that he represents a repudiation of the governing prerogatives of the UMP is absolutely preposterous.

Mike Gravel, American

So it appears that Mike Gravel's entire congressional pension goes to his ex-wife. He's broke. He got pissed at the credit card companies and the fed-backed debt machine, so he declared bankruptcy. Twice. He is "following his bliss," according to Salon.

There is almost nothing I do not like about this man.

Nuts, Berries, and an Occasional Boar

Jim Henley has some interesting thoughts on the vitality of the libertarian critique of government under so fantastic a jerk-off as George W. Bush. His point is well taken: State failures under "competent" leadership make a stronger case for the failure of the State than do the catastrophic fuck-ups engendered by infinitely venal morons like Bush and his half-wit enablers, simply because they show that "good leadership" isn't inoculatory: failures and abuses occur anyway.

On the other hand, there's a strong argument to be made that the catastrophic rule of venal morons is itself one of the natural and inevitable failures of the State. And the fact that it occured in the United States, which despite its great Civil War has had one of the most politically stable systems of government in the history of the world (for all its limits of freedom, its corruptions, its foundations in genocide and slavery, it has nevertheless been a model of well-structured government compared the the rest of the atrocities of States in the world), is certainly more indicative of the inherent problems of State and government than the lastest military coup in Asia or the Aminization of Subsaharan Africa. Which is to say: if the most well-executed governing experiment in the modern history of man produces George W. Bush, then isn't the proper conclusion that government itself is the problem?

I had a friend who for some time claimed to be an anarcho-primitivist, committed to the idea that the development of agriculture and the subsequent growth of civilization were great blights on the happiness of the species; that the ensuing huge growth in population, the development of wealth as a concept and actuality, the growth of community beyond kinship--these all represented the diminishment of human freedom, health, and joy. The life of a wealthy urban denizen in post-industrial America was no better and certainly no less precarious than the life of a pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer in a clan matriarchy. This argument always struck me as the fallacy of the Fall. Imagining Arcadia, I told him, is not a positive program for freeing ourselves from the iniquities of the involuntary social compact, and truly creative social thought would grapple with the difficult questions of consensual and cooperative society in the inescapable context of modernity. None of us is prepared to contemplate honestly the depopulation of the globe.

But in so many ways the great existential questions of modernity and postmodernity--wrestling the individual experience out of the collective; contemplating the nature of war and the individual; asking into the possibility of true communion and communication; then, inquiring into the validity of perception, the subjectivity of experience, the nature of cognition when the parameters of our world-view are social constructs--spring fully from the one indelible fact of contemporary life: the centraility of states and governments as the organizing principles of all human life, even the lives of stateless persons, who are nevertheless defined in relation to the subdivision of the world and the population into a vast Venn diagram of overlapping authorities. What questions might we ask ourselves were that not the case? My friend doesn't call himself an anarcho-primitivist anymore, and I still believe that the Arcadian fantasy is an essentially narcissitic view of once-perfect man, but I do think there are interesting questions about the purely organismal experience of the self-aware being. What are consciousness and consience without society?

Verizon in Iran

This article in today's Times, which properly would be titled "Propoganda for Me, but Not for Thee," is full of stationary targets, but the broader conclusion, reinforced by nearly every bit of reporting on the American military's situational behavior, is that the American military leadership is second only to the American congress in its high-majority percentage of buffoonery. God bless you, Colonel Patrick Lang; you're a truly learned, eloquent, and admirable man; but let's be plain: Gilbert and Sullivan's Queen's Navy reads as the heights of professionalism and martial achievement compared to these guys.

What's rather shocking, actually, is the degree to which these sorts of institutional fuck-ups--bungled attempts to recast failures as successes in most cases--reveal the "military culture" to be no different from our much-satirized contemporary office culture. It has the same petty territorialisms, the same cowed inferiors, the same methods of rank-climbing, the same inscrutable systems for awarding advancement to those evidently least deserving, the same bathetic personal efforts at individuation, the same resentments of blame-impervious management and leadership, the same little indignities, the same habits of breeding odd organizational rites and behaviors, the same habit of crafting obfuscatory language with an alacrity that, redirected to something useful, might produce achievement rather than endless streams of over-worded, transparent excuses. The difference, of course, is the presence of guns and bombs, and so to the cruise-missile left and interventionist right, you world-savers and democracy-bringers, I ask you: Would you trust your cell phone provider to run a country, and if not, why do you trust your army to do the same?