Time Magazine Lies and the Power Perspective

Glenn Greenwald has a recent series of posts showing how Time Magazine publishes blatant lies that serve a clear political agenda (you can go find the links). The basic story is quite familiar; the writer simply asked a few partisans about a pending bill and printed their talking points without verifying the facts at all. The whole premise of his column was built around a blatant lie.

In response to the controversy, the offending writer, Joe Klein, has gone through a series of embarrassing denials, weaseling, and obfuscating. The punchline is his recent quote that "I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who's right." He seems to think this is a defense, because in his pathetic bubble world of elite beltway journalists, investigating reality is not something anyone is expected to be interested in or capable of doing. They just repeat what their sources say.

Political operatives are well aware of this, and hence are unconstrained by truth when they feed information to such "journalists." From some perspectives, this tends to favor Republicans. This isn't incorrect, though other perspectives provide more clarity: the powerful use their power to to their benefit, and the truth is rarely their friend.

college football too

From deep in the belly of the beast, Buckeye country, I risk life and limb by passing along this scathing criticism of the college football industry. A highlight:

From Creation -- Rutgers beat Princeton on Nov. 6, 1869 -- college football has been criticized for being violent, commercial, and a higher-education distraction of the first order. That's why we love it. Not to mention the chance to play war, invent fungible icons, and engage in acceptable homosocial behavior.

The true heroes of the game have not been the players -- usually too young to be interesting in their firefly careers -- but the loud, devious, flim-flam artists who convince the young that winning a game as a group is more important than any kind of individual expression. The most manipulative of them succeed by convincing "their" boys that they are a "band of brothers" who can trust only each other and need to sacrifice their bodies (more and more often now at the expense of their future health) for the greater good. Most college players understand that they are being played, but they do genuinely love the game, the contact, their friends, the steam of the locker-room.

From Pop Warner at the Carlisle Indian School through Bear Bryant at Alabama to Tom Osborne at Nebraska -- who, after I questioned his repeated "forgiveness" of a felonious running back, asked me if I'd rather have the player loose in my neighborhood -- the unstated mission of coaches has been to provide a model for controlling and exploiting young manhood for factories, corporations, and armies.

What Thanksgiving is all about

In 1970 ... the Massachusetts Department of Commerce asked the Wampanoags to select a speaker to mark the 350th anniversary of the Pilgrims' landing. Frank James "was selected but first he had to show a copy of his speech to the white people in charge of the ceremony. When they saw what he had written, they would not allow him to read it." James had written:

Today is a time of celebrating for you... but it is not a time of celebrating for me. It is with heavy heart that I look back upon what happened to my People... The Pilgrims had hardly explored the shores of Cape Cod four days before they had robbed the graves of my ancestors, and stolen their corn, wheat, and beans... Massasoit, the great leaders of the Wampanoag, knew these facts; yet he and his People welcomed and befriended the settlers... , little knowing that... before 50 years were to pass, the Wampanoags... and other Indians living near the settlers would be killed by their guns or dead from diseases that we caught from them... Although our way of life is almost gone and our language is almost extinct, we the Wampanoags still walk the lands of Massachusetts.... What has happened cannot be changed, but today we work towards a better America, a more Indian America where people and nature once again are important.

What the Massachusetts Department of Commerce censored was not some incendiary falsehood but historical truth. Nothing James would have said, had he been allowed to speak, was false, excepting the word wheat.

But truth isn't important as long as we have our feel-good myths.

The true history of Thanksgiving reveals embarrassing facts. The Pilgrims did not introduce the tradition; Eastern Indians had observed autumnal harvest celebrations for centuries. Although George Washington did set aside days for national thanksgiving, our modern celebrations date back only to 1863. During the Civil War, when the Union needed all the patriotism that such an observance might muster, Abraham Lincoln proclaimed Thanksgiving a national holiday. The Pilgrims had nothing to do with it; not until the 1890s did they even get included in the tradition. For that matter, no one used the term Pilgrims until the 1870s.

But if they did have Thanksgiving back in Pilgrim times, what would white people have given thanks for?

King James of England gave thanks to "Almighty God in his great goodness and bounty towards us" for sending "this wonderful plague among the salvages [sic]."

All above quotes are from James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me.

bad movie alert

We Own the Night. Don't see it. (Unless you really love Eva Mendes, in which case leave after the first 2 minutes.)

"I don't read your political blog posts"

1.) "I don't read your political blog posts." I get that line a lot. I'm curious as to how those people expect I'll react to "Hey I don't read the 95% of what you write... you know, the stuff you obviously care a great deal about. But dude that shit about the Ramen was funny! I love Ramen!!!" Thanks. Thanks a lot. (If you've said this to me recently and figure I'm talking about you, I assure you that you're not alone. My readership has changed dramatically since I used to write about poker and movies all the time.)

2.) I had a conversation recently with my mother, who loves George Bush unconditionally, trusts him completely, and fully supports his war-making. Over the course of this conversation it became appallingly obvious how ignorant she was about basic facts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She actually outright refused to believe factual information I provided that casts the actions of our military in a negative light, starkly denying the possibility that it could be true. She knows nothing but Progress and Noble Goals, and unquestioningly assumes the Goodness of The United States of America. She once told me "America is number one." I stopped and asked her what that means exactly. She paused, thought about it for a while, and said "it means that we have the privilege to live in a country that is the best."

--

This is America in a nutshell. We're occupying a country on the other side of the world that we illegally invaded, causing death and injury to untold millions, and nobody wants to know a thing about any of it. The vast majority of us are shockingly ignorant and oblivious, but that doesn't stop huge numbers from blindly supporting our course of destruction anyway, because hey, if we're doing something, it must be right, because we're Number One and being #1 means we're The Best. The Best might occasionally mess something up or have an isolated bad apple, but we're always operating with the Noble Intention of Spreading Freedom, and the net effect of our actions is always Good. (Because we're The Best. The Best = #1. America is #1. )

I don't blame you that you don't want to question these stories. I know you don't want to actually think about this. I know you don't want to discover that your country is a monster and your flag-waving friends are idiots. Do you think I do? Do you think I want to know that my own mother's carefully considered explanation for why America is #1 is that "we're the best"? That she believes every lie from George W. Bush's forked tongue and not a word from mine?

Go read that link. I know you don't want to; that's what the link it actually about, the way we censor our own conversations to avoid unpleasant reality. If you manage to suppress your urge to click elsewhere, if you actually read it, you might realize that by voluntarily ignoring the spread of evil, you're willingly surrendering to it.

Explain this phenomenon to me

I object to Bush's war and they bring up Sandy Berger. This has happened twice now, once with each parent, in incidents almost a full year apart.

[Berger was Bill Clinton's National Security Advisor who later stole classified documents from the National Archives by stuffing them down his pants. The lead prosecutor of the case indicates that he stole only copies and that no original material was destroyed, though this story is hotly disputed by Rush Limbaugh and the like, who claim without much factual basis that something much more sinister was happening.]

Who knows what the hell was going on there, but what kind of derangement is happening when you attempt to compare this to Bush's war crimes? Its like comparing the Columbine shootings to spray-painting some graffiti on a school wall. I can't even fathom what point they're trying to make by bringing it up. "Well you're saying that Bush illegally invaded two sovereign nations causing the slaughter of at least a million people, but this one guy who used to work for Clinton stole some documents!!"

Jesus approves of torturing cats

As long as it makes a musical sound


This makes Hattori so mad:

Ramener

I've been ravaged by illness for the last few days, but that gave my wife the opportunity to introduce me to one of life's great pleasures: adding egg to Ramen Noodles. Just crack one into the boiling water to add extra deliciousness to your salty noodle-water.

someone has my back

fiddle and the drum

more Morton West

If any of the kids from that school happen to see this, for what its worth, I'm with you. You're right and they're wrong. Fuck them.

francais?

Remember, remember the 5th of November

Morton West High School

Dissent will not be tolerated. These poor kids are learning their lesson early. Take a moral stand against authority, and authorities will freak the fuck out. They'll beg and they'll bargain and they'll lie. And then when they don't get what they want, they'll come down on you as hard as they can.

Read Arthur Silber's take on it, and follow his advice and sign a petition urging the school to go easy on these kids.

what is wrong with this God fellow?

God gives an adorable little girl an extra set of arms and legs that threaten her survival, and this is a gift? Of course, God kills women who obey his profoundly inexplicable and murderous rules, so extra arms does sound generous.

Helen Keller and Brian McGough

At the time Keller became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity - this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, wrote that Keller's "mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development."

Keller recalls having met this editor: "At the time the compliments he paid me were so generous that I blush to remember them. But now that I have come out for socialism he reminds me and the public that I am blind and deaf and especially liable to error. I must have shrunk in intelligence during the years since I met him." She went on, "Oh, ridiculous Brooklyn Eagle! Socially blind and deaf, it defends an intolerable system, a system that is the cause of much of the physical blindness and deafness which was are trying to prevent.

- James W. Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me, p22. Thanks to Brice Lord for recommending it.

Rush Limbaugh:

VoteVets.org has -- they describe themselves as an organization comprised of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns who oppose current policy in Iraq. They've put together a TV ad that takes aim at me. This ad's going to run on Fox News, on CNN, it's going to run on WMAL radio in Washington, $60,000 ad buy that's going to run, I think, on our local West Palm Beach station down here. And there's a man identified as Brian McCoff -- McGough -- it's M-C-G-O-U-G-H, I'm not sure how he pronounces it, McGo, McGuff -- I haven't watched the ad.

He discusses his service in Iraq, the wounds he suffered there, and he says to me in this ad, "Until you have the guts to call me a 'phony soldier' to my face, stop telling lies about my service." You know, this is such a blatant use of a valiant combat veteran, lying to him about what I said, then strapping those lies to his belt, sending him out via the media in a TV ad to walk into as many people as he can walk into.

This man will always be a hero to this country with everyone. Whoever pumped him full of these lies about what I said and embarrassed him with this ad has betrayed him. They're not hurting me, they're betraying this soldier. Now, unless he actually believes what he's saying, in which case it's just so unfortunate and sad when the truth of what I said is right out there to be learned.

what is a boy to do?

Before the last discussion got out of hand, there seemed like there was a possibility of discussing the merits of an approach to a moral dilemma. I still want to do that. The question, simply posed, is this: given that this country is hopelessly fucked, what is a boy to do?

You might not be on board with the assumption. I'm slightly more interested in the moral issue, but I understand if you first feel the need to figure out what is so fucked and why it is so hopeless. I've explained this somewhat in this post, which also dealt with the question of what to do about it. Read all the links from that post if you want to try to understand where I'm coming from. Beyond that, authors whose writing has influenced my opinion on the matter are most notably Noam Chomsky and Chalmers Johnson. The scholarship of Jared Diamond and Howard Zinn has also contributed. Arthur Silber and Chris Floyd have blogs that relentlessly document how fucked everything is. My arguments are their arguments.

Now, given all of that... now what? Well on more than one occasion Floyd has looked to Thoreau for guidance on the matter, and found an answer that I find convincing: "How does it become a man to behave toward this American government to-day? I answer that he cannot without disgrace be associated with it." Also in that comment thread I link to three items containing ideas that I also find convincing. I'd recommend reading them. Here they are again: (1) Fuck (2) the (3) system.

Based on all of this, I put forth the idea that refraining from working when I don't need to for my immediate survival, thus minimizing my association with the government by avoiding income tax, is some kind of noble form of principled dissent. I fully acknowledge the possibility that there might be convincing arguments against this line of thinking, I don't see that any of them found their way into that discussion, but that doesn't mean they can't exist.

Here is my version of the argument offered against my idea (as opposed to arguments against the underlying assumption, or arguments about details along the way, or various invective):

But some of the theoretical tax dollars I would be paying to the government would have helped people. Needy people.

I'll assume that it is true that some tax dollars pay for things that help people, but I reject that as a compelling argument against my position on a variety of grounds, some of which I mentioned in the comments:

• Illegitimate acquisition of funds
• Immoral use of funds
• violence
• coercion
• torture
• racist behavior
• environmentally destructive policies
• energy
• transportation
• agriculture

It was pointed out that this method of weighing the good against the bad is a utilitarian approach (at least considering everything but the first bullet, to which I'll return later). In spite of repeated dismissals of the value of measuring utility only in "dollars that help" versus "dollars that hurt," there was extended discussion about how the budget is allocated. It isn't that the information about where tax dollars are spent is useless, but that those values need to be weighted in such a subjective way, and with such disparate coefficients, as to render the actual figures trivial values in the moral calculus.

To translate that to an easy example, consider an organization that collects money from its members, and uses 99% of it to give pennies to people on the streets, and 1% of it to fund the murder of small children. Giving people money helps them, and killing hurts. I don't think anyone would argue that tweaking the percentages even by a orders of magnitude would change the moral righteousness of buying into the organization. No matter how many acts of goodness they do, it will never add up to enough to surpass the evil of murder. Lots of little goods don't outweigh a bit of heinous wrong.

Going back to reality, it is obviously my contention that the way our national budget is spent does more harm than good. Whether we spend 40% or 55% or 80% of our tax revenues on social good doesn't really matter as long as we're spending hundreds of billions of dollars to sustain an illegal and immoral occupation of a nation we illegally and immorally invaded and destroyed, as long as we're holding people without charges, as long as we're torturing people, as long as we're conducting warrantless domestic surveillance, as long as millions of nonviolent drug offenders are imprisoned, as long as we're massively subsidizing unnecessary crops that ravage our environment and our health.

And on top of all that, much of the spending that on the surface may appear to be good is actually significantly less good than it appears, if not outright bad. I consider this to be the case for much of our education spending, as I mentioned, and I suspect that it would be the case for just about everything, including the State Department's involvement in the recent World Radiocommunications Conference, which was mentioned in the comments. I imagine this effect is worse than normal under Bush, whose administration has looked at absolutely every agency, program, and crisis as an opportunity to enrich their supporters, bolster their own power, and bludgeon their opposition, all while purporting to help people. Take, for example, two other purported good efforts mentioned - nuclear nonproliferation and environmental protection programs. It is true that money spent in ways that genuinely advance those causes would be doing good, but any money we spend on them and good that results is completely undermined by the way our "defense" policies and arms manufacturing and sales escalate arms proliferation and the way a multitude of our national policies wreak havoc on the environment. Those "good" programs, placed in proper context, are then nothing but pathetic fig leaves for our leaders to point to and pretend they're doing something to help fix the problem.

So, yeah, I don't think the math adds up favorably for the good of the way our tax dollars are spent. But you can even put every bit of all of this utilitarian rambling aside*, because I don't even think there's any justification for this government taxing my income to begin with, because I basically have no say in how they use it. This goes right to the heart of why everything is fucked about this country: because it is no longer the representative democracy it claims to be, though it still goes through the empty motions. Many of the authors I've mentioned have made this case quite convincingly. This essay is one of the best. I don't recognize any right by which an organization can forcibly take my money and give me effectively no say in how it is used. Even if the utilitarian calculus added up in favor of good, taking my money at gunpoint is wrong. Give your government that power, and sooner or later the people running it will start to use it for their own selfish purposes, not the beautiful noble ones they'll claim. A few centuries into the American experiment, and we're well past that point. I'm not sure that any government has ever stayed on the good side of it for long.

I can't imagine someone putting forth a case that substantially undermines the thrust of what I'm saying here, but I'd much prefer to live in a world where they could. But the idea that my opinion is some immobile monolith is hard for me to take seriously, given how wildly my opinions have changed over the last few years. I'm open to good argument, and I've found it from the authors I've cited. I don't like the idea that I live in a country and world that is so hopelessly fucked, but when someone makes that case convincingly, I'm going to accept it. And then at that point I'll try to figure out something to do about it.

And the last point here is to point out that the tragic absurdity of this quote from the comments:

"what really bothers me about your little plan of not working, and your modus operandi in general, is that if you're so convinced that everything is so fucked then do something positive to fix it, or just remove yourself from it entirely and live in a shed in the woods in Canada."

What on earth do you think I'm doing? I can't magically fix everything by myself, and my whole point is that the whole system is impossibly fucked beyond the point of fixing. The only conceivable way, in my estimation, to make anything better is by tearing the system down, and what I can personally do about that at the moment is minimize my contribution to the system, which is what I'm trying to do by avoiding income (I could also consider taking some of the measures mentioned in the "fuck the system" links above). And beyond that all I can do is try to spread awareness and urge more people to do the same.

Given that I'm doing all I can about it, what is really being said in that quote? "Either fix it or go away" reduces to "get the fuck away and shut the fuck up" The very act of acknowledging the unpleasant reality bothers people, so much so that they prefer not to hear it. This creates a pretty fucking vicious natural support for the abhorrent system to which I'm objecting. That would be funny if it weren't so fucking sad.

And yeah, rarely does a day go by when I don't think about running away from all of it.



* - If you wanted, you could structure this point into the utilitarian framework as well, and that might even be implicitly what I'm doing here. I just think it gets to complicated to write about it that way, because then you're talking about one utilitarian decision set depending on the range of possible outcomes of various possible subsequent utilitarian decision sets.