burn baby burn

I walked by this a few days ago and wished I had a camera.

which victims matter (updated)

In my last post I tried to make a very simple point, which now IOZ has made much more cleverly, and Justin has made much more eloquently. And Ethan found a nice quote that sums it up nicely:

Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

If you read only one of those links, read Justin's, which illustrates this dynamic using two recent killing episodes.

update: Jack Crow too!

a short story

Gabrielle Giffords repeatedly used her considerable political power to support killing people. Then someone tried to kill her.

The end?

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

some people get it

Here are a pair of inspiring blog posts I came across today:

America Via Erica's valedictorian speech (via Ethan)

the Anarchist Mother's unfooding experiment

both of them have other interesting items on their blogs. check them out!

a few unrelated items

On my brief trip to Maryland for the holidays I had a run in with the police. My "suspicious" activity was pulling into the parking lot of a community park at 6pm and walking around near my car. I was detained for questioning for about 20 minutes by an armed asshole who, when I didn't give meaningful answers to his questions and asked if I was free to go, threatened to arrest me, called for backup, and had me thoroughly frisked.

I found Life of Birds at the library, and, well, I couldn't pass that up. Katsu loves it too. He's been staring like that for 10 minutes.

I found some ground water buffalo in the freezer last time I went to Cumbraes, and, well, I couldn't pass that up. I don't think I could blindly distinguish it from beef by texture or flavour. I won't be offering Katsu any of the spaghetti I'm making.

great job david house

one less reason to torture him...

Remember how Bradley Manning is getting mindfucked at least in part because they want him to testify against Julian Assange?

Greenwald's excellent offering of the day preemptively establishes that any testimony Manning could give is worthless, since getting Manning to say that Assange asked him for secret documents doesn't make Assange a fucking spy, it makes him a fucking JOURNALIST! Not only that, what Assange did was clearly LESS harmful - by the standards loudly proclaimed by government and journalists alike - than what the NYT did today. And has done a million other times.

So, there's one less reason for them to keep torturing the kid. I'm sure they've got more though.

more on Wikileaks

Wikileaks is giving me more hope than any political organization/movement I can remember. I see a few main reasons so far to support what they've been doing:

1.) The information they've made public has revealed numerous previously unknown instances of corruption and crime in the US, Australia, Kenya, Iceland, Peru, and other places. I'm particularly impressed with all the dirt they've uncovered about the US Government in their most recent release. A quick sample:

• Bush and Obama used the US State Department to pressure the Spanish and German government not to investigate torture (and death) of their citizens at the hands of US agents.
• Obama is conducting a secret war in Yemen that has killed dozens of civilians, and his State Department has lied to cover it up. One strike targeted a US Citizen, consist with Obama's claimed power that government can order the murder of its own people without any judicial due process.
• Hillary Clinton ordered US diplomats to do all kinds of spying on UN leaders - gathering fingerprints, DNA, iris scans, credit cards, frequent flier numbers, computer passwords and encryption keys, etc. This shit is very illegal under US and international law.

These crimes just wouldn't be uncovered by the mainstream press without Wikileaks. Bush was able to get the New York Times to delay publishing the story (for over a year!) about Bush's illegal warantless surveillance of telephone communication by US citizens. Wikileaks is uncovering similar stories by the handful, and getting the mainstream press to publish them.

It might sound weird to be so enthusiastic about these things. But what I'm enthusiastic about is the disclosure, not the crime. Given that these crimes have happened, it is definitely a positive thing that they be made public, and that wouldn't be happening without Wikileaks.

2.) Their overall strategy is brilliant. Contrary to the popular idea that they won't matter because in response to these leaks, the government will just lock down information even tighter and then go right back to doing the same shit, there is good reason to think that these leaks will genuinely disrupt government operations. This is because government is essentially an authoritarian conspiracy - "conspiracy" not in the crazed Hollywood sense, but with the more mundane meaning of a network of associates working together and whose plans are not fully public. Making leaks a part of their communications environment makes it harder for them to operate, because they either have to become more secretive, making it more difficult to operate and thus less efficient in their operations, or less secretive, in which case their actions will outrage people and inspire greater popular resistance. Wikileaks' tactics have also been brilliant, but I'll just leave it at that for the sake of brevity.

So many groups who claim to care about the kinds of things I care about have no clue how to actually make positive progress in the face of brutal opposition, and in fact they often fail to even recognize who their opposition is. This group seems to have a real sense of how, and against whom, to fight!

3.) The response to what they've done is revealing the ugly workings of power.

• Wikileaks hasn't been convicted of, or even charged with, any crime. Yet the US Government has pressured Amazon.com into cutting off their website (which Amazon hosted). Paypal, Visa, and Mastercard have refused to process funds transfers to Wikileaks. Banks are freezing their assets. These are all lawless, state-sponsored, politically-motivated attacks on a journalist organization.
• Bradley Manning, who allegedly was the source of these leaks from inside the US military, is being held in solitary confinement, and not allowed visitors. This is a severe punishment (certainly psychological torture) despite not having been convicting of any crime, and despite Obama's campaign pledge to increase protections for whistleblowers.
• Various high-ranking government figures are calling for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be killed, labelled a "terrorist", or charged with treason (absurd, as he's not a US citizen) and Assange was apparently also being held in solitary confinement in the UK (on very fishy sounding charges of weird sex crimes). He was recently granted bail release, but the (Swedish?) government is appealing that ruling.
• Media and political figures endlessly repeat a series of blatant falsehoods, e.g. "Wikileaks has blood on its hands," despite not a shred of evidence that anyone has come to harm because of the leaks (aside from the accused leakers), or "Assange isn't a real journalist because he just publishes documents indiscriminately" when in reality, for the recent leaks he's published fewer than 1% of the documents obtained, and only after the New York Times published nearly all of them.
• The US Government has sent absurdly authoritarian memos to all of its employees warning them not to read any of the leaked material, despite being available on literally thousands of websites, including the sites of major newspapers, since the material is still technically "classified." Universities, noble progressive institutions of truth that they are, have sent similar memos to their students. The US Air Force is blocking the New York Times.
• The US Attorney General says the Justice Department is investigating Assange despite him not being American or in America, and despite there being no laws that he's broken.

All of these things are so obviously corrupt and hypocritical. Officials of the US Government, an organization responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and elsewhere over the last few years, accusing anyone of having "blood on their hands" would be funny if it weren't so disgusting.

Again, it might sound weird that I'm so enthusiastic and hopeful about an organization that is being so viciously attacked, and inspiring such a disgusting authoritarian backlash, but the intensity and open criminality of those responses is a measure of how threatening Wikileaks is to the corrupt people who hold all this power. They're willing to look like bloody fools just to try to stop the damage.

4.) Wikileaks is inspiring others to action: not just polite protest, but cyber-attacks on the bottom line of corporations who have sided against Wikileaks. When their site got shut down, thousands of other sites popped up to mirror Wikileaks. Their ability to win other groups to their cause is impressive and encouraging.

There are a few different worthy sub-causes to which I'm considering donating:

• Wikileaks itself
• Julian Assange's defense fund
• Bradley Manning's defense fund

But there are some problems. It is hard to get money to some of these groups because of the crackdown. Also, it would be reasonable to fear reprisal, like being charged with "material defense of terrorism" or some crazy shit like that. I'm trying to get a better feel for my options.

lies are the world

Tell a truth that discomforts power, that challenges its domination over our lives, our discourse, our very thoughts, and you will be destroyed. No institution, public or private, will stand with you; the most powerful entities, public and private, will be arrayed against you, backed up by overwhelming violent force. This is where we are now. This is what we are now.

- Chris Floyd

wikileaks

alternate addresses since the main site is shut down:

http://213.251.145.96/

http://46.59.1.2/

http://wikileaks.ch/

http://www.wikileaks.nl/

glimmers of hope in the madness

Powerful forces in the US government are shutting down Wikileaks. Free speech is under attack. With that in mind, Julian Assange says (emphasis mine):

The west has fiscalised its basic power relationships through a web of contracts, loans, shareholdings, bank holdings and so on. In such an environment it is easy for speech to be "free" because a change in political will rarely leads to any change in these basic instruments. Western speech, as something that rarely has any effect on power, is, like badgers and birds, free. In states like China, there is pervasive censorship, because speech still has power and power is scared of it. We should always look at censorship as an economic signal that reveals the potential power of speech in that jurisdiction. The attacks against us by the US point to a great hope, speech powerful enough to break the fiscal blockade.

on Wikileaks

I love it. Duh.

Beyond that, there's lot to say, much of which has already been said. But you must know what I think, so here's a thought.

First, consider that many of these leaked documents are totally mundane and offer no new information about the foreign policy or military policy of the USG. But the fact that such material is classified in the first place DOES reveal something, a point made by Glenn Greenwald:

It is a "scandal" when the Government conceals things it is doing without any legitimate basis for that secrecy. Each and every document that is revealed by WikiLeaks which has been improperly classified -- whether because it's innocuous or because it is designed to hide wrongdoing -- is itself an improper act, a serious abuse of government secrecy powers. Because we're supposed to have an open government -- a democracy -- everything the Government does is presumptively public, and can be legitimately concealed only with compelling justifications. That's not just some lofty, abstract theory; it's central to having anything resembling "consent of the governed."

The alleged social contract is that we the people will allow the government to have insane amounts of power, as long as they let us know what they're doing with it. "Ok, we'll let you keep a few secrets in some special cases where secrecy is appropriate, but generally you need to be telling us what you're up to." Wikileaks come in and proves that the government is making a mockery of that social contract, by making EVERYTHING secret.

If the government isn't respecting the deal, why should we? And aside from what it is that Wikileaks is exposing, the fact that they're in the exposing business is also a problem. Wikileaks is being defiant, refusing to obey as Michael Smith points out, which might make other people less inclined to obey. Power has good reason to be pissed off at Wikileaks.

And so various high profile political and media figures, like good servants of power, are running around saying we should kill the Wikileaks guy. They're the more fringe crazies like Sarah Palin. What about the more "respectable" figures? Consider what Greenwald pointed out and IOZ emphasized about Wolf Blitzer: he was outraged at the idea that the government failed to keep secrets from him! This is a leading "journalist" and he demands that we all should know LESS about what our government does. Or consider that the Attorney General is running around threatening to prosecute foreign citizens, who aren't on US soil, for violating laws that don't exist:

"To the extent there are gaps in our laws... we will move to close those gaps, which is not to say . . . that anybody at this point, because of their citizenship or their residence, is not a target or a subject of an investigation that's ongoing."

This entire Wikileaks episode should reveal very clearly that the people who control the power of Government and of mainstream media have no respect for democracy (i.e. they want an uninformed citizenry) and have no respect for law (i.e. they break it or change it when it serves their interests). The entire power structure of government and media exists to serve certain interests - not yours.

more of my students ought to hire this guy

what is bo good for?

we lost another great one

Ugh, first Howard Zinn, and now Chalmers Johnson.

let's solve the problem of homelessness by making it illegal!

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!

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.

So, who are these people that "need to be killed"? And doesn't this all sound a bit desperate?

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.

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.

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.

vote for change? impossible

American elections, in a nutshell:

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.

killers and thieves suck each other off

via GG:

MILITARY OFFICERS TOUR JPMORGAN -- JPMorgan Chase yesterday hosted about 30 active duty military officers (across all branches and agencies) from the Marine Corps War College in Quantico, Va. The officers met with senior executives, toured the trading floor and participated in a trading simulation. They discussed recruitment, operations management, strategic communications and the economy. Aside from employees thanking them for their service as they passed by, they also received a standing ovation on the trading floor. Said one officer after a senior JPM exec thanked him for his service: "We promise to keep you safe if you keep this country strong."

communication styles

When I talk to people, I often almost entirely attend to the literal semantic meaning of the words being exchanged. Perhaps I make some adjustment for the literal semantic meaning that was intended, in cases where there was some imprecision of speech. This strikes me as a purely intellectual, conversation as mutualistic truth-seeking kind of approach.

I'm realizing that I ought to pay much more attention to the other kinds of information being conveyed by being more attentive to context, tone, and subtle meanings behind the literal meaning of words. This would be more of a real world, communication as negotiation amidst some shared and some conflicting interests kind of approach.

I suspect that most people do a lot of the latter without even realizing it, guided by emotions rather than conscious deliberation. In fact I'd suspect that the level of emotion in the conversation is a reflection of the extent to which the latter kind of process is happening. I often find myself in a conversation where I'm much less emotional than the other party (and what emotion I do feel or express is often related to the intellectual content!) which is often a source of extreme frustration for that other party. They feel like I don't realize what's really going on, yet are unable to counter when I dutifully and accurately recite the actual words as evidence that I do understand, because their understanding that something more than the words is going on isn't fully conscious.

I'll have to consciously force myself to pay more attention to the other stuff until it comes more naturally; in doing so, I fear I'm being cynical and that I'm risking being regarded as such. Of course I already am regarded as cynical so maybe that's not much of a risk.

asshole toronto cop can't stand being called an asshole, so he files a lawsuit... like an asshole

answering anarchy's toughest challenge

An obvious problem that society has to cope with is that some people just want to hurt other people, to control them, to dominate them, to humiliate them. How does the anarchist propose to deal with that?!!!.

Anarchists propose that we all take note that the state's solution for dealing with these people is to (1) hire all of them, (2) train them to kill people, (3) give them guns, (4) set them loose among the population, and then (5) use its power to shield them from accountability for their unjust use of violence. Anarchists then suggest that maybe the state's solution isn't the best idea!

prison

yeah, i'll just keep going with my wildly unpopular criticism of institutionalized education and say i agree with that perspective.

if i'm correct in assuming that the use of physical or authoritarian coercion is truly avoided except in self-defense or the immediate defense of others, the only thing i can see wrong with this alternative system after a quick perusal is that it isn't the system for every part of everyone's lives. it almost seems unfair to provide people with such an ideal environment, knowing that it will be extremely different to replicate that experience later in their lives.

thanks to dan for the tip.

Dive! Trailer from Compeller on Vimeo.

via

leave those kids alone

I just sat through this talk about how you can maybe treat ADHD by treating associated working memory deficits that pissed me off.

Working memory is supposed to be useful for "goal-directed activity." The behavioural patterns associated with ADHD include things like poor academic performance, not sitting still in class, talking out of turn, and poor performance in memory tasks in the lab. It strikes me that all these behaviours involve goals imposed on them by authorities, authorities who then cite a child's reluctance to subordinate his own goals to the goals of the authority as evidence of a "disorder" that requires pharmacological intervention or behavioural modification therapy. Seems to me like ADHD is an independent-minded social strategy that doesn't fit well with our social system, so we're trying to modify the individuals to fit the system, rather than the other way around. Procrustes smiles.

When I brought this up to the speaker, she cited ADHD kids' poor perform at video games ("their favorite thing to do!") as evidence for inability to perform well at their own goals. I've played video games; sometimes you just don't want to do what you have to do to "win." Sometime you just want to go jump on that thing and see what happens. When I questioned the ecological validity of video games, she said something about how when they play baseball ("what could be more ecologically valid!?") they have trouble remembering how many outs there are or some shit. Uh, maybe they just want to catch and throw a ball without keeping score? God forbid we try to have fun without a way to keep track of winners and losers.

It just strongly felt to me that I was in the presence of the worst evil of academia, where some "expert" is highly paid to make it sound like fucking people up to serve the interests of power is somehow "science" that we should all take seriously and respect. Fuck them.

My friend at Think Love, who studies psychological phenomena related to so-called ADHD, has some further commentary, touching on some important points like how this kind of "science" is funded, and what might constitute natural child behaviour (hint: it doesn't involve sitting still in a classroom all day and filling in the right circles with a #2 pencil).

kids these days

saw 2 fashion statements i thought worthy of mention:

1) thumbs up to the dude wearing a cape. crimson on the inside, purple on the outside, tied around his neck.

2) thumbs down to the girl with a neck piercing. it was like a hook through the skin of her neck, with small balls on either end. there was a hideous scar associated with it, and the piercing had gradually pulled downward, accentuating the wound. wtf?

the wonders of pillage

way to completely ignore the moral argument, journal of wall street!

"isn't it amazing how much variety we have!!"

uh, yeah, and the cost of that variety is borne by peasants in mexico, slaving away in factories because a huge US corporation stole their land to grow cheap ass avocados, and those who will inherit our broken ecosystems, raped to death by monoculture and waste from the transport systems to bring you your fucking avocado to manhattan in february. such people have no power, and certainly don't read the WSJ. no need to consider their perspectives.

embracing my own agency

For most of my formative years, much of my schedule was controlled by authority figures: schools and parents. When I was first in a position to have much greater control over my own time, I squandered it. Then I got a job for a few years, and my time was controlled, my efforts directed. After quitting it, I again squandered my time. I've had a few more cycles like that. Throughout all of this I tended to think of myself as lazy, and wondered how I could fight my own laziness.

It occurs to me now that years and years of taking orders from authority figures really fucked up my ability to manage my time, and to direct my efforts towards goals of my own choosing. Whenever I had time to myself, I just wanted to do nothing, perhaps because I was accustomed to goal-directed activity being unpleasant. And it was unpleasant partially because I wasn't the one setting the goals. I suppose these repeated periods where I squandered my time were when I rejected being an agent for someone else's goals, but was incompetent at setting my own and executing on them.

Anyway, I think that slowly over the last 2 years of grad school I've started to realize that my time is my own, and that the way I spend it today is a big part of what options I'll have tomorrow. (Perhaps "realize" isn't the right term; "act like someone who understands" might be more accurate.) I'm getting better at identifying what options I want to have tomorrow, and how to direct my energies towards those long-term goals. Maybe that's just behaving like a fucking adult, but it's big progress for me, and I feel pretty good about it.

I'm more productive at work now, allocating time both to short-term (applying for funding next month, teaching responsibilities, various new student administrative things) and long-term projects (developing a plan of study for my PhD work), and doing so far more efficiently than ever before, though with plenty of room for improvement. The same is true for home life. For example, last weekend I canned 23 liters of tomato sauce with some friends, to make some delicious local produce last into the winter. These are the kinds of things I've been saying I wanted to do for years now, and now I'm actually doing them. Items on my list for the near future include homebrewing beer and submitting a paper for publication, both of which will happen in the next couple months.

I'm trying to make similar progress with personal relationships. I've had very few deeply satisfying connections with other people, and the few I've had haven't lasted very long, probably at least in part due to my own failure to maintain them. I suspect I'll be able to apply these newfound abilities in this part of life as well. We'll see how it goes.

Aside from the personal utility I'm deriving from these changes, it occurs to me that the explanation I've hypothesized -- years of taking orders from authority stunting my ability to effectively identify and pursue my own goals -- could have enormous social implications if the same dynamic has been playing out for a large population, which - I - suspect - it - has. I'll have to think more about that.

weighing the question: does it matter?

One reason I'm studying what I'm studying is that while I enjoy learning just for its own sake, it feels like masturbation if it doesn't matter. And I know that pursuing science just for its own sake can, and often does, lead to something that matters. But I like studying cooperation and conflict (as opposed to string theory or tactile perception or Russian literature) because, aside from the masturbatory feeling that it is enjoyable and interesting, it also seems to me that this shit matters. It seems clearer in my academic field than in some others (and less than some too) that my work has potential to do some good. I suppose that is a personal judgment, perhaps largely political. My hope is that as I get better at doing the science, I'll also be increasingly able to do it in a way that facilitates positive social change, if only on a tiny scale.

I hope that will be worth the valuable time and energy I'm devoting to the formal process of obtaining the proper credentials required by the gargantuan institutions where most of this kind of work is done. Grad school is good because it, at least in theory, strips education down to its best parts: there is minimal formal coursework, most of which involves small class sizes, and there is lots of independent, self-motivated investigation of topics that interest you (although personal interests have to be weighed against the interests of the people funding the research), under the guidance of experienced and knowledgable supervisors. Grad school is bad because in order to afford it, most of us have to actively participate in the formalization of the worst perversions of education: marking exams and teaching huge introductory courses to masses of students with little interest in the material.

Greenwald on accountability

Greenwald today (emphasis mine):

That Jeffrey Goldberg of all people is the reporter to whom we turn to understand the contours of the Iran debate would be comical if it weren't so troubling, and it illustrates the broader shield from accountability with which political and media elites have vested themselves.

...

Goldberg is still treated as credible and influential despite his unrepentant Iraq falsehoods because the people who determine credibility and influence did essentially the same thing he did, and are thus incentivized to maintain a Look Forward, Not Backward amnesia, ensuring that nobody pays a price for anything that happened (see, as but one example, Slate's Fred Kaplan -- who was also spectacularly wrong in his Iraq-war-enabling reporting -- gushing this week about Goldberg's brilliance: "the best article I've read on the subject -- shrewd and balanced reporting combined with sophisticated analysis of the tangled strategic dilemmas."). Meanwhile, Goldberg's colleague publicly demands that nobody hold Goldberg's past transgressions against him. No profession is more accountability-free than establishment journalism.

Greenwald last month (emphasis mine again):

With the Nasr firing, here we find yet again exposed the central lie of American establishment journalism: that opinion-free "objectivity" is possible, required, and the governing rule. The exact opposite is true: very strong opinions are not only permitted but required. They just have to be the right opinions: the official, approved ones.

It simply isn't true that establishment journalism is accountability-free. It is true that establishment journalists are not accountable to the truth, nor to the public (though they might purport to be). But they are accountable to power, as Octavia Nasr and Ashleigh Banfield and Eason Jordan and Phil Donahue, among others, well know. Thus, nobody is held accountable for the disaster of the Iraq war because the Iraq war wasn't a disaster to the powerful! Further, people are rewarded for their contributions to the Iraq war because the Iraq war was good for the powerful!

I'm sure Glenn knows this because he documented it quite well in the 2nd linked piece, but I feel like his piece today suffers for not explicitly making the connection.

The Matrix

awesome stuff: "there is a superficial reality that is maintained in order to obscure the real workings of modern societies in favor of particular interests"

worship of state

Rolling along with the idea, popular in my head, that statism is a religion, here's the good professor (emphasis mine):

These conventions are so widely observed that further citation is unnecessary. A notable feature throughout is the lack of any felt need to justify the flattering doctrine that in the Third World, the U.S. has sought only to thwart the Russians and their totalitarian goals while upholding its lofty principles as best it can in these grim and trying circumstances. The reasoning is that of NSC 68: these are necessary truths, established by conceptual analysis alone. Scholars who profess a tough-minded "realistic" outlook, scorning sentimentality and emotion, are willing to concede that the facts of history hardly illustrate the commitment of the United States to, as Hans Morgenthau puts it, its "transcendent purpose" -- "the establishment of equality in freedom in America," and indeed throughout the world, since "the arena within which the United States must defend and promote its purpose has become world-wide." But the facts are irrelevant, because, as Morgenthau hastens to explain, to adduce them is "to confound the abuse of reality with reality itself." Reality is the unachieved "national purpose" revealed by "the evidence of history as our minds reflect it," while the actual historical record is merely the abuse of reality, an insignificant artifact. The conventional understanding is therefore self-justifying, immune to external critique.

Though the sophistication of traditional theology is lacking, the similarity of themes and style is striking. It reveals the extent to which worship of the state has become a secular religion for which the intellectuals serve as priesthood. The more primitive sectors of Western culture go further, fostering forms of idolatry in which such sacred symbols as the flag become an object of forced veneration, and the state is called upon to punish any insult to them and to compel children to pledge their devotion daily, while God and State are almost indissolubly linked in public ceremony and discourse, as in James Reston's musings on our devotion to the will of the Creator. It is perhaps not surprising that such crude fanaticism rises to such an extreme in the United States, as an antidote for the unique freedom from state coercion that has been achieved by popular struggle.

greatness and our dim future

Q: What really bothers me about LeBron's decision is the effect it's going to have on the younger generation. Young kids everywhere are going to see this and think that it's better to take the easier road to success instead of taking the chance at being great. If you have a chance at transcendence but it seems just a little too hard or too much for you to handle, then don't go for it. Take the easy road. That's the lesson learned and the trend set for this generation. But then again, this is also the generation that airs out their beef on Facebook/Twitter. This is the generation that could never understand what JFK's quote "We do this not because it is easy, but because it is hard" really means. Hell, this is the generation that thinks the greatest rapper of all time is a Canadian who got famous because he was on a Nickelodeon show. So maybe LeBron's just a product of his time and he's just doing what he thinks is right. But what do I know? Call me old-fashioned, but then again I'm only 21.
-- Sopan, New Brunswick, N.J.

Woe to us! Our youth are going to think that achieving ridiculous wealth by playing a game with your friends is more fun than trying to destroy everyone else the way the "great" Jack Kennedy did! What grim portent!

Sorry, Sopan, I don't call you old-fashioned. I call you brainwashed.

hippies and small farmers have unfair advantage say men with guns

People organize to get the food they want. They leave giant corporations out of the process, so those corporations send men with guns to steal that food. This is called "leveling the playing field for producers" by the government. Ha!

fine, I'll talk about LeBron

Ok despite my constant complaining about the absurdity of professional sports, I still pay some attention to the NBA. And the reactions to this whole LeBron to Miami thing are so fucking stupid. Take this, from a recent Bill Simmons mailbag:

City: Cleveland

Name: Paul
I'm 25 years old. I'm about to re-enlist for another tour overseas with the Army. I have an idea of what matters and what doesn't.

But this still hurts. Nothing stings worse than when one of your own rips your heart out. Not like this ...

Maybe I should do what's best for me and get out of the Army. Unfortunately, loyalty is driving me to do one more tour.

LeBron knows nothing of that word.

Where do I even start? You have an idea what matters because you're part of a death machine that is occupying countries across the globe to serve the interests of American corporations? And despite your brilliant grip on "what matters," you think it matters what uniform a professional basketball player wears? Whether the professional sports team from your city throws a ball through a hoop more often than any other? And "loyalty"? Loyalty to what, your employer? Fuck that.

And then this whole "Jordan would have wanted to beat Wade, not join him" thing is amusing too. You want to know something about Jordan? He's a fucking asshole. His teammates hated him and were terrified of him. He wanted to destroy everyone, and he did. Uh... great? LeBron seems just to be a nice, though hideously self-absorbed, guy who wants to hang out with his friends in a fun city. And this is supposed to be a bad thing? Go play ball in Miami, LeBron! Who fucking cares what Jordan would have done.

(american) football

Stories like this are a big reason why I don't want to support the NFL (or boxing, or MMA, etc) at all. Bad things happen when people repeatedly endure head trauma, and a small number of people are getting very rich off kids destroying their bodies. I don't want to be a part of that.

a few life updates

Not much blogging lately, but here's a few things that are going on in my life:

• I've been spending my work hours writing my thesis, which I'll defend in mid-July. Today I spent the afternoon redoing some statistics that were a bit off, and now I'll have to rethink a section in light of the changes. This section isn't especially important to the thesis as a whole, but it is important to a direction I'd like to take in the future.
• I'll be traveling to my first academic conference and presenting a poster later this month. The poster will focus on the experiment I ran this winter. I've never been to Oregon before.
• I've had all three cats since my ex moved out, but today Hattori goes to live with her. It will be sad to lose him, but we think this is the best possible arrangement for everyone. We'll try it for a few weeks and see how it goes. One potential benefit of his absence is that Horus might be more social once he realizes he doesn't have to hide from Hattori's bullying.
• Softball season is in full, glorious, swing.
• This weekend is the Hamilton Anarchist Bookfair and Dundas Buskerfest!
• I think I'm starting to experience human emotions a few times a week. I kinda like it.

sounds like mexican food

who else had never heard the word "flotilla" before?

Today is 2 years since I moved to Canada. I love it here.

plans

Ah, yes. I am heading to Guelph next year. Sad to leave McMaster, but excited about the next step. I'm working on writing up my thesis for the next few weeks, and will defend it on July 19.

Eat local!

I've made this point before, but while Jon Schwarz is mentioning it, I'll say it again. Changing your eating habits is one of the easiest ways to really make a huge difference in the world. Think about how much money you spend per year on food, and imagine if that amount went into your local community to people growing food in an ethical way, rather than giving it to giant, evil corporations that abuse workers, animals, and the environment to increase profits for the wealthy people that own and manage them. Eat local!

my pain, the world's pain

I've had a rather rough last 6 months, dealing with the collapse of my marriage (I'm doing okay though). During that time, whenever I've read something like this, I've often remembered IOZ's moving thoughts after a break-up he went through. Somehow it helps. I strongly recommend reading it.

NYT sucks

the nyt is a hideous pile of shit.

the entire thing is just copying down what anonymous government officials say and printing it. they give it the title "evidence mounts for taliban role in car bomb plot" when no evidence whatsoever is produced.

plus you get shit like this:

There is no doubt among intelligence officials that the barrage of attacks by C.I.A. drones over the past year has made Pakistan’s Taliban, which goes by the name Tehrik-i-Taliban, increasingly determined to seek revenge by finding any way possible to strike at the United States.

The C.I.A.’s drone program in Pakistan, which was accelerated in 2008 and expanded by President Obama last year, has enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Washington in part because it was perceived as eliminating dangerous militants while keeping Americans safe.

But the attack in December on a C.I.A. base in Afghanistan, and now possibly the failed S.U.V. attack in Manhattan, are reminders that the drones’ very success may be provoking a costly response.

notice anything funny? there's no fucking mention of hundreds of innocent civilians who've been slaughtered by BO's flying death robots.

and this is funny too:

The message may be, “ ‘The U.S. is pounding us with drone attacks, but we’re powerful enough to strike back’; it’s certainly enough to attract ever more recruits to replace those they’re losing,” Mr. Hoffman said.

correct me if i'm wrong, but wasn't the entire plot a huge fucking failure, and the guy who did it a huge fucking moron?

!!!!

girlfriend!

Is there any rhyme or reason to the phenomenon whereby heterosexual women sometimes refer to their same-sex friends as "girlfriends" instead of simply "friends"?

Also, is my question mark at the end of the last sentence supposed to be inside or outside of the quote? [update: outside was right!]

Steal from Work Day!

Is today!

new computer for me

After almost 8 years of faithful service, my Dell desktop is being put out of its misery retired. I finally caved and bought a new computer. Big change for me - I bought a Macbook. So far I like it. If the goal of marketing is to create a blind loyalty to a corporate brand, the Apple people have succeeded. Asking people for advice on whether to get a Mac or a PC is like asking "Jesus or Allah?" But I tried to filter out the religious gunk and get to the substance, so hopefully I made the right choice. If I can make this machine last half as long as the last, I'll be fairly happy.