surely it is our words, not our violence, that causes this violence

All the respectable liberals are supposed to be blaming the violent rhetoric of the political class for the Arizona killings, presumably because that makes it all the Republicans' fault. Mister Smith takes a swipe at this, as does IOZ. It strikes me that Arthur Silber had the best response, but it was written almost four years ago.

If the question is what does the US political class do that inspires violence, I suppose their violent rhetoric might be a concern, but surely a distant one.

We've bombed, invaded, and occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, and we're threatening Iran with the same. We're conducting half-secret wars in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and who knows where else. Hundreds of thousands of people, the vast majority non-combatants, are dead as a result. We provide weapons and support for brutal regimes around the world and flagrantly disregard the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. We spend more money on war than the rest of the world combined (while our healthcare system is a joke, and our education system and infrastructure rots away). Thousands die and millions more are in cages because of our stupid war on drugs. We torture and kill prisoners, including our own citizens.

Insane violence is what the US political class is all about.

update: good stuff, Jack Crow

Pete Stark backs down

Congressman Pete Stark (who previously earned See For Yourself acclaim for making his atheism public) got pissed off last week and started acting crazy. He actually told the truth. Obviously the truth is the last thing Congress wants its member to be telling us, so 173 of them voted to censure him. For some strange reason 196 voted against and the motion failed, but he gave a tearful apology anyway. (Maybe he accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.)

They'll stop you from speaking out against an illegal war, but certainly won't do anything to stop the illegal war itself. They make a big fuss about the style of the complainer and ignore the substance of the complaint. The lightning rod "poor form" diversion strategy succeeds again.

Winter Patriot has written the apology that Stark should have delivered. Go read it.

Even if they weren't so wrong, they're still assholes

Politics aside, the Graeme Frost case demonstrates the true depth of the health care crisis: every other advanced country has universal health insurance, but in America, insurance is now out of reach for many hard-working families, even if they have incomes some might call middle-class.

And there’s one more point that should not be forgotten: ultimately, this isn’t about the Frost parents. It’s about Graeme Frost and his sister.

I don’t know about you, but I think American children who need medical care should get it, period. Even if you think adults have made bad choices — a baseless smear in the case of the Frosts, but put that on one side — only a truly vicious political movement would respond by punishing their injured children.

The whole thing is pretty good.

talking myself in circles about healthcare reform

Now having identified the perverse tactics of the right as lightning rods to distract from the main issue, health care for children, I suppose I ought not let them succeed, and spend some time contemplating the main issue. Honestly, I don't know much about it. I see it a small step of the battle for socialized medicine, and I don't know what to think about that either.

It seems to me that other nations are getting better results and spending a lot less money with a more nationalized system. It seems to me that insurance companies are getting fat off a steady flow administrative fees, and siphoning back some of that loot to the politicians to make sure they don't turn off the spigot. So it seems like turning off that flow and moving towards a more efficient system would be the right thing to do. But it also seems to me that more government power and bureaucracy are likely to be quite bad for everyone, given how the government has managed to turn basically everything they touch into a machine to make more money for rich people with utter disregard for the welfare of the population as a whole.

So I think essentially the question is: would a national single-payer healthcare system be a good thing, given that it will be run by this government? Some kind of idealism versus realism question. And of course it is just some incremental change in a system that basically needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. Are any of these kinds of incremental changes useful? I don't even know how to evaluate these questions, and I imagine I sound pretty naive and pathetic. As a result I'm pretty ambivalent on the issue.

Ignorance. I guess that's why we'd rather focus on the lightning rods; it is much simpler to figure out what is right and wrong there.

I fell for it

All of this disgusting bullshit was just another right-wing lightning rod.

ps - Rush Limbaugh is such a disgusting liar it makes my eyes bleed.

WHAT THE FUCK ELSE DO YOU WANT, ASSHOLE

Look at this fucking idiot.

Novak sits around complaining about how mean we are and how nasty our words are.

His president is starting wars of aggression against countries that pose us no threat, torturing captives, suspending habeas corpus, spying on American people, pardoning felons on his own staff, and breaking American and international laws left and right, all with Novak's gleeful support, but woman and bloggers are just so fucking vitriolic. What a disgusting person he is.

What sane person responds to the madness of our government and the idiocy of our press with anything other than outrage? How the fuck else am I supposed to respond? Dick fucking Cheney says that he doesn't have to follow the rules of the executive branch because he's not in the executive branch and I'm supposed to treat that with something other than scorn? Every single fucking argument these people make is already filled with scorn. They scorn reality. They have contempt for laws. They don't give a fuck about anything but their own power, and yet all this fucking idiot can say is that the critics are just so mean. Fuck you, Bob Novak.

distraction as policy

"POOR FORM!" strikes again.

Harry Reid says that outgoing Joint Chiefs Chairman Peter Pace was incompetent and is immediately hypocritically attacked by the White House and John McCain, among others, for daring to criticize the military in a time of war. Rather than address the substance of Reid's remarks with an honest analysis of Pace's performance, conservative lunatics and their fawning press have focused on the manufactured scandal about whether criticism of the general was appropriate. In a world where basic respect for logic and consistency is valued, this tactic would be laughed at and then dismissed, along with those who use it. Too bad...

POOR FORM

Another follow-up to this post would be noting another example of the "poor form" diversion.

hard work

I have a lot of political ideas that many people regard as extreme. I of course don't seem them as extreme; I seem them as logical and fair. The only way I see to ever improve things is by convincing people of the need for change, which is really fucking hard.

Recently, I sent a group of friends this article, by two retired military leaders (generals or admirals or something way at the top), about how using torture as a tool in the "war on terror" is a terrible mistake. One of my authoritarian friends replied to all of us essentially with 3 points (I'm respecting his wishes not to use his name or exact words). Here are those 3 points and my responses.

1.) That's crap. It makes sense in theory but isn't practicable.

Yeah those retired generals are crap! But what do you expect from elite military leaders? They're known for thinking in the clouds; certainly after decades of distinguished military service at the highest levels they have no idea what is practicable.

2.) Their ideas hinge on the notion that changing the way we deal with people will change how those people think of America. But those people won't change how they think because their religion dictates their opinion of America.

Yeah some people have this rigidly dogmatic view of America that is instilled in them from a young age. And no matter how much evidence you present those people about the role that America really plays in the world, no evidence could ever change their true-believing religiously-warped minds!

What facts might possibly convince these people to change their minds about America? How about these:

1953 -- Allen and John Foster Dulles, using the spectre of Communism, had convinced President Dwight Eisenhower to authorize the CIA and its operatives to overthrow the immensely popular and democratically elected Prime Minister Mossadegh of Iran (the US, of course, was after Iran's oil, and Mossadegh had nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in an attempt to get fair payment for his country's resource). The CIA installed the dictator Reza Shah. This action did provide the US with oil, but it turned Iranians against the US: it radicalized whole sections of the population. The authoritarian government allowed radical (and anti-American) segments of Islam to flourish. During the coup, some estimates are as high as 10,000 of number of civilians killed; more were killed during the Shah's regime. Read Stephen Kinzer's book All the Shah's Men for more information.

1954 -- Jacobo Arbenz, the democratically elected reformist leader of Guatemala is overthrown by the US. Arbenz had incurred the wrath of the US owned United Fruit Company when he overthrew the corrupt Ubico government (the UFC made a lot of money while Ubico was in power because it was allowed to fix prices, avoid taxation, and exploit its workers). The CIA, in collaboration with the UFC, installed the military dictator Colonel Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in his place. During the overthrow and the subsequent bloody regime of Guzmán, 200,000 civilians were killed.

1963 -- US first assists in installing Ngo Dinh Diem as president of South Vietnam. When he made decisions that were "too independent" and strayed from the US vision of the region, the US backed his assassination. The war that resulted in part from this meddling killed 4 million people in southeast Asia.

1977 -- US backs military rulers of El Salvador. 70,000 Salvadorans killed.

1981 -- The Reagan administration trains and funds contras in Nicaragua, who target civilians in their attacks. 30,000 civilians die.

There are *many* more examples listed here:
www.wordiq.com/definition/List_of_U.S._foreign_interventions_since_1945

Wait those don't sound like the actions of the land of the free do they? The people with a warped view about America are Americans.

For over a hundred years now, starting with the Philippines in 1898, through all those listed above and more, and into Iraq, America has routinely invaded countries for any reason we see fit, which are usually reasons that tend to make our rich people more rich, killing many thousands of non-white poor people in those countries, ruining millions of lives, destroying their homes and resources and farms, and telling them that it is for their own good!

Why don't they love us? Why do they hate us with a religious passion? I can't fucking imagine.

3.) All the hype about torture is going to make the public think that thousands of people are being tortured every day, which isn't the case.

How would we know what is the case when our government won't tell us? They say such information is secret because of national security interests! They refuse to allow any oversight of their behavior, stonewall investigations, ignore Congressional requests, and issue signing statements to reserve their right to ignore laws they don't like.

So what do we know? Quick hits:

• In Iraq as of March 2005:
• As of this week, the military is holding at least 8,900 detainees in the three major prisons, 1,000 more than in late January. Here in Abu Ghraib, where eight American soldiers were charged last year with abusing detainees, 3,160 people are being kept, well above the 2,500 level considered ideal, said Lt. Col. Barry Johnson, a spokesman for the detainee system. The largest center, Camp Bucca in the south, has at least 5,640 detainees.
• Wikipedia says there are 775 detainees in Gitmo.
• We know that there are secret prisons all over the world but we don't know how many people are held there.

So in 5 minutes of Google searching, we're probably holding over 10,000 people related to our actions in the war on terror. And that doesn't even start to count people being held here, like Jose Padilla, who has be held without trial or access to lawyers and tortured for the last 5 years (he got limited access to lawyers about a year ago I think).

Many of these prisoners are being held by a military force where over a third condone torture, and less than half say they'd report unethical behavior of a team member. And commanding this military force is an administration that has explicitly reserved the right to torture, who brag about their use of "aggressive interrogation techniques," and who have repeatedly apprehended and abused innocent "suspects" on the flimsiest of evidence. Other prisoners are shipped to countries known for their human rights violations to be tortured there.

But he assures me that it is "isn't the case" that we're torturing thousands of people a day. Rest easy! We sure wouldn't want to let the generals and their "somewhat crap" opinions give anyone the idea that America is torturing any more than just a few hundreds of people per day!

His response was to tell me how oversimplified and naive my views are. This is from the guy who says that changing how we treat people won't change what they think of us since they hate us because of their religion. Certainly there is a religious aspect to people's opinions, but flatly rejecting the idea that treating people better would improve their opinion of us is about as "oversimplified" and "naive" as you can possibly be.

He also said I "blindly" accepted the ideas I argued for. I presented evidence and reasoning; he simply asserts his beliefs. Yeah, I'm the blind one.

This inevitably degraded into a personal attacks, which led to everyone discussing what an asshole I am. While I regret my inability to ignore personal attacks and understand that it would often be preferable to ignore them, I'm constantly amazed how effectively one can avoid discussing the substance of an issue by criticizing your opponents' form (even when your side initiated the downslide into that poor form). This doesn't just work well in group emails with your high school friends. It is a pervasive technique that I recently mentioned in the lightning rod part of this entry.

Don't want to debate the war? Attack your critics' poor form! Questioning a war is insulting to the troops!

Here's an excellent example of Fox News trying to use this tactic on Christopher Hitchens, and his impressive ability to thunder away despite of it.

It occurs to me

It occurs to me after reading Glenn Greenwald's piece today that there's an element of evil genius to the far right lunatics running this country that I hadn't previously considered. Glenn writes:

The notion that citizens should refrain from questioning, criticizing or objecting to their country's war is -- aside from being patently undemocratic -- also incomparably destructive, as it eliminates (by design) a crucial mechanism for ending a misguided war: namely, the citizenry's demands that its government cease pursuing a failed or pointless war. Despite how destructive is the notion that war criticisms are illegitimate, that idea is widespread among American political leaders and our most "serious" and respected opinion-making elite.

By loudly shouting that anyone who questions the war is a traitorous terrorist-lover, war supporters have brilliantly (and disgustingly) added an extra layer of protection to their beloved war. Now war opponents have to spend extra time and effort and political capital fighting for the idea that war criticism is acceptable and valid and non-traitorous, instead of directing that energy against the war itself. It is chilling to the core that an idea so absurd could be such an effective lightning rod, but that's our America.

Now that I think of it, there are probably lots of other brilliant lightning rod strategies these creeps are using. I mean, Alberto Gonzales is a human lightning rod. And when it was a front page story that Bush had authorized widespread domestic surveillance in clear violation of federal law, he simply asserted that he has the right to break the law. Rather than discussing how he broke the law, we waste time debating if the President has the right to break the law. And Bush keeps saying that refusing to give him a blank check to fund the war is "not supporting the troops." And so everyone wastes time explaining that they support the troops that they could be using saying how Bush's war is a fucking disaster.

Absurd. Brilliant.

---

It occurs to me that it should be abundantly clear to everyone that Jesus didn't actually ever exist. The gospels are fiction, myths composed to fulfill prophesies of ancient texts. None of it makes sense as a real story.

It occurs to me that the tortured logic and absurdity used to defend Christian mythology is remarkably similar to the tortured logic and absurdity used to defend the far right lunatics running the country. C.S. Lewis wrote:

"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg - or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."

Which blowhard Christians have condensed into an in-your-face "LIAR, LUNATIC, OR LORD!? WHICH IS IT???!! HUH?? HUH???" There are so many flawed premises there that it stuns an unprepared rational thinker into temporary submission. Kinda like how wanting to bring soldiers home from war is failing to support the troops. Up is down. Black is white. Liar, lunatic, or Lord?

Absurd. Brilliant.

update: It occurs to me that this is the perfect intersection.

---
It occurs to me, after reading this outrageous article (courtesy of paulp) about a 66 year old psychologist who has been permanently banned from the US for writing about taking LSD 40 years ago, that it is entirely reasonable for me to be concerned about having publicly written some of the things I've written. Things like... how our far right overlords are insane... or how Jesus never existed.