The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) is an odd piece of legislation; it was another centrist bit of legislation signed into law by Bill Clinton. I’m not going to say it’s bullshit because it was produced under Clinton. It’s bullshit because it’s American.
Success has many parents, who have PR machines behind them and trumpet it to the skies. Failure is, as they say, an orphan. In the case of Afghanistan, like Iraq, the war party has diligently flicked the remaining scraps of egg from its face and declared everything is the current administration’s fault (for doing exactly what the previous administration was planning to do).
The US political system is incredibly corrupt. There are perhaps a few mere millionaires in congress, but they’re the tip of an iceberg made of shit – it’s their children or spouses that are grabbing money hand over fist. I remember back in the 90s when the US media was all a’cry about the corruption of Saddam Hussein’s children, but they were ham-fisted amateurs compared to the Washington set.
A dozen years ago, I read Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem and that provoked a lengthy peripheral interest in the problem of using legalisms to deal with the unexpectedly nasty monsters that occasionally crop up in humanity. As a moral nihilist [*] the nazi elite seemed tractable to me: they were just a bunch of power-drunk assholes who managed to gain power over a country with a great military, and they went on a great rampage, doing whatever got them off.
The premise of representative democracy is that we have leaders who are tracking the issues that are important to their constitutents, and making the best decisions for them because those constituents don’t have time or inclination to understand those issues and make their own decisions.
This is incredible. On a scale of 0-10 WTFs this is a 10.
This one is simple: people are (with good justification and for good reason) upset that the US is abandoning its Afghan allies, and (with good justification and for good reason) expect them to be torture-slaughtered as soon as the US military is no longer there to protect them.
I’m referring, of course, to humans.
Whoever came up with that stupid, cruel, “boil a frog slowly” story? It’s wrong at many levels.
I used to enjoy Mehdi Hasan’s work at The Intercept. He’s incredibly articulate, he does his research and all that thinky stuff, and he does not tolerate “both sides”-ism or bullshit. He’s climbing his way up the ladder of the media heirarchy, so he’s moved on from The Intercept to his own show on MSNBC.