Monday, November 29, 2010
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
Friday, November 19, 2010
the banality of evil (updated x 2)
How do we spread peace, justice, and sweet freedom to Afghanistan? With "68-ton tanks... propelled by a jet engine and equipped with a 120mm main gun that can destroy a house more than a mile away" of course!
So, who are these people that "need to be killed"? And doesn't this all sound a bit desperate?
Update: Arthur Silber comments on the same article, including a genuine compliment to its author for his fairly straightforward depiction of the evil under discussion. Arthur's entire essay, as always, is well worth reading.
Is this really a good idea? Anonymous officer thinks so!
"The tanks bring awe, shock and firepower," the officer said. "It's pretty significant."
That doesn't sound like a way to win hearts and minds to some people, but anonymous officer knows better, as does his boss:
"Petraeus believes counterinsurgency does not mean just handing out sacks of wheat seed," said a senior officer in Afghanistan. Counterinsurgency "doesn't mean you don't blow up stuff or kill people who need to be killed."
Let's talk about blowing up stuff and killing people. The silly people who's stuff is getting blown up wonder why their stuff is getting blown up, and don't seem to like it.
"Why do you have to blow up so many of our fields and homes?" a farmer from the Arghandab district asked a top NATO general at a recent community meeting.
And we understand farmer's point. But farmer doesn't seem to understand the way anonymous officer does! See, when we blow up farmer's fields and homes, that is a good thing for farmer, because he gets the privilege of filing a complaint!
Although military officials are apologetic in public, they maintain privately that the tactic has a benefit beyond the elimination of insurgent bombs. By making people travel to the district governor's office to submit a claim for damaged property, "in effect, you're connecting the government to the people," the senior officer said.
Maybe we should start blowing stuff up everywhere that the government isn't connected to the people! The people's stuff, of course. Not the government.
Although the officer acknowledged that the use of tanks this many years into the war could be seen as a sign of desperation by some Afghans and Americans, he said they will provide the Marines with an important new tool in missions to flush out pockets of insurgent fighters.
"Pockets of insurgent fighters" are who must be "flushed out." In other words, anyone who doesn't like foreign armies blowing up their fields and homes and slaughtering their family needs to be killed. Why?
...to protect Afghan civilians from insurgents.
Has anyone asked these Afghan civilians what they think? If they want more 68 ton tanks? If they want Petraeus or anonymous officer in their backyard? Of course not. Why ask them when we could just talk to anonymous officer?
Anyway, you might be wondering how Petraeus can get away with this, yet alone live with himself. Don't worry, he's doing just fine!
"Because Petraeus is the author of the COIN [counterinsurgency] manual, he can do whatever he wants. He can manage the optics better than McChrystal could," the adviser said. "If he wants to turn it up to 11, he feels he has the moral authority to do it."He can get away with anything and feels morally justified because he wrote a book about how to kill people, and because he can manage optics. I'm pretty sure that "optics" means The Washington Post.
Update: Arthur Silber comments on the same article, including a genuine compliment to its author for his fairly straightforward depiction of the evil under discussion. Arthur's entire essay, as always, is well worth reading.
Update 2: Yeah, the more I think about it, "optics" means US domestic media - TV networks, local papers - more than the Washington Post. This comment seems right to me.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
how to make things better
I recently suggested to some friends that a way to work towards a more equal society would be to get more involved with their union. This was met with rather vehement objection, on the basis that their union doesn't serve their interests. The more I've thought about this response, the more amazed I am because of how backwards this logic is.
Whether they like it or not, their union is the (strongest) vehicle for collectively representing their interests as employees. The union hasn't served their interests well in the past precisely because a small number of biased people have been making decisions on behalf of a larger group (I know this because I used to be in the same union and had many of the same frustrations as them). So I'm advocating that my friends get more involved so as to make their union more effective at representing their interests.
So basically I'm saying: the current power structures of society don't serve your interests, so you need to work more for your own interests and do less delegating of that work to others.
And they're responding: but those others don't work for my interests.
And they seemed to think that undermined my point!
In retrospect, I think that a big source of confusion is that they, like most North Americans, have only the faintest notion of what democracy actually is, aside from voting. Not because they're stupid, but because they're deluged with propaganda and they have little exposure to genuinely democratic organizations. They have little concept of how people could possibly manage their own affairs rather than letting someone else control things. To them "the union" and "the people who've been leading the union" are indistinguishable - pure authoritarianism. Thus, "getting more involved with the union" doesn't work because they can't imagine that meaning anything other than just doing what the union leaders tell them to do. The idea of working together to force powerful people to respect your interests is just utterly foreign. Again this isn't because they're dumb, but because they've never known anything else.
The topic came up in the first place when I made a broader point about helping people that has been on my mind lately. I noted that, given the existence of human suffering, there are two main ways to make things better. You can either find a suffering person (or people) and try to heal them, or you can address the root causes of that suffering. It turns out that social structures can be pretty strong root causes of suffering. (There's a pretty convincing body of evidence that economic inequality leads to all kinds of nasty shit, see this book for a good start, and so I suggested that if you want to help people, fighting for greater equality is a way to address root causes.) Because there are entrenched interests that will resist changes to social structures, and because working directly with a suffering person can create a more immediate improvement, I argued that the root cause approach is too neglected. (Not to mention that there's more money to be made in treatment!) I think that if people shifted their total helping efforts to do slightly more root cause work (even at the expense of treatment work) I suspect we'd all be better off.
Their resistance to my idea tells me I'm fighting an uphill battle.
Whether they like it or not, their union is the (strongest) vehicle for collectively representing their interests as employees. The union hasn't served their interests well in the past precisely because a small number of biased people have been making decisions on behalf of a larger group (I know this because I used to be in the same union and had many of the same frustrations as them). So I'm advocating that my friends get more involved so as to make their union more effective at representing their interests.
So basically I'm saying: the current power structures of society don't serve your interests, so you need to work more for your own interests and do less delegating of that work to others.
And they're responding: but those others don't work for my interests.
And they seemed to think that undermined my point!
In retrospect, I think that a big source of confusion is that they, like most North Americans, have only the faintest notion of what democracy actually is, aside from voting. Not because they're stupid, but because they're deluged with propaganda and they have little exposure to genuinely democratic organizations. They have little concept of how people could possibly manage their own affairs rather than letting someone else control things. To them "the union" and "the people who've been leading the union" are indistinguishable - pure authoritarianism. Thus, "getting more involved with the union" doesn't work because they can't imagine that meaning anything other than just doing what the union leaders tell them to do. The idea of working together to force powerful people to respect your interests is just utterly foreign. Again this isn't because they're dumb, but because they've never known anything else.
The topic came up in the first place when I made a broader point about helping people that has been on my mind lately. I noted that, given the existence of human suffering, there are two main ways to make things better. You can either find a suffering person (or people) and try to heal them, or you can address the root causes of that suffering. It turns out that social structures can be pretty strong root causes of suffering. (There's a pretty convincing body of evidence that economic inequality leads to all kinds of nasty shit, see this book for a good start, and so I suggested that if you want to help people, fighting for greater equality is a way to address root causes.) Because there are entrenched interests that will resist changes to social structures, and because working directly with a suffering person can create a more immediate improvement, I argued that the root cause approach is too neglected. (Not to mention that there's more money to be made in treatment!) I think that if people shifted their total helping efforts to do slightly more root cause work (even at the expense of treatment work) I suspect we'd all be better off.
Their resistance to my idea tells me I'm fighting an uphill battle.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
art
I love the graffiti around town. If I had a camera, I'd take pictures of it and post it on my blog. But I don't have a camera, so I direct your attention to... Guelph Graffiti Blog! Naturally, this one is my favorite.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
vote for change? impossible
American elections, in a nutshell:
Another key point:
Americans out of work, out of income, out of homes and prospects, and out of hope for their children's careers are angry. But the political system offers them no way of bringing about change. They can change the elected servants of the oligarchs, but they cannot change the policies or the oligarchs.
Another key point:
The control of the oligarchs extends to the media. The Clinton administration permitted a small number of mega-corporations to concentrate the US media in a few hands. Corporate advertising executives, not journalists, control the new American media, and the value of the mega-companies depends on government broadcast licenses. The media's interest is now united with that of the government and the oligarchs.
On top of all the other factors that have made American elections meaningless, voters cannot even get correct information from the media about the problems that they and the country face.
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