The excellent Greenwald on the American public’s apparent support for the aerial bombardment of civilians:
All of this is so widely tolerated, even cheered, among large factions of the American citizenry due to three premises:
- I have absolutely no idea who my government is continuously bombing to death by drone, but I assume they deserve it;
- When my government extinguishes the lives of entire families, including small children, as it often does, I know it’s all for a just and important cause even if I can’t identify it; and,
- We have to stop the Terrorists, because they keep killing innocent civilians.
That’s the Authoritarian Mind, and it appears everywhere the Imperial Mind does.
While I salute his desire to question America’s hypocritical tolerance for war crimes as long as the victims are the same colour as “terrorists”, I think the reasons for this apparent tolerance have more to do with shitty American media and weak-willed politicians than it does moral acceptance.
Having been through the wringer of post-graduate education on more than one occasion, I have come to the conclusion that humanities post-graduate education is not only a glorified ponzi scheme, it actually harms the circulation of new ideas by placing it behind a pay-wall of fees and pointless jargon.
The wracking university dependence on private money—student tuition in particular—has pushed a huge portion of the higher ed sector into manipulating exactly the young people they are charged to enlighten. We start instruction by teaching them to betray their own self interest. We burden students with debt, but more fundamentally we corrupt our relationship with them by not basing it on trust, without which there can be none of the personal development we seek to create. We who are charged with helping them discover their future first greet them—via our financial aid offices— by misleading them about their future’s financial basis.
During the run-up to the Iraq War, a lot was made of Colin Powell’s performance at the UN. At the time, Powell was presenting himself as a lone voice of reason in the Bush administration and so his willingness to step into the ring and go to bat for the Bush administration was seen as proof that America really did have evidence of WMDs. As someone who was doing research on WMDs at the time, I remember thinking that Powell was most likely a well-meaning patsy who had been cut out of the loop and then fed a few scraps of fraudulent intelligence that prompted him to go to bat for US government. This excellent post by Jon Schwarz suggests that Powell was not just an incompetent buffoon but an active participant in the Bush administration’s lies:
Powell’s image has about as much to do with reality as what he told the UN. Though his entire career Powell has eagerly bent the truth to please his superiors. He started his climb up the Army ladder by covering up the massacre of civilians by U.S. troops in Vietnam, even serving as a character witness for a general who apparently shot Vietnamese from helicopters for fun. During the 1980s, when Powell was assistant to then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, he also helped cover up the Iran-contra scandal, and almost certainly deceived congressional investigators. (If there were a Museum of Washington’s Funniest Lies, it would have its own wing for Powell’s statement that, “To my recollection, I don’t have a recollection.”) So everyone’s default assumption should have been that Powell would lie to Americans and the world at the UN. And – as anyone can see just by looking at what’s in the public record – he did.
In a week when Obama began rallying the Democratic faithful by finally recognising the moral and political necessity of gay marriage, Glenn Greenwald remind us of Obama’s abject failure to confront (let alone arrest) America’s slide into paranoia and authoritarianism. The column begins by echoing Fareed Zakaria’s question of why the security state is continuing to grow when the War on Terror is supposedly over and goes from there:
The political faction that has long been derided for wimpy weakness (progressives) will spend the remainder of the year flexing self-admiringly in front of a mirror and basking in the war glory draped on them by all the deaths their leader has caused, while the country that is so petrified of its own shadow that it begs the government to monitor and surveil every last one of its communications will seize on these same deaths to feel purposeful, strong and proud. There is a direct correlation between the fear and impotence Zakaria bemoans and the fact that America’s greatest and proudest achievement over the past four years is its “success” in blowing people up from the sky or summarily executing them.
I am rapidly forming the opinion that we are actually better off with right-wing governments because when they sacrifice human rights and brutalise the poor, they are held to account for their actions. Conversely, when a left-of-centre party gets rid of student grants, extends the War on Terror or covers the country with CCTV cameras, people on the left spring to their defence while people on the right remain unconcerned. The more I think about all of this, the more I feel that politics is a sham and humanity is utterly wretched.
There more engagement I have with human society, the more I realise the extent the extent of our short-sightedness. One of the great flaws of human nature is an inability to disentangle interpersonal bonds from the broader and more universal principles we hope to embody. Nowhere is this failing more evident than in our regrettable tendency to give preference to our mates and nowhere is this failing more harmful than when it perpetuates inequality:
Class privilege, and the power it confers, is often conveniently misunderstood by its beneficiaries as the product of their own genius rather than generations of advantage, stoutly defended and faithfully bequeathed.
It is hard to know which is more toxic: our tendency to favor the people we know over the people we don’t or the tendency to invoke universal moral principles to justify this tendency.
It is often said that science fiction no longer functions as people are no longer capable of imagining an appropriately realistic future. For some, this failure of the imagination is due to the effects of capitalism, for others it is due to the ever-increasing complexity of human society. However, for me it is nothing more than complete and utter bullshit. There is nothing more urgent and revolutionary than imagining a future unlike our own. Intriguingly, Penny attributes a very similar attitude to Gibson:
What makes Gibson’s work so vital is its hunger for strangeness, the need to unearth the future in the present like a child digging in dry ground for buried bulbs. We don’t need to see it face to face: we just need to know it’s there, a little under the surface, waiting for spring. It’s only by making the present strange that we can possibly hope to make the future possible.
I’m not sure I agree with her interpretation of Gibson (the man who began by writing about the future, progressed to writing about the present and finished up writing about the past) but I echo her sentiments wholeheartedly.
Possibly one of the most intriguing articles I have read this year. Ostensibly, it is all about a lesbian who enjoys seducing nominally straight women but the real meat lies in the ways in which it plays with our assumptions about both gender and sexuality. In fact, the article’s sexual politics are so densely layered that the article serves as a kind of therapeutic touchstone for the reader’s attitudes about gender and sex. How do you view female sexuality? Is human sexuality a series of categories or a spectrum? How central is sexuality to your concept of identity? The article challenges all of these ideas and prompts dozens of outraged comments in the process. A superb piece of intellectual provocation:
Twenty years later, I still flirt with these straight-but-not-so-straight women. Only now I know the limitations of such insanities. The trick to surviving the chase is not to take yourself, or the interaction, too seriously. I always choose an opening line that borders on the absurd. “I like the way you make that pink push-up bra look intellectual” – and if she is the kind of sexually ambiguous woman that likes this kind of attention, she will laugh. And if you listen well, you can tell if she is likely to play or nay. It is not because she laughs that indicates her willingness, but how she laughs. It has to be a sort of curious amusement that comes from her eyes and travels to her mouth. Never mention that her skin is beautiful or that her legs go on for ever. Remember, she navigates that sort of cheese from straight men all day long.
Without really saying so, Petridis presents homosexuality as a kind of countercultural shibboleth: Because homosexuality was more tolerated in pop music than elsewhere, many gay people moved into pop music circles meaning that moving in those circles either entailed homosexuality or a tolerance of non-hetero sexualities that vastly outstripped that of the mainstream.
The killer quote comes from the critic Jon Savage:
Savage thinks rock’s ongoing prosaicness is symptomatic of a wider cultural shift. “There’s a current mode of solipsism, where you don’t want to be challenged, you just want to have your own life reflected back at you. It’s down to the way the internet has grown up, the whole apparent democratisation of the idea of skill – that skill and experience don’t matter and that you’re as good as anyone else. There’s the disastrous impact of reality shows, the whole impulse to be famous, the idea that fame is the way to go.”
I think the internet’s bottomless capacity to create group-thinking hug boxes drives this increasingly solipsistic attitude to culture but I think the wider problem here is the loss of an easy shibboleth for rebellion. Indeed, because homosexuality is no longer Other, rebels can no longer define themselves by tolerating and/or embracing homosexuality. Without a clear set of cultural attitudes to kick against, we are left no recourse other than to build our own little online hug boxes.
Paul Graham provides a deceptively straightforward analysis of how a concept evolves over time, how those changes implement society and how people with vested interests in old conceptions will try to warp society in order to ‘freeze’ one conception in place. The analogy he uses is of a shop owner who tries to charge people for the smell of his delicious cooking:
The reason so many people think of property as having a single unchanging definition is that its definition changes very slowly. But we are in the midst of such a change now. The record labels and movie studios used to distribute what they made like air shipped through tubes on a moon base. But with the arrival of networks, it’s as if we’ve moved to a planet with a breathable atmosphere. Data moves like smells now. And through a combination of wishful thinking and short-term greed, the labels and studios have put themselves in the position of the food shop owner, accusing us all of stealing their smells.
Rob Goodman looks back at how the Romans dealt with the boredom that follows excessive indulgence and stimulation:
Decadence is a useful way to understand any situation in which an existing pleasure becomes cheap, and it takes the ingenuity of a Petronius to fight off the boredom. That is now the case with information—the small burst of satisfaction that comes from a refilled inbox or a new text, from connecting with friends, or sharing the meme of the day. Millions of us are now richer in these pleasures than our parents’ generation could ever imagine. But our capacity for enjoyment is still finite: We’ve built up a tolerance to the pleasures of information, just as Trimalchio built up a tolerance to the pleasures of food.
