Are constant reminders OK, too?

Writing about the role of the NAACP in swatting down the endemic racism in the Republican party, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes something beautiful.

I have, in my writing, a tendency to become theoretically cute, and overly enamored with my own fair-mindedness. Such vanity has lately been manifested in the form of phrases like “it’s worth saying” and “it strikes me that…” or “respectfully…”

When engaging your adversaries, that approach has its place. But it’s worth saying that there are other approaches and other places. Among them–respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with.

It’s worth saying, respectfully, that I have never been overly enamored with my fair-mindedness, so it’s the second paragraph that resonates most strongly with me.

(via Mike the Mad Biologist)

Aisha

The cover of the latest issue of Time is going to shake a few people up. Aisha is a woman who fled the tyranny and abuse of her in-laws, and as a punishment, the Taliban had her husband cut off her ears and nose.

Here’s where pro-war propaganda steps in: the cover is titled, “What happens if we leave Afghanistan”. It’s set up as if this kind of horror would be a consequence of our military leaving the country. However, the story undermines that message.

This didn’t happen 10 years ago, when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan. It happened last year. Now hidden in a secret women’s shelter in Kabul, Aisha listens obsessively to the news. Talk that the Afghan government is considering some kind of political accommodation with the Taliban frightens her. “They are the people that did this to me,” she says, touching her damaged face. “How can we reconcile with them?”

If we want good news from Afghanistan, it’s not going to be measured in body counts or enclaves raided or bombs dropped. It’s going to be when we actually hear about the progressive people of the country rising up and shaming the men and mullahs and misogynists. There could be a role for military aid in protecting a fragile political and social movement, but there’d be an even stronger role for education. I don’t see much sign of that happening.

WikiLeaks does humanity a service

It’s amazing: WikiLeaks has just dumped over 91,000 classified documents from the Afghanistan war on the web. Just like that, we get an actual look at what’s been going on over there, unfiltered by the traditional media, and definitely not given a rosy patina by Fox News. Fox New is, of course, treating this as a serious blow to their worldview — which isn’t surprising, since reality does great damage to Fox. US Government sources also condemn the release, since it exposes the failures of militarism, and militarism is what the government and its profitable contractors have committed themselves to.

I think it’s wonderful. Truth is an essential part of accurately assessing the war.

And the war isn’t going well. There are tales of atrocities on both sides, civilians being murdered by both sides, backhanded deals by Pakistan with both the US and the Afghan insurgents, and an increasing number of attacks — we aren’t winning at all.

The other shocking bit about this revelation is that it wasn’t done by any of the established media organizations — it took a stateless, independent organization to actually break the barriers to information that other media companies respect. Now, of course, Spiegel, the Guardian, and the NY Times are doing a fine job of analyzing the deluge of information…but once upon a time, we might have expected investigative journalists to do that work. I guess it’s cheaper to hire a Judith Miller to massage government propaganda than to actually dig into the facts.

This sad fact about the news disappointed me.

Ask yourself: Why didn’t Wikileaks just publish the Afghanistan war logs and let journalists ’round the world have at them? Why hand them over to The New York Times, the Guardian and Der Spiegel first? Because as Julien Assange, founder of Wikileaks, explained last October, if a big story is available to everyone equally, journalists will pass on it.

“It’s counterintuitive,” he said then. “You’d think the bigger and more important the document is, the more likely it will be reported on but that’s absolutely not true. It’s about supply and demand. Zero supply equals high demand, it has value. As soon as we release the material, the supply goes to infinity, so the perceived value goes to zero.”

I have a very low opinion of most journalists — it’s a career in disrepute, given the sad state of media affairs, especially with the pathetic state of television news. I glanced at some of the programming going on now, and most of what I saw were mannequins arguing over whether it was right to release these documents, rather than any substantive discussion of the horrors contained within them.

But I will say this: Julien Assange is a hero who is doing a great service to both rescue and revolutionize honest journalism.

Lessons learned from Breitbart and Sherrod

So there I was on strike, and this appalling news story flew by and I had to choke on my tongue. I’m late, but I have to say something.

The story, as you probably all know, is that Shirley Sherrod gave a talk on her work assisting poor farmers hang on to their land, in which she confessed to being less enthusiastic about helping poor white farmers early on. Andrew Breitbart, professional pseudojournalist and teabaggin’ hack, ran just that excerpt of her talk and made it sound as if she and her audience at the NAACP were flaming racist hatemongers who were chuckling over making Whitey pay.

He lied. He lied outrageously by editing out the context (or, as he claims, his source did the editing), and making it sound like racism when it was exactly the opposite, and Tom Vilsack, the Democrat at the Department of Agriculture rushed to appease Breitbart and had Sherrod fired.

Afterwards, the full video of the talk was revealed, and it’s discovered that Sherrod was making the point that her early biases were wrong, and that she learned that it was important to get over the false barriers of racism and realize that this is a problem of the poor of every color. Then the farmers who she’d been initially reluctant to help came forward to say that Sherrod had been a wonderful person who’d saved the family farm for them. It’s quite a story: it’s the complete annihilation of a right-wing lie, and the emergence of a real hero, Shirley Sherrod.

I’ve learned a couple of things.

  • Andrew Breitbart is beneath contempt. He’s not a journalist at all: he’s a partisan hack who will make up stories to fit his biases (he was also guilty of faking the ACORN scandal). I’m hoping the news media will recognize his name as purest poison from now on. I don’t have high hopes, though; people seem to be swallowing Breitbart’s excuses, lame as they are.

  • Our Democratic leadership is spineless. They fired this woman at the command of right-wing attack dogs? For shame. They didn’t even try to investigate and figure out if this was a genuine problem. Please learn: when the wingnuts bark, don’t jump, because they are little yappy dogs who never shut up. Fire Vilsack and put Sherrod in his place — she seems to have a moral compass.

  • Racism isn’t dead, and the Republican party seems to be its bastion. This was an effort by Breitbart to punish the NAACP because it had been accusing the teabaggers of racism; it has soundly backfired, because trying to damage an organization working to end racism is simply another manifestation of racism. Sherrod is fighting back, pointing out what the right-wing media is actually trying to do.

    “They were looking for the result they got yesterday,” she said of Fox. “I am just a pawn. I was just here. They are after a bigger thing, they would love to take us back to where we were many years ago. Back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person.”

  • The right-wing political base is truly vile. I looked at a few of their blogs, and despite the thoroughness of Breitbart’s credibility implosion and the way this story has blown up in their faces, they’re still trying to defend it. I’m not going to link to them, but instead, look at this brief and effective deconstruction of one such apologia by John Cole. Are the teaparty promoters racist? Hell, yes. Either that or they’re just brain-damaged idiots, I can’t tell.

  • There’s another minor lesson to be learned here, too. Glenn Greenwald said something of Breitbart, who is still refusing to explain how he got this dishonestly edited tape:

    “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

    Oh, yes?

  • The important lesson, though, is that this is about class politics and class warfare — not the phony kind the Republicans decry, which is all about the horrible way the obscenely rich are hindered from becoming pornographically rich, but the real one, the one fought in an America where children still go to bed hungry and everyone has to worry about the porous social safety net. This is a country where a middle-class person can be completely wiped out by a serious illness in the family, where the poor are kept paddling in place trying to make ends meet and never get an opportunity to advance themselves. Sherrod said that, too.

    Sherrod delivered an address on race, class, and government that wove together reflections of the murder of her father at the hands of white man, her early-life misgivings about the American South, her work organizing the community in the face of violent racism, and her eventual recognition as a government official working with local farmers that class, not race, was the dominant matter. “It’s not just about black people, it’s about poor people,” Sherrod said. “We have to get to the point where race exists but it doesn’t matter.”

    That should frighten Republicans more than their phony race-baiting story: when Americans wake up to their common cause despite Republican efforts to sow divisions by race, then we might have some progressive politics again (beyond the weak and unprincipled of Democratic Republican-lite politics, that is.)

But most of all, we’ve got to treat the Republican hate machine appropriately: Drudge-acolytes like Breitbart, phonies like Beck and Limbaugh — all are pariahs that our news media must stop treating respectfully.

Eyes without a mind

Everyone should read the Washington Post’s recent effort in investigative reporting, Top Secret America. It’s distressing. Since George W. Bush, we’ve had this reckless, ridiculous, uncoordinated expansion of intelligence agencies, all sucking up tremendous sums of money, all with little oversight, and all producing floods of data…and it’s all a waste because the emphasis is on sucking in lots of data, and little is done about comprehending it all.

The terrorists really have been effective. They’ve turned us into bloated clowns stumbling over our own feet and doing ourselves far more damage than any hijacked plane could do.

Another theocrat for Kansas

Maybe somebody from Kansas can say whether this crazy woman has a chance. Joan Farr Heffington is running for governor, and she has a few priorities.

  • Require that a Biblical and Constitutional reason exist for the passage of any new laws

  • Allow teaching of Christianity vs. evolution in schools

I guess there won’t be any laws regulating GMO crops in Kansas, or prohibiting stem cell research, or funding the creation of any wind farms. Anything more recent than the 18th century is going to have to be neglected, along with anything not mentioned in the Constitution.

At least she’s upfront about the conflict between Christianity and evolution.

Quick, somebody reassure me that she’s a fringe candidate without a prayer of getting into office. Please. It’s Monday, the day is painful enough.

So that’s why they call it the dismal science

Let’s see more charts and graphs to suck the joy out of your life! Here are 15 Appalling Facts About Wealth And Inequality In America — the rich-poor divide is growing. One graph summarizes it all: If you aren’t in the top 1% of America’s earners, you’re pretty much screwed.

There’s a lot of class warfare going on right now, only it mostly consists of the victims lying back and voting for the officials who will then help the plutocrats mug them some more.

Evolution isn’t libertarian

Larry Arnhart wrote a strange article in which he tried to claim Darwin and evolution for libertarianism, or as they prefer to call it nowadays, “Classical liberalism”. I was invited to give a reply, along with a few other people, but I can give the gist of my reaction here: no one gets to claim a biological justification for their political philosophy. Evolution does not endorse libertarianism, socialism, communism, or capitalism, and even if it did nudge one way or the other, that does not mean that we shouldn’t oppose the brutal short-term expediency of natural processes.

How to fish for atheists

It’s easy. Bait your hook with stupid.

It’s true, we’re a sucker for that stuff, although it does have a downside. We’ll come up, swallow the bait, follow the line to its source, devour the poor fool holding the pole, and then waddle off, all fat and smug. It’s our nature, we can’t help it.

So, for instance, an Indiana politician who is considered a potential presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels, talks about atheism.

People who reject the idea of a God — who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm — have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications — which not all such folks have thought through — because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.

And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists — Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth — because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.

You should read the rest of that interview, especially the part where he talks about not being ostentatious with his faith. It’s so precious.

The projection is strong in this one. I don’t know if I’d want a president who thought the world was divided into people who thought the only two possible purposes in life were to glorify God or a brutal drive to power.

Daniels is an example of a Christian considered smart enough to be president. You should see what the brain-damaged masses believe. It’s always fun to be lectured about what I believe by a marginally literate kook. Did you know that atheists believe in these six things?

  1. Satan.
  2. Ghosts.
  3. Tarot cards.
  4. Astrology.
  5. Veganism.
  6. Saying OMG.

She even made a video about it!

But wait! You haven’t seen the scariest part! Who is this person?

Jellooo I’m Bev, I’m a health care provider, I work in a hospital and nursing home. I also earn my degree in Bachelor of Science major in Management, I teach academic program to toddlers, children and young adults, I also teach speech to foreign student.

If only she’d move to Indiana, she could run for president someday.

Annoying libertarians

Ah, the funny cartoon yesterday rankled the libertarian contingent again. I’ll explain a few things that will get them fired up even more.

  • Get over yourselves. Mocking libertarians does not bring me a swarm of traffic — you’re like a tiny swarm of self-important rodents who will natter on endlessly in protest, but most normal people laugh once, shrug, and move on. The major traffic-getter on my site yesterday was a post inviting women to express themselves. If all I cared about was sucking in clicks, I’d do that more often; women matter, libertarians are a negligible blip.

  • The funniest thing to me is how quickly libertarians get indignant and demonstrate an absence of a sense of humor. It never fails. Make a joke about libertarians, and they don’t get it, but they will sit there and explain how the joke doesn’t work, endlessly, becoming a new variant of the joke themselves. Please, get some self-awareness!

  • There were the typical claims that government would be at the mercy of whatever rascal we elect to the presidency. I would like more government. A well-regulated civil service would be an excellent buffer against the whims of the executive. Why do you anti-government guys always think so simplistically, assuming that big government means concentrating more power in the hands of an autocratic individual? You do realize that we live in a representative democracy with more than one person at the top, and that non-partisan institutions within government can function without an overlord?

  • The alternative to regulation of basic services by the government is privatizing them and giving more power to corporations — whose goal is to increase profits. Personally, I like to see the Invisible Hand shackled and restricted to doing useful work, rather than picking pockets.

  • I actually do like civil libertarians very much. The rights of the individual to think and speak as he or she pleases should not be compromised. However, the social machinery that maximizes civil liberties is very much the product of cooperation and secular social institutions. Most of the oblivious libertarians — the ones who can’t get the joke — don’t realize that their advocacy of mindless laissez-faire capitalism and unfettered industry is about destroying the social fabric that allows each of us to be something more than a serf. Freedom is worth paying taxes for, unless all you think freedom is about is gathering money.

My apologies for the link to the malware site in that post, too, and I’ve removed it for now. I hope the bad stuff gets fixed soon; Barry Deutsch at leftycartoons.com (right now, go there at your peril) actually has page after page of absolutely marvelous cartoons that will make pro-union, pro-equality, pro-socialism, pro-goodness and light people feel all happy and warm.