Some Announcements

These are not really household chores but things I want to mention.

First, several of you have asked me why I suddenly stop posting for a few days. Well, I haven't. It's your browser that's the problem: it's giving you the blog as it was some days ago. Try clearing the cache.

Second, some announcements from my mailbag: You could wear a blue hat for the victims of Darfur.

We thought you might be interested in an online gallery that organizations from all around the world have put together to promote September 17, the global day for Darfur. We're hoping you'll encourage your readers to add their faces to the gallery of people wearing a blue beret, the internationally recognized icon of U.N. peacekeeping forces, to send a message to their governments to pressure the U.N. Security Council and the government of Sudan to deploy U.N. troops to protect the people of Darfur. Thousands of people around the globe on September 17 will join in a unified call for an end to the mass slaughter in Darfur at over 40 events being held in at least 20 countries, including a rally and concert in NYC Central Park. People are also being asked to wear a blue hat on the day. To add a photo of oneself to the gallery (one can adjust the blue beret to fit the photo) and for more details on the events in each country, please go to http://www.dayfordarfur.org. These pages are being constantly updated.

Then The International Alliance of Women:

The International Alliance for Women (TIAW) will bring its unique Global Partnership Forum to Atlanta, Ga. Nov. 9 – 11, continuing its 25-year history of connecting women. TIAW supports the economic empowerment and advancement of women, and its annual Global Partnership Forum helps leading business women make local, national and international connections in an exceptional learning environment. . TIAW was the first international women's organization to hold its conference in Atlanta and the 2006 event marks the third time the group has gathered here.

The Forum, co-hosted by the Executive Women of Goizueta and Georgia Executive Women's Network, offers unmatched networking opportunities for enhancing leadership skills and gaining support and strategies from highly successful women in their respective fields.

The conference also offers a unique global perspective, fulfilling TIAW's commitment to provide a culturally rich and diverse forum. The distinctive environment of international women business owners and corporate leaders is perhaps the forum's greatest contribution for its participants.

If you are interested in learning more, click on this website.

Last, but certainly not least, Nancy Keenan is guest posting over at RH Reality Check. Her most recent post is about what will happen next, now that Plan B is available over the counter. Go and read her if you are interested in the politics about women's bodies.

Remembering the Victims of Terrorism

Some silence. Send your love to those you knew and loved, those who will not see the turning of the leaves this year or the birth of their grandchild or the new school in the village. Send a prayer or a meditation or a wish into the pure air. Silence.

Then return to life and note that the real intended victims of terrorism are the living, the ones who didn't lose a loved one, the ones who are intended to be scared now, to be frightened now, to limit their lives now, to give up their liberties and freedoms and to close their mouths for good. But we, these intended victims, have a choice. We can refuse the fear and the worry and the cowardly lifestyle. We can go on.

A Private Preview

You can watch a few scenes from Part I of "Path to 9/11". It was shown in its original unedited form in New Zealand last night.
----
Via pigboy on Eschaton threads

You Can Make A Troll A Target

But you can’t make them think.

The Piano on the Flying Trapeze

or: A Musician Grumbles About the State of the Avant Garde and Radio

What does it mean to have an avant garde which expects to receive grants to produce their art? If they submit to the approval of committees or administrators how can they be avant garde? It used to be that an avant garde artist expected to have a day job to support their art. They knew that their art was not going to be a financial success and that it wouldn’t be supported by foundations or the government. They produced their art for many reasons. Expecting to become rich was a pipedream of many of them but it obviously wasn’t their first motive or they’d have gone into finance.

As a musician, I’ll point out that non-support is taken as a given by us in most circumstances. Arnold Schoenberg’s great opera Moses Und Aron* exists without its final act because he couldn’t get a grant to give him the ‘leisure’ to finish it. And he was one of the most famous composers in the world at the time. Funding situations have changed and it is more common for composers to get some kind of grant support but it is far from the typical method of a composer earning their living. It never has and almost certainly never will be the major source of support for most musicians’ work. No one pays us to practice.

Visual artists who produce a thing that can be owned, shown off easily and sold at a profit have a much higher status than their equivalent in music. I’m talking about non-commercial music, mind, what the late and wonderful Arthur Berger puckishly referred to as “unpopular music”, when asked what kind of music he wrote. So visual artists get a lot more attention from the media and, at least in part as a result, from funding sources.

I will mention one of the more absurd consequences of this. NPR in the form of Susan Stramburg** constantly has pieces on about high status visual art, even about art which the average LISTENER probably has no chance of knowing or seeing . This RADIO network does this while ignoring composers of enormous ability and stature. From NPR’s*** work you would never know that the past sixty years in the United States has been a period of one masterwork after another produced by a series of great composers. Even composers of lesser stature are producing work of the highest quality. I would hazard the judgement that never in the history of music has the secondary composer been better. Yet it is only if there is some non-musical reason to pay attention, a Pulitzer, a MacArthur, an anniversary, etc. does National Public RADIO pay attention to an art that it can convey with remarkable fidelity. Susan, I hate to break it to you, yet again, but you cannot string together enough cliches to give people an idea of what something they’ve never seen really LOOKS like. Your attempts are bound to be misleading, you should stop it if the art itself is your subject.

Ok, back on topic.

Really, can you have an avant garde approved by the establishment? The government, for the love of Mike. It isn’t a sin to not be in the avant garde but art needs to have radical artists whose work is box office poison and who know that they’re not working with a net. Isn’t there enough of a smug intelligentsia anymore which wants to be ahead of the critical and commercial curve? Do we have an intelligentsia without any sense of daring? That would explain a lot.

*I am going to be posting a review of a recent recording but dealing with a piece this important and this huge is going to take many listening. This is Schoenberg’s spelling, he had a fear of the number thirteen.

** See my point?

*** Sadly, you can see the same thing in the nyt corp owned Boston Globe these days. You could read a months’ worth of Globes and not realize that Boston was one of the great musical cities of the world. The nyt corp fascination with fashion takes up much more space than serious music coverage since they purged its long term employees. The Globe spends many times more column space on the product of Hollywood than it does its local musicians.

Revised from a post on olvlzl, Monday, September 04, 2006

Postscript

Democracy in the United States will never be safe again unless there is a constitutional amendment removing the ability of a president to pardon members of his administration or members of an administration he, himself was part of. We have had enough evidence of that kind of pardon to see that it is an enormous loophole through which criminal administrations can drive something the size of the Iraq invasion.

September 11 Didn’t Make America An Orphan So Why Did They Try To Make Bush Our Daddy

As they study the rise and fall of America as an empire, scholars should consider that as they dishonestly spoke the word “democracy” the political and media elites had no faith in it. They fight against any possibility of it rising up out of interest in their own wealth and power, but they also don’t even believe that its necessary precursor can exist.

One of the most characteristic assumptions of the American establishment is that the American People are high-strung and nervous children who have to be protected from even the most important realities. That’s their line. The same conservatives and their media mouthpieces who whine and complain about any program to aid the down-and-out as paternalism turn around and, when it suits their purpose, say that the entire American People are babies.

They pretend this because it allows a string of the most criminal administrations in our history, all of them Republican, to escape investigation or punishment. They have no such inclination during Democratic administrations, doing those the favor of inventing lurid and sensational crimes to be most publicly investigated at the cost of tens of millions of dollars when real crimes weren’t forthcoming. And that doesn’t include the fictitious impeachment porn that the religious right, Ken Starr and Henry Hyde pitched in most educational detail on the public airwaves. On Sunday morning, even.

The excuse of the Nixon pardon, that Americans couldn’t stand the indictment of a president, assumed that the American people lacked the maturity to see justice done. There was no reason to believe this was true. By that time, Nixon had accepted that resigning and having his hand-selected successor pardoning him was his only hope of escaping impeachment and prosecution. Nixon, who insisted on law and order for everyone else, accepted a pardon before he was even charged.

The majority of the American People would have listened to the evidence and let justice be done. It was our elites who couldn’t stand to see the Constitution come to life, not the People. And even if the People hadn’t been prepared to watch, when did that become a legitimate issue in law enforcement? The crimes of Richard Nixon included the extension of the Vietnam war into Cambodia, a crime which over its course was as bad and then worse than the invasion of Iraq today. Even the House committee which adopted articles of impeachment thought the American People were too childlike to face what its government had done to millions of people in that one. If you can find a transcript read what Congressman Robert Drinan said in favor of their adoption.

Perhaps, as proven in their inability to sway the public with their fully aired “evidence” in the Senate trial of Bill Clinton, their real fear is that the American People are fully able to judge evidence and to draw logical conclusions from it. If you don’t get that, let me point it out plainly. They put Clinton ON TRIAL over phony, rigged up charges - after refusing to try Nixon over some of the most serious crimes an American President has ever committed - and they lost with no resulting social disruption whatsoever.

Letting Nixon be pardoned set the stage for pardons by other Republican administrations, perhaps most infamously* in the Bush I pardon of the unindicted Caspar Weinberger. Wineberger’s handwriting put Bush the father “in the loop” of Iran-Contra and likely under perjury for denying that he was. The media shrugged. The Nixon pardon put Republican Presidents above the law. The excuse effectively said that the Constitution was impractical due to insufficient maturity of the American People. Despite that honor given to Gerald Ford at the Kennedy School, the Nixon pardon was one of the more injurious acts done to this country in the past half century.

What was, one hopes, the nadir of this coddling of the People was the post 9-11effort to present them with George W. Bush as a surrogate daddy. How desperate does an imperial establishment have to be to instill George W. Bush with preternatural paternal powers? And at the same time, they were trying to install him as first-frat-boy, first-drinkin’ buddy, top gun and a raft of other, would be, endearing personas. Flight-suit, Matthews, you know what I mean. The post-September 11th glorification, even deification of George Bush is a sign that our media has reached that stage of eutrophication that produces abundant methane and no clarity. The Press Corps wanted Bush to be their daddy, you wonder what their relationship with their natural fathers could have been to allow such a perverted idea to gain currency. Yes, let’s make it reflect back on to the media who say these things, they’re the ones who are saying them, afterall.

We've got to fight against this attack on the maturity of the People. It is an put-down given for the most dishonest purposes, to cover up imperial crimes, the kind of crimes that it takes grown-ups to detect, punish and prevent. By remaining silent as they treat us like children we allow them to be unaccountable.

Children exposed to war and tragedy often grow up too fast, it is heartbreaking to see them robbed of even what little childhood they might have had. Seeing an attempt to turn Americans into babies over one day of attacks is not sad, it is monumentally insulting. Roosevelt didn’t do it after Pearl Harbor. He knew he would need all the maturity that Americans had to win the war against fascism and Naziism. Americans won’t take to being called babies once it has been pointed out to them that is just what the corporate media has been doing for the past five years.


* After the fall elections watch a flood of pardons come down from Bush II. If the Democrats take back one or both houses it will be a deluge. If this is done it should not stop Democrats from fully airing the crimes of this regime. If Democrats do begin investigations watch for the press to increase the attempts to quash them with this and similar tactics. They will reach levels of insane frenzy surpassing those poor monkeys whose terry-cloth and chicken wire mother substitutes were taken from them.

In the mean time watch the exact same ersatz journalists’ defacto campaign for Republicans. They are already warning that if Democrats win they will do exactly what they, themselves, were encouraging Republicans to do to Clinton, impeach a president. Impeachment has gone from being a moral imperative under Clinton to being an unthinkable catastrophe that the country couldn’t survive under a Republican.

Saturday Night September Emiliy Dickinson Blogging

Posted by olvlzl

September's Baccalaureate
A combination is
Of Crickets -- Crows -- and Retrospects
And a dissembling Breeze

That hints without assuming --
An Innuendo sear
That makes the Heart put up its Fun
And turn Philosopher.

Emily Dickinson

You Don’t Have To Believe It But Ridicule Won’t Win Their Support

Posted by olvlzl

You know it is one of the clearest realities of American life, so clear that it is beyond question; for the left’s agenda to be put into effect it will need the support of religious people. Some kind of religious belief is held by a very large majority of Americans, you don’t win elections without the support of the majority of the voters. If the left, by its own actions or by caricature, can be made the enemy of religion in general then the left can forget about holding power in the United States, ever again.

Reading leftist blogs you have certainly seen comments hostile to religion. The sometimes witty slurs against people who believe in one or more gods are certainly well known to you. If not, just wait around, one more is on its way. While sometimes quite funny, they tend to be repetitive. They could be intended as a fairly harmless indulgence for those hostile to religion but it isn’t politically innocuous.

I am bringing this up because I suspect there is an effort to stir up these questions just now. Articles in MSNBC-Newsweek and elsewhere might indicate an attempt to kick up a religious fight before the fall election. My interest in this is entirely in its effect on practical politics, I want the left to win this election, winning is the most important thing for the next two months. We can live with a certain level of atheist-religionist animosity, we cannot win an election with leftists falling for the bait the Republican right puts out for it. Leftists can be counted on to come to the defense of atheists who are targeted for discrimination. If atheists are in danger of life and limb, we must do that. But this all too timely row has nothing to do with life and limb. It is not pressing.

Absurdly, this time the bait seems to feature the question of an atheist not being electable as president. Since it’s proving hard enough to get any moderate-liberal elected you wonder why the left needs to deal with that just now.

Does an atheist have the right to be President? No. Let’s get that straight. No one has a right to be President. Holding an elected office is an assumed responsibility, assumed only with the permission of the voters, not a right. Our democracy would be a lot safer if everyone would remember this. Atheists have a right to run for President but no one has what is constantly mislabeled a right to assume the office except the legitimate winner of the election.

Is it unfair that an atheist who is honest about it has no chance of being elected as President? Yes, unfair. It is as unfair as the fact that a vegetarian, a Buddhist, an Animist or a Zoroastrian has no realistic chance of winning a real party’s nomination or gaining enough votes to win a presidential election. If you point out that the Constitution says there will be no test of faith to hold office, that’s enforceable against the congress, executive or judiciary, how are you going to enforce it against voters?

Will it remain so? Almost certainly it will remain so for the rest of our lives, there’s not much we do about it. Changing that situation cannot be done politically or by court ruling. It is a matter of cultural change, and, ironically, it will be a change that depends entirely on the acceptance of atheists by religious believers. Atheists who would like to change that might profitably ask themselves if insulting religious believers will hasten that day. They might consider if their, at times brilliant, mockery of religion* has perhaps played any role in their present day status with believers. When we talk about religion we are talking about people. Religion doesn’t exist outside of people who have feelings that inform their opinions and votes. Some religious people will never vote for us and we don’t have to worry about them. But there are many, I hope most, who we can convince to vote with the left. Those are the ones we need.

Atheists on the left should cut out the blanket mocking of religious people. What do they hope to gain by it? Nothing that is worth the cost. Interestingly, it almost always lacks the objective observational acuity necessary for realism, usually the pride of atheists. “Religion” takes in an enormous range of beliefs**. It is safe to assume that the range of religious variation is at least as wide as that found in politics. To lump together Quakers, Unitarian Universalists, Catholics, Jains, Oomotists, etc. and to ridicule them over their religion as if it was any one thing is the sign of a lazy mind. The variation in these beliefs and the actions that come from them do make a huge difference. Pretending that they are all the same thing is just as unrealistic as conflating all political parties, ideologies, rump caucuses and majorities of one for characterization - based on the worst of the bunch- as “political people”. Attack away, as long as it is religious fascists who are the target, there is nothing to lose by doing so. But ask yourself if you really want to drive away people who might vote the same way you would.

A lot of the most important success of the left was grounded in the religion of the activists who did the necessary work. We have that on the best possible authority, the activists themselves. What good is there in mocking liberal religion? Atheists have also done good work for the left but you don’t usually hear religious leftists slamming them because of their atheism just as a matter of course. That kind of injustice would be remarkably atypical of religious liberals. It is a matter of fact that religious liberals have been outspoken supporters of the rights of atheists and other religious non-adherents.

I’m not going to insult your intelligence by phrasing it as a question. This conflict will be promoted by the supporters of the Republican Party during this election season. It is brought up now because they know it could provide them with the margin they need to win this election. Atheists and knee-jerk leftists who ignore that this is a well worn tactic of the Republican right are counted on to do most of their work for them. Remember this, these kinds of wedge issues don’t have to succeed with a majority of the voters to work. They just have to deliver the margin of victory. Leftists who choose to strike a pose should be asked if they really think their ephemeral self-satisfaction is worth remaining out of power. It isn’t a price that is worth it to any rational leftist.

* Some of the mockery, when it has been against criminal behavior and moral hypocrisy by the religious establishment, has been well worth the cost. As the urgency of the problem addressed diminishes the benefit over cost ratio plummets.

** Including non-theistic forms of Buddhism

What Does ‘olvlzl’ Stand For?

Posted by olvlzl

The question has come up again, what does “olvlzl” stand for. While the temptation is strong to echo Groucho Marx and say, “he’ll stand for a lot” the fact is no one seems to be pushing that particular envelope at this time of my life.

Some of you may remember a commenter on many of these leftist blogs who went by the name EPT, a name chosen to honor the author of The Making of the English Working Class. As an aging gay man EPT was quite innocent of the fact that it was also the name of a product that was associated with urine. Having been ribbed about that and, shortly after, having had the letters olvlzl come up on the random letter generator of the comments board of the blog Mercury Rising*, EPT decided to see if there were any ways those letters could generate ribbing or anagrams. Finding none, he impetuously chose them as his own. Fate seemed to dictate it.

Echidne’s blog takes as its theme the great subject of feminism, it encompasses the lives and interests of more than half the human population. If feminism was represented in the way that subject deserves to be it would be ‘masculinist’ blogs that would be noteworthy as an alternative viewpoint.

My blog, olvlzl, has a much more modest theme, how the left can change its behavior to win politically. That theme, though more modest, requires that the ways that leftists characteristically act, speak and think be investigated to see possible self-defeating follies. What do we do that makes our agenda, so much in the interest of the vast majority of people, fail so regularly at the polls. It’s not all what they do to us, a lot of it is what we do to ourselves. A lot of what we do allows the right to caricature us, to lie about us in order to defeat us. As in the two longer pieces posted below it is also a matter of us giving them the rope to hang us with. That is a situation that cannot go unchanged either for what they do to us or what we allow them to do to us for whatever noble sounding reason. It is sometimes noble sound that signifies very little.

That is what the pieces I’ve posted here this weekend are about. If they are unsettling, this essential change without which we will never win, is bound to be. I hope that your disagreement and ideas will help to further the work of finding the way, they have taught me a lot in the four months I’ve been doing this. Most of all, I hope we will find ways to win. Everything depends on our winning elections, taking office and changing laws. Everything.

* I have seen no better coverage of the Mexican election online than that which Mercury Rising has posted. It is a wonderful and original blog which deserves far greater notice.

Adding Insult to Mendacity

Posted by olvlzl

ABRNC didn't even film it in New YorkCity! Geesh! Isn't there anything that gets produced here under Republican misrule?

What next?

For Example: Resources the Right Has at its Disposal and Which We Don't

Posted by olvlzl

So, who did fund the longest political hit ad in our history? Since on U.S. TV a program is what appears between ads, what else is the ABRNC crockudrama but a political ad?

I particularly like the part of Howard Dean's statement which I put in bold. We won't see responsible TV until they have their responsiblities as borrowers of public property, the airwaves, forced back onto them.

"The fact that the writer/producer of the piece is a well known conservative raises additional concerns and questions," said Dean. "The American people deserve to know who funded this $40 million dollar slanderous propaganda."

"Use of the public airwaves is a privilege conferred upon broadcasters in the public interest," Dean continued. "It comes with a responsibility to the American people and a responsibility to the truth."

When The Left Aids Its Enemies Why Should It Expect To Win?

Posted by olvlzl

It isn't free speech that I deny for fascists and Nazis, I believe that everyone has that as a matter of their having been born, "are endowed by their creator..." this piece is about the response of leftists, particularly the free speech absolutists such as Nat Hentoff to it.

The left has no obligation to do anything that could politically benefit our enemies. Not one thing. Our resources are very limited. We are always making choices in what we have the time and money to do. I don't follow their activities as much as I used to but I know that the state chapter of the ACLU here only took on a small number of cases due to lack of resources.

Fascists, Nazis and the right in the United States all explicitly work to deny people rights as innate as their right to free speech, they have huge resources at their disposal. I say that their advocacy for the abridgement and destruction of other peoples' and groups' rights, with increasing support on the Supreme Court, places their rights outside the area of our concern.

The pose of absolutism, re Skokie, has a politically damaging effect on the left. The Phelps citation was made because the issue was coming up and I imagined the self-defeating words coming out of the mouths of our defenders of the first amendment in support of people who would take away every one of my rights, likely including that to life itself. If my rights and my life mean less to a free speech absolutist than the rights of fascists who would rob me of them, then what other stand am I to take? Why should members of any group targeted by fascists sit quietly while they are aided by leftists?

In doing this I am far more generous than either group, fascists or absolutists. I only call for the deferment of the Phelps’ ability to make their hateful demonstration until it won’t impinge on the rights of people who have no choice about burying their dead, their right to speak would reman intact. If the fascists got their way someone would lose all of their rights and there would be no ACLU to file so much as an amicus brief.

The rumored plans for the Phelps to come to my home state of Maine to assert what we all know they assert at that time also influenced the writing of this. Just the threat had the family of a dead serviceman, his entire community and my state in termoil. Then the Phelps announced that they wouldn't be coming afterall. They got massive attention for themselves , the goal of a demonstration, afterall, without even bothering to show up. The family and community got a kind of pain no decent person would not try to prevent.

I hope no one missed that the piece didn’t call for leftists to take anyones speech rights away nor for the government to do it. We, dear fellow leftists, are not a court of law, we are not a legislative or executive branch, we are not even an unpaid government consultant we are not under any obligation to be even handed in OUR activities. We aren't now. We pick and choose as a matter of the most basic necessity. Let’s choose more intelligently is all I’m asking.

If someone doesn’t like the tone, I kind of get worked up about people who advocate stripping me of my rights and killing me.

I Won’t Be Fair to Fascists I Won’t Be Nice to Nazis

Posted by olvlzl

I won't be fair to fascists. I won’t be nice to Nazis. I will not give them a fair hearing. They've had their hearing and on their own terms. We've had their message aired universally, enthusiastically supported by conservatives here and abroad, and we have abundant examples of what happens when they achieve power. The combination constitutes probably the most ill-advised test of time given in recent history. And they've failed the viability test. We know the catalog of their crimes and we know that those crimes are the only part of their platform that they deliver on. They promise to kill people, to enslave people, to exclude people and to plunder the property of their victims. And that they can do. That is they can until either their own population or another has had enough and overthrows them. Victory, a higher standard of living, what they promise their supporters will be bought with that blood? No. They're not so good on that despite the lying Luce line.

Why anyone who pretends to be a liberal spends a second of their lives, though they live to be a hundred, being nice to them or defending their rights is one of the more idiotic results of the Code of Liberal Ethics. They've had their rights, as noted above. And their victims have had the full benefit of their exercise of those "rights". Why these liberal niceness scolds spend a second on the rights of fascists that they could spend on the rights of the victims of fascists is an exercise in ego of the worst kind. I will get to that in a minute after pointing out that I have made no guarantee of being such a nice person. No fascist should ever live in the expectation that they are going to see a benevolent smile from me. No liberal or leftist should expect me to be patient with the insistence that we be fair to them. As if the fascists were all going to attend a Developments in Contemporary Fascism seminar which will make living with them possible. Socialism develops, fascism has already found their true religion, racism, violence, slavery, theft and war.

If this apostasy isn't bad enough, it gets worse. I am an NMAS free speech absolutist. That, after L. Hansberry, means No More After Skokie. There is no reason for anyone on the left to come to the defense of the free speech rights of fascists.

Given their stated intentions and their history it is bizarre that any leftist would entertain considering the free speech rights of fascists. Why should any leftist give them the time of day nevermind a fully paid legal representation? The old reason given by the most easily stomached of our fairness monitors is that, "if they are silenced then we can be too". This argument has the virtue of replacing absolutist prissiness with an appeal to practicality. But it is empty. They haven't been silenced, they are all over the place. Ann Coulter's insane performance art is certainly not silent. And she's only one of the slew of dispund that fills the airwaves and makes it into print. We, dear friends, are entirely frozen out. Effectively blacklisted. The real left appears only slightly less often than plate spinners on our media. There is the pantomime of liberalism presented but it is such a transparent farce that even dismissing it gives it more attention than it deserves. Free speech sermons by liberal scolds is one of the more popular scenes of the farce.

As our friends in Canada sometimes point out, free speech is a right, it isn't the only right. Rights exist in tension, they don't exist outside of people and their owners don't exist in a vacuum. All rights may be absolute until they impinge on the rights of someone else. It is when they do impinge on other peoples' rights that things become less absolute than lends itself to facile philosophical contemplation between commercial pods and the length of a Village Voice column.

Let's take a variation on a classic. There is no right for a person to stand in the road outside your house and yell abuse at you for extended periods of time. Especially not at night. I doubt that someone could get away with standing outside your house and yelling adoration at you for several hours in the afternoon. It wouldn't be surprising if long and loud proclamations of affection met with a quicker and more forceful response by the police after your terrified call for help fifteen minutes into the incident. I have never heard a free speech absolutist defend this kind of speech and risk their own domestic tranquility. Why should a random night of sleep enjoy more protection than the one and only opportunity of an entire family to exercise the right granted by common decency, to hold a funeral free of the publicity stunts of hate cults? If a family can't bury their dead without the likes of the Phelps tribe turning their grief into a media availability, I don't want to be a part of your "free speech".

Free speech absolutists believe that they are acting out of high principle, I fervently want to believe it of some of them. There are free speech absolutists who I not only respect but love. But when you make free speech into an overriding absolute, an inflexible absolute, the principle becomes a petty scruple. It becomes moral schtick which includes the absolutist's imagined right, by virtue of their constitutional purity, to dispose of other peoples' rights without their consent and often in the face of their vigorous disapproval. The worst of them appropriate as the raw material of their media careers as "defenders of the constitution" the lives and rights of the victims of fascists, both past and future. Who the hell died and made them God?

first posted on olvlz Wednesday, May 17, 2006.

Parsing Rush Limbaugh

Just because it's a fun thing to do, and because learning to parse one wingnut helps us in parsing all of them. And because it's fun. Oops. I just said that.

Rush Limbaugh spoke to Katie Couric in her new series "Free Speech". I'm going to use his speech as the stuff dreams are made out of, at least dreams of parsing, which means that I'm going to give you a few lines of Rush and then my masterful (mistressful?) interpretation of the problems his speech contains. And so on.

Here's the beginning of Rush:

LIMBAUGH: My friends, it's time to face a hard, cold fact: Militant Islam wants to kill us just because we're alive and don't believe as they do. They've been killing us for decades. So it's time to stop pretending these terrorist incidents are mere episodic events and face the reality that our way of life is in grave danger. Now, this threat is not just going to go away because we choose to ignore it.

I've bolded the bits I'm going to rip apart here. First, note the "just because", combined with the earlier word "fact". Limbaugh is telling us that the militant Islamic terrorists have no other reasons for their hatred than the fact that we are alive and disbelievers, and he's telling this as a fact. Most educated observers know that the "just because" is not true, that there are many reasons for the American unpopularity in Islamic countries, and that many of these reasons have to do with the foreign politics of the United States. The problem here is not that Rush isn't partially right. He is, in that there indeed are some terrorists who would hate the non-Muslim world whatever else might be going on. But the numbers would be much fewer if the United States had a different foreign policy with respect to the Middle East. The problem is that Rush argues for the totality of his opinion as the only correct explanation for terrorism.

Now comes the really fascinating transition: Rush moves from Militant Islam (an ideology) to "they" (people). Who are "they"? He never defines this nebulous and frightening group, but I'd assume he means the terrorists. This is an important point, because later on he talks about "diplomacy" as if it was something the critics of the Bush administration advocate as the tool for coping with, say, bin Laden. This is pure hogwash, of course.

Then the third bolded bit: about the needs to stop pretending that these terrorist events are episodic and can be ignored. Who pretends this? It's a strawman Rush is building here, or at least something I've never heard of.

And finally, the fourth bolded bit: That "we" (who are these we?) choose to ignore the threat of terrorism doesn't mean that it will go away. I don't know who chooses to ignore the threat of terrorism. The liberal and progressive criticisms of the Bush administration policies are not because these critics want to pretend that terrorism doesn't exist. They are because these critics believe that the approach to fighting terrorism Bush has selected (make the terrorists into warriors by calling terrorism a war, rather than treating the terrorists as the slimy ratass criminals they really are and thus removing the halo of heroism from them) is wrong-headed.

Are you bored yet? Some people actually love sentence parsing. I'm going to continue a little longer, just in case you're one of them. Here's the rest of Rush's first paragraph:

Some say we should try diplomacy. Yeah, well, tell me, how do we negotiate with people whose starting point is our death? Ask them to wait for 10 years before they kill us? When good negotiates with evil, evil will always win, and peace follows victory, not words issued by diplomats.

Only two points concerning these sentences. First, when "some say we should try diplomacy", those "some" are not talking about trying diplomacy with bin Laden and other such terrorists. They're talking about matters between countries, mostly. Second, once we introduce "good and evil" we introduce both a religious approach to looking at these conflicts (something bin Laden does, too) and the impossibility of distinguishing that "good" and "evil" must be defined. Is it good to torture people? Or does it matter if it's the "good" who are doing the torturing? And notice the obvious reversal already pregnant in Rush's argument: If the terrorists define good and evil in similar moral terms, they clearly think that it's the United States who would win in any diplomatic negotiations.

And then the rest of Rush's comments (though I deleted his bye-bye bit):

But some Americans, sadly, not interested in victory, and yet they want us to believe that their behavior is patriotic. Well, it's not. When the critics are more interested in punishing this country over a few incidents of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay than they are in defeating those who want to kill us, when they seek to destroy a foreign surveillance program which is designed to identify those who want to kill us and how they intend to do it, when they want to grant those who want to kill us U.S. constitutional rights, I don't call that patriotic. Patriotism is rallying behind the country, regardless of party affiliation, to defeat Islamofascism. Patriotism is supporting our troops in the battlefield, not undermining the mission and morale.

Check out the first sentence I bolded. Rush is taking giant leaps here (I don't like the visual image that provided). He's referring to "some Americans" but he never tells us who these people are. He's telling us that these "some Americans" are not interested in victory (left undefined) and that this makes them bad patriots.

It's hard to address a sentence like that, because there's no "there" there. Sorta. What Rush is really saying is that there is only one way to be patriotic, and that is to support George Bush. Anything else is more like treason. If you don't support Bush you are not for victory, it seems. So according to Bush I want bin Laden to win and to take over this country and to put me into a burqa. Very funny.

The long sentence I bolded is essentially a rerun of the same argument. We must criticize nothing the government does, nothing. Because if we do it means we are not patriotic. Later, Rush argues that everybody should rally behind the country, regardless of party affiliation, to defeat what he so quaintly calls Islamofascism. This might not apply to Rush himself, of course, given the horrible things he said about Bill Clinton earlier on. And I'm really wondering how Rush would rally behind a Democratic president in a similar situation, at least without having a knife in his hand.

To finish off this post, I couldn't stop thinking that when Rush says that "patriotims is supporting our troops in the battlefield" he might have used that definition of support tongue-in-cheek. For what is it that Americans are asked to do to support the troops in the battlefield? To put some "Made in China" stickers on their SUVs? To go and shop? And what about the support the troops need once they come home? Like medical benefits for the permanently disabled?

That was fun, but I went on too long.

Have a good weekend. Olvlzl will be driving this blog for the next two days while I go cavorting.

No Prewar Saddam-Al Qaeda Ties

Yes, I know that it's boring to harp on about the same piece, but even minor goddesses have obligations:

There's no evidence Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence that Democrats say undercuts President Bush's justification for invading Iraq.

Bush administration officials have insisted on a link between the Iraqi regime and terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Intelligence agencies, however, concluded there was none.

Republicans countered that there was little new in the report and Democrats were trying to score election-year points with it.

The declassified document released Friday by the intelligence committee also explores the role that inaccurate information supplied by the anti-Saddam exile group the Iraqi National Congress had in the march to war.

It concludes that postwar findings do not support a 2002 intelligence community report that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program, possessed biological weapons or ever developed mobile facilities for producing biological warfare agents.

And what is this obligation I speak of? It's the obligation to inform all Americans who answered this question in a recent Zogby poll with "agree":

Do you agree or disagree that there was a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 terror attacks?

Two thirds of Republican respondents to the survey did so.

So yes, it's old news. An old inaccuracy (see how polite I'm here) which sprouted, grew and now has brought a harvest. But it's also not true.

Friday Cat Blogging

This is Hermione, blue lily's cat. Blue might join us as a weekend guest blogger with olvlzl when she has more time. Hermione looks wise to me, though I really don't know cats very well.

Have to start taking snaps of Henrietta the Hound. She is currently snoozing on top of her double-thickness dog bed. Like the princess and the pea story. She inherited Hank's bed and does she love the comfiness! All her limbs are poking out in luxurious abandonment.

The Enemy At Home

Via Eschaton, I read Michael Berube's post on Dinesh D'Souza's new book blurb. The book is titled The Enemy At Home, and that, naturally, is us. What have we done? Well, we are responsible for all the licentiousness and depravity on earth, things such as women allowed to drive cars and go out alone, and as a consequence, we indeed are the people truly guilty for the 911 events:

While everyone else in the liberal blogosphere is focused on the world-historical shenanigans of ABC-Disney-Rove's fictionalized docudrama, The Path to 9/11: Clinton Did It (original title: A Million Little Pieces of the Democrats' Plan to Undermine America), I figure that somebody around here ought to be paying attention to the Old Media, namely, books.

So it is in the spirit of bookselling hucksterism that I bring you the new fall line for Outer Wingnuttia, courtesy of Dinesh D'Souza:

In THE ENEMY AT HOME, bestselling author Dinesh D'Souza makes the startling claim that the 9/11 attacks and other terrorist acts around the world can be directly traced to the ideas and attitudes perpetrated by America's cultural left.

D'Souza shows that liberals—people like Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Barney Frank, Bill Moyers, and Michael Moore—are responsible for fostering a culture that angers and repulses not just Muslim countries but also traditional and religious societies around the world. Their outspoken opposition to American foreign policy—including the way the Bush administration is conducting the war on terror—contributes to the growing hostility, encouraging people both at home and abroad to blame America for the problems of the world. He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom—from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

The cultural wars at home and the global war on terror are usually viewed as separate problems. In this groundbreaking book, D'Souza shows that they are one and the same. It is only by curtailing the left's attacks on religion, family, and traditional values that we can persuade moderate Muslims and others around the world to cooperate with us and begin to shun the extremists in their own countries.

Yuh. If the Talibans on the two sides join together and fight the rest of us they might not fight each other. It could work... All we need is to put women and gays in little cages. Why didn't I think of it before? Shows why we need D'Souza's great writings to inform the lowlier forms among us.

Well, there's still the whole problem of the U.S. policies in the Middle East. But I'm sure if Osama bin Laden sees pictures of Hillary Clinton in a burqa he will immediately tell all the suicide attackers to cease and start making money for American companies.

Have you ever followed all the links about the conservative violations of sexual freedoms on the internet? Every day I see at least one story about a minister who raped children or solicited gay sex or something similar. And it's the capitalists who make money out of pornography.

D'Souza is a nutcase. But he's involved in this whole plot to make sure that we finally put all our energy against our real enemies: the horrible left which is both cowardly and weak and also so incredibly powerful that it's to blame for everything, even terrorism. Never mind that D'Souza's ideas would require getting rid of the good differences between bin Laden's thinking and the Western tradition. That's how sick these puppies are.

How Lower Incomes Look To Conservatives

They look good. I've been visiting some blogs in Wingnuttia. Instapundit had a post about a week ago on the new income statistics (which for us latte-sipping limousine welfare queens showed that the real earnings of individuals have declined and that the share of nonlabor income (profit, interest income, rents) has risen). Now, I would have thought that all this is good news in Wingnuttia. Isn't capitalism one of the major religions over there? But surprisingly, quite a few righty bloggers felt the need to reinterpret the evidence or its meaning.

The most interesting of these interpretations is the idea that being poorer now is a lot better than it was in the past. Hence, there is no real need to worry about increasing income inequality or declining earnings. People have cell phones! And a television sets and McDonald's hamburgers! David R. Henderson summarizes this argument like this:

The bottom line is that the vast majority of us are doing well by the standard measures. Finally, (like Don Boudreaux) ask yourself this: Would you rather be in the middle 20 percent of the income distribution today or in the top 20 percent 50 years ago? How much do you value cell phones, cars that last 10 years, airline travel to Europe, iPods, and being able to fight cancer and win?

How much do you value health insurance? Without it the chance to fight cancer and win is a lot less, and health insurance is becoming an ever rarer benefit for even middle-income workers.

A somewhat different version of the same argument has been used to explain why we shouldn't worry about real poverty that much. First, the poor can buy cheap electronic gadgets; cheap, because the price of electronics tends to drop in real terms fairly rapidly after the product is first introduced. We are all equal on the internet, too! Second, the poor are a lot happier than the wealthier people.

Sadly, over forty million Americans have no health insurance, housing is more expensive in real terms than it has been for decades and higher education is out of reach for many, too. But there's always gadgets to play with and cheap fast meals to eat. And smiles aplenty, too, I guess.

Rush Limbaugh even suggested that the poor have too much, that the "liberal" state has given them food stamps and hence obesity. Interesting, huh?

It's almost as if it's the rich who should be really envious of the middle classes and the chubby/happy poor. Note that Mr. Henderson didn't offer us the choice of belonging to the top twenty percent of the income distribution today. We are meant to focus on how nice it is not to have that much income, compared to years past. We are not meant to think about the well-off of today.

But let's do so. Suppose that income differences really don't matter that much anymore, that it's in fact quite comfy to be poor or at least middle-class. If this is true, why would the rich want to get rid of the estate tax? Why would they want their taxes lowered? What do they have to gain by trying to have more than the iPods and the cars and the cell phones?

Clearly nothing much. And then add to that the sadness that follows greater incomes, and you have a fairly drastic case for a more progressive system of taxation.

Don't Look Now

But Bush has admitted to secret detention of terrorism suspects in foreign countries. But worry not! The scariest suspects will be transferred to Guantanamo:

President Bush's announcement that 13 top al-Qaeda suspects are to be moved to Guantanamo Bay to face military tribunals, and his call for Congress to prioritize legislation to beef up the legal foundation of those tribunals, is aimed at bolstering the legal basis of U.S. detainee policy. But the President's timing — some two years after the Supreme Court first challenged the legal basis for the practices at Guantanamo, and on the eve of an election season in which his own party is expected to suffer losses at the polls, partly because of the situation in Iraq — will be widely viewed as politically motivated.

The President's speech, filled with graphic details of terror plots, is clearly part of the ongoing White House campaign to shift the terms of the political debate over national security issues. As the Democrats are pointing to U.S. difficulties in Iraq and demanding the resignation of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the White House has begun to reemphasize the continuing terror threat to America — an issue that has tended to favor Republicans. The question of what legal rights Congress should legislate for detained terror suspects is also highly contentious, and putting it on the legislative agenda less than a month before the pre-election recess is clearly an attempt to frame the national conversation on terms least favorable to the Democrats.

...

By transferring name-brand al-Qaeda prisoners recognized as dangerous men — such as alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Muhammad — to Guantanamo from secret detention abroad is likely to strengthen the rationale for the off-shore facility, and for dispensing justice via military courts. It is also precisely because the Supreme Court has ruled that military tribunals do not offer detainees sufficient legal rights that the President has now urged Congress to pass legislation to address those concerns.

Have a lollypop, anyone?