Saturday, 27 August 2011
Friday, 26 August 2011
Andrew O'Hehir is, let's just say, not my favorite movie reviewer. That's no big deal. However, in a review of Colombiana, he responds to Colombians complaining that the film unfairly depicts Colombia by writing
Of course, it's precisely the complaint of the Colombians who are protesting this movie that Colombia is a not a failed state, that surely the whole damn country is not, and that Colombian demonstrates that even educated Americans like O'Hehir don't know any better. He appears to be proving that point. I'm not qualified to make the case for Colombia as an improving nation, but the case is out there for you to evaluate.
But set aside potential improvements in Colombia's condition. Maybe we should consider why the country has been in such dire straights for so long. Perhaps there's some giant rapacious superpower due north that has explicitly proclaimed its ownership of the hemisphere for centuries that has been causing a little chaos. We could talk specifically about Plan Colombia, which has included funding and arming right wing paramilitary organizations, funneling in money that corrupts police departments and empowers cartels, sending military ordnance into a country that doesn't need any more weapons, and spraying thousands of defenseless people with aerial fumigation of unknown medical consequences and sometimes devastating economic consequences. Or we could go beyond just Plan Colombia and look at our general, decades-long history of manipulation in Colombia and the region, undertaken in large part to secure valuable resources and perpetuate a useless and inhumane drug war. Or we could just talk about the fact that this country can't stop doing cocaine but refuses to decriminalize it, and what that means for Colombia.
You know. If you're into that sort of thing.
One is that if your whole damn country hadn't been a failed state for 20 years or so, you might not have idiots from France like producer/co-writer Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton -- yeah, that's a put-on last name -- using it as a cheap pretext for a trashy and ridiculous blend of "La Femme Nikita," "Scarface" and "Fast Five."Har!
Of course, it's precisely the complaint of the Colombians who are protesting this movie that Colombia is a not a failed state, that surely the whole damn country is not, and that Colombian demonstrates that even educated Americans like O'Hehir don't know any better. He appears to be proving that point. I'm not qualified to make the case for Colombia as an improving nation, but the case is out there for you to evaluate.
But set aside potential improvements in Colombia's condition. Maybe we should consider why the country has been in such dire straights for so long. Perhaps there's some giant rapacious superpower due north that has explicitly proclaimed its ownership of the hemisphere for centuries that has been causing a little chaos. We could talk specifically about Plan Colombia, which has included funding and arming right wing paramilitary organizations, funneling in money that corrupts police departments and empowers cartels, sending military ordnance into a country that doesn't need any more weapons, and spraying thousands of defenseless people with aerial fumigation of unknown medical consequences and sometimes devastating economic consequences. Or we could go beyond just Plan Colombia and look at our general, decades-long history of manipulation in Colombia and the region, undertaken in large part to secure valuable resources and perpetuate a useless and inhumane drug war. Or we could just talk about the fact that this country can't stop doing cocaine but refuses to decriminalize it, and what that means for Colombia.
You know. If you're into that sort of thing.
Thursday, 25 August 2011
I really appreciate Pascal Emmanuel Gobry for just straight laying the neoliberal antipathy for democracy out there.
Gobry claims, with dubious evidence, that the French economy is on a precipice, and that if it fails the world will fail, and so France must reform. His preferred reforms are your standard neoliberal boilerplate, which has the usual dissonant logic going-- the US economy is on a precipice, and the US has pursued the neoliberal agenda for 30 years. Remember, though, that elites have decided that neoliberalism can never fail, and so there is no reason for concern. Three decades of committed deregulation and capture of our government by rapacious plutocrats and our economy being brought to the verge of total destruction have nothing to do with each other. Let's mimic the policies that have destroyed working conditions for the American people, created spiraling inequality, gutted our regulatory infrastructure, and handed more and more power to the richest few.
But this agenda would be deeply unpopular with the French people. Gobry himself acknowledges this. So what to do? Compromise? Do the hard work of advancing a position politically? Or, heaven forbid, accept that not everyone in the world is on board with the neoliberal platform, and stop acting as if the opinion of policy elites should be enough to counteract the will of the people.
Gobry picks a different option: literal fascism. Think I exaggerate? Look and be amazed. He wants Sarkozy to pass new regulatory and tax schemes "by decree" and to use the emergency wartime powers most countries have to enforce them. Yes, he wants to be able to institute martial law in order to force the neoliberal policy platform onto an unwilling populace.
Now, I ask you: can you imagine if some leftist advocated a similar thing? Can you imagine the reaction? The backlash? This isn't somebody noodling on a Blogger blog like me. This is a guy at Business Insider, a mainstream, professional publication. He's calling for military takeover to force the people to adopt the policies he wants. If someone advocated doing this in a professional publication in order to pass a carbon tax or single payer health care, I can't even imagine the reaction. Liberal bloggers would be leaping to distance themselves from such a statement. Every conservative would crawl out of the woodwork to say that this is how all liberals secretly think. It would be pandemonium.
This should be disqualifying for taking Gobry seriously, but I imagine it won't do any damage to his reputation at all.
Think about how the blogosphere creates insiders and punishes those who don't play the game. Look at Glenn Greenwald. Everybody acknowledges his work as prominent and important. But most in the Cool Kid Club talk about Greenwald as if he's some tiring fact of life to be ignored if possible and argued with only as a last resort. I'm hardly a blogging insider but even I know how much most liberal bloggers grumble about him privately. Why? Because he keeps bringing up politically inconvenient realities; because he isn't afraid to talk about morality and character; because he doesn't pretend that politics is a game; because he calls people on their petty hypocrisies. He violates the code. That's enough to earn him a lot of derision.
Well, here we have somebody who is advocating the use of emergency military powers to suppress democracy. Will people react to that? Or does the fact that Gobry is pushing the elite line mean that they won't condemn him at all? Gobry says "We find themselves in the same position today: what is desperately needed is decisive action and a wholesale abandonment of old, discredited ideas, in this case austerity." Actually, in this case, the "discredited idea" is democracy.
This sort of talk should scare you, but it's actually not that far out of the mainstream. Gobry is taking this to an extreme, but it's an extreme derived from the logical progression of neoliberal ideas. One of the things that makes neoliberals so creepy is that they always, always talk as if their ideas are agreed to by everyone when in fact they are and always have been resisted. Consensus and democracy have nothing to do with each other. Dissent is the life blood of democracy. But everywhere, always, neoliberals of all three flavors (called progressives, libertarians, and conservatives here in this country) insist that There Is No Alternative. You can see this attitude play out in the enforcement of the neoliberal agenda in the second and third world, where countries face coercion and violent reprisals from the first world nations if they don't get in line. You can see it in the struggle of indigenous people, like with the Zapatistas, who rose up against globalization and were swiftly branded terrorists. And you can see it in the way a small, elite group of bloggers, totally disconnected from the day to day lives of average Americans, assert the privilege of their access and their affluence and refuse to countenance contrary opinion.
As I am someone who believes that words have meanings and am not afraid to use them, I will say that this post (published at Business Insider!) is Gobry coming out as a totalitarian. But in a deeper sense, he's just taking the neoliberal attitude towards dissent to its logical conclusions.
Update: I sense I'm not being very articulate in the connection I'm trying to make here, so let me be more clear. I'm not the discourse police and my point isn't at all that PEG should, I don't know, get fired from Business Insider or something. I'm just saying that I'm consistently amazed by what does and does not get people put on the blogosphere shit list.
The point about Greenwald is that he's a guy who has undertaken a project I once thought any politically minded person would endorse, protecting civil liberties, and yet gets a lot of flak constantly. Here you have someone arguing for using emergency wartime powers to pass a set of laws and policies that many citizens would resist. That's pretty extreme! Yet I doubt that there will be any fuss about it at all.
Update II: Here's a point a couple commenters have made, as voiced by Anonymous:
Gobry claims, with dubious evidence, that the French economy is on a precipice, and that if it fails the world will fail, and so France must reform. His preferred reforms are your standard neoliberal boilerplate, which has the usual dissonant logic going-- the US economy is on a precipice, and the US has pursued the neoliberal agenda for 30 years. Remember, though, that elites have decided that neoliberalism can never fail, and so there is no reason for concern. Three decades of committed deregulation and capture of our government by rapacious plutocrats and our economy being brought to the verge of total destruction have nothing to do with each other. Let's mimic the policies that have destroyed working conditions for the American people, created spiraling inequality, gutted our regulatory infrastructure, and handed more and more power to the richest few.
But this agenda would be deeply unpopular with the French people. Gobry himself acknowledges this. So what to do? Compromise? Do the hard work of advancing a position politically? Or, heaven forbid, accept that not everyone in the world is on board with the neoliberal platform, and stop acting as if the opinion of policy elites should be enough to counteract the will of the people.
Gobry picks a different option: literal fascism. Think I exaggerate? Look and be amazed. He wants Sarkozy to pass new regulatory and tax schemes "by decree" and to use the emergency wartime powers most countries have to enforce them. Yes, he wants to be able to institute martial law in order to force the neoliberal policy platform onto an unwilling populace.
Now, I ask you: can you imagine if some leftist advocated a similar thing? Can you imagine the reaction? The backlash? This isn't somebody noodling on a Blogger blog like me. This is a guy at Business Insider, a mainstream, professional publication. He's calling for military takeover to force the people to adopt the policies he wants. If someone advocated doing this in a professional publication in order to pass a carbon tax or single payer health care, I can't even imagine the reaction. Liberal bloggers would be leaping to distance themselves from such a statement. Every conservative would crawl out of the woodwork to say that this is how all liberals secretly think. It would be pandemonium.
This should be disqualifying for taking Gobry seriously, but I imagine it won't do any damage to his reputation at all.
Think about how the blogosphere creates insiders and punishes those who don't play the game. Look at Glenn Greenwald. Everybody acknowledges his work as prominent and important. But most in the Cool Kid Club talk about Greenwald as if he's some tiring fact of life to be ignored if possible and argued with only as a last resort. I'm hardly a blogging insider but even I know how much most liberal bloggers grumble about him privately. Why? Because he keeps bringing up politically inconvenient realities; because he isn't afraid to talk about morality and character; because he doesn't pretend that politics is a game; because he calls people on their petty hypocrisies. He violates the code. That's enough to earn him a lot of derision.
Well, here we have somebody who is advocating the use of emergency military powers to suppress democracy. Will people react to that? Or does the fact that Gobry is pushing the elite line mean that they won't condemn him at all? Gobry says "We find themselves in the same position today: what is desperately needed is decisive action and a wholesale abandonment of old, discredited ideas, in this case austerity." Actually, in this case, the "discredited idea" is democracy.
This sort of talk should scare you, but it's actually not that far out of the mainstream. Gobry is taking this to an extreme, but it's an extreme derived from the logical progression of neoliberal ideas. One of the things that makes neoliberals so creepy is that they always, always talk as if their ideas are agreed to by everyone when in fact they are and always have been resisted. Consensus and democracy have nothing to do with each other. Dissent is the life blood of democracy. But everywhere, always, neoliberals of all three flavors (called progressives, libertarians, and conservatives here in this country) insist that There Is No Alternative. You can see this attitude play out in the enforcement of the neoliberal agenda in the second and third world, where countries face coercion and violent reprisals from the first world nations if they don't get in line. You can see it in the struggle of indigenous people, like with the Zapatistas, who rose up against globalization and were swiftly branded terrorists. And you can see it in the way a small, elite group of bloggers, totally disconnected from the day to day lives of average Americans, assert the privilege of their access and their affluence and refuse to countenance contrary opinion.
As I am someone who believes that words have meanings and am not afraid to use them, I will say that this post (published at Business Insider!) is Gobry coming out as a totalitarian. But in a deeper sense, he's just taking the neoliberal attitude towards dissent to its logical conclusions.
Update: I sense I'm not being very articulate in the connection I'm trying to make here, so let me be more clear. I'm not the discourse police and my point isn't at all that PEG should, I don't know, get fired from Business Insider or something. I'm just saying that I'm consistently amazed by what does and does not get people put on the blogosphere shit list.
The point about Greenwald is that he's a guy who has undertaken a project I once thought any politically minded person would endorse, protecting civil liberties, and yet gets a lot of flak constantly. Here you have someone arguing for using emergency wartime powers to pass a set of laws and policies that many citizens would resist. That's pretty extreme! Yet I doubt that there will be any fuss about it at all.
Update II: Here's a point a couple commenters have made, as voiced by Anonymous:
Not to be too charitable to PEG, but if you actually RTFC, Article 16 is not about martial law and commandos storming the IRS (or whatever it is in France) - english translation here: http://www.assemblee-nationale.fr/english/8ab.asp
and it ends with
After thirty days of the exercise of such emergency powers, the matter may be referred to the Constitutional Council by the President of the National Assembly, the President of the Senate, sixty Members of the National Assembly or sixty Senators, so as to decide if the conditions laid down in paragraph one still apply....
Wednesday, 24 August 2011
I keep getting comments and emails saying that it was mean to go after Zack Beauchamp because he is inexperienced, or because the person writing presumes that he's young. I have no idea on either front.
I think this sort of thing illustrates the great distance between some of my ideas about what argument is, how democracy works, and what real intellectual respect entails. I have a whole host of complaints about how discussion goes down on blogs, but I'll be brief and just say: when you are overly protective of a writer on the Internet, you inevitably create the impression that the writer needs protecting. So is Zack Beauchamp someone who needs protecting? I'll extend him the preconditional respect of saying that he is not.
I think this sort of thing illustrates the great distance between some of my ideas about what argument is, how democracy works, and what real intellectual respect entails. I have a whole host of complaints about how discussion goes down on blogs, but I'll be brief and just say: when you are overly protective of a writer on the Internet, you inevitably create the impression that the writer needs protecting. So is Zack Beauchamp someone who needs protecting? I'll extend him the preconditional respect of saying that he is not.
Tuesday, 23 August 2011
- William Brafford convincingly swats PEG. He's always been a sharp one.
- Charles Davis tools Radley Balko. When Balko is right (read: writing about drugs), he is so, so right. When wrong-- oof.
- Come September, the supple hair and fashionable glasses of Will Wilkinson will reside at a new venue, where he will doubtless continue to hate liberals far out of proportion with his disagreements with them. Note: the man's a fine, fine illustrator, and I wouldn't give out such praise lightly. Check him out at his new digs starting September 12th.
- Erik Kain, who has paid his fair share of dues and then some in the blogging game, is also not so hot on Zack Beauchamp.
- Karl Smith is one of those lonely voices speaking out against those who keep telling us dissenters that we don't exist.
- Ezra Klein demonstrates what it means to be a contemporary American liberal. He shows that welfare reform was just straight class warfare against the poor, but has to keep that "if" in there. Otherwise, what would the community think?
- Ta-Nehisi Coates again makes a great point and then drowns it in the bathtub of semantics and petty actor sorting. But his commenters loved it!
- IOZ.
Beauchamp rebuts.
Now, if Zack is merely sore because I was being a bit of a jerk, okay. I apologize for being a bit of a jerk. I didn't, actually, mean to suggest that he is actually related to Tina Brown. (In certain technical circles, that is referred to as a "joke.") But if that was a bit too mean, fair enough. And, you know, the True Blood thing was just because he's got kind of a Cajun thing going there. I didn't even really mean it as an insult, and I do think this is more worthwhile an endeavor if you can have a little fun doing it. But names are touchy, I get that.
I have to defend myself: beyond those two things, I don't think I was engaging in name calling. I think I was forcefully replying to someone who was, to my mind, articulating bad arguments and doing so in a way that was dismissive of two bloggers who have invested considerable thought into articulating complex analyses of the Libyan situation.
For substance:
Second: what does Beauchamp think the purpose of the Libyan intervention has been? Is it merely to remove Qaddafi? Of course not. If your goal is to help Barack Obama's electoral chances, then sure, recent events in Libya are looking great. But that's not why we intervened, and it's not the reason people gave, when reading opponents of intervention like me the riot act. The reason was for the good of the Libyan people, for their safety and their freedom. So I ask Mr. Beauchamp: have the safety and freedom of the Libyan people been secured? If they haven't, then what profit is there in responding with such glee towards a temporary and conditional military victory? Beauchamp accused me of merely calling names when I said that he was unconcerned with the plight of the Libyans. But he is proving that point again today; he cares entirely about whether he can use Libya as a cudgel against people he disagrees with and seemingly not at all about whether this will result in a Libya that is safer and freer for most Libyan people. My point is simply that a true concern for Libya just has to compel someone to refrain from declaring victory, as recent history has shown time and again that short term military success and long term humanitarian success are very different things.
Today he's unleashed a rather more disappointing argument. See:
What is so disturbing and so disappointing about Beauchamp's posts today is that he seems to have missed the important point of all of us: if the goal is not to reach short-term military victories, which as any gloss of recent history will show do not always lead to humanitarian gains, but rather to achieve lasting improvements in the well-being and freedom of the Libyan people, then there is nothing yet to celebrate. History is riddled with new orders which ended up just as bad as the first. What makes me deeply uncomfortable with Beauchamp's commentary is that he doesn't even seem to realize that military victory doesn't lead inevitably to humanitarian benefit; or that short term successes can become long term failures; or that oppressed people can turn very quickly into oppressors; or that at the most basic and elementary level, the Libyan conflict is not resolved at all.
I have advice. Here is a response from Daniel Larison that should serve as a model for Beauchamp. It is, typical of Larison, measured and supported by evidence. Again, Beauchamp was mocking Yglesias and Larison for predictions that they themselves weren't making. They were reporting on and responding to the predictions of NATO officials, and the frequently confused positions of the Libyan rebels themselves. As Larison says in his own defense, he was merely echoing Admiral Mike Mullen. Does Beauchamp think that he was in better position to speak on the matter than Admiral Mullen at the time Larison made the original comments? I said that Beauchamp was being dishonest by acting as if Larison and Yglesias were making these predictions in a vaccuum, rather than responding to the statements of senior military officials and political figures. I firmly stand by that opinion.
Incidentally:
I know that the point here is that he didn't, actually, feel bad about my criticism. Fair enough. For what it's worth, I am sorry if Beauchamp felt personally affronted. The point was not that "I don't like him very much," as I hope is clear. I would remind him that he is writing on one of the most popular, influential, and powerful blogs on the Internet. Criticism should and will come.
Now, if Zack is merely sore because I was being a bit of a jerk, okay. I apologize for being a bit of a jerk. I didn't, actually, mean to suggest that he is actually related to Tina Brown. (In certain technical circles, that is referred to as a "joke.") But if that was a bit too mean, fair enough. And, you know, the True Blood thing was just because he's got kind of a Cajun thing going there. I didn't even really mean it as an insult, and I do think this is more worthwhile an endeavor if you can have a little fun doing it. But names are touchy, I get that.
I have to defend myself: beyond those two things, I don't think I was engaging in name calling. I think I was forcefully replying to someone who was, to my mind, articulating bad arguments and doing so in a way that was dismissive of two bloggers who have invested considerable thought into articulating complex analyses of the Libyan situation.
For substance:
Now it should be clear from that excerpt that Matt's endorsing the Guardian article's argument that "bombing alone" will not end the Libya conflict as evidence for one of his own claim about air power. And the Guardian authors don't mean by that "bombing won't be able to produce a just post-war order" - they mean NATO will not be able to produce a military solution.But this is precisely the point. What does "providing a military solution" even mean? Surely the military goals of ousting Qaddafi and taking Tripoli are important. But, first-- it is not clear that this has been accomplished. Does Beauchamp not think that this is a time for modesty in our descriptions of what is happening? Does he see no need for prudence in assessing a shifting and incredibly complex military situation? Events on the ground are still unfolding. What virtue is there in declaring a "win" now? I understand that politics are made of childish stuff, but there is no need for us to pretend as if the short term political consequences for Barack Obama are the most important thing, or even an important thing. And surely the kind of blogocentric axe grinding he is participating in is ultimately of little importance. If he were to stop feeling aggrieved for a moment and actually think it over he'd likely see that.
Second: what does Beauchamp think the purpose of the Libyan intervention has been? Is it merely to remove Qaddafi? Of course not. If your goal is to help Barack Obama's electoral chances, then sure, recent events in Libya are looking great. But that's not why we intervened, and it's not the reason people gave, when reading opponents of intervention like me the riot act. The reason was for the good of the Libyan people, for their safety and their freedom. So I ask Mr. Beauchamp: have the safety and freedom of the Libyan people been secured? If they haven't, then what profit is there in responding with such glee towards a temporary and conditional military victory? Beauchamp accused me of merely calling names when I said that he was unconcerned with the plight of the Libyans. But he is proving that point again today; he cares entirely about whether he can use Libya as a cudgel against people he disagrees with and seemingly not at all about whether this will result in a Libya that is safer and freer for most Libyan people. My point is simply that a true concern for Libya just has to compel someone to refrain from declaring victory, as recent history has shown time and again that short term military success and long term humanitarian success are very different things.
Today he's unleashed a rather more disappointing argument. See:
Will everyone who said that liberal interventionists "lost all credibility" after the Iraq War, and hence should never be listened to again, renounce their own credibility after predicting Qaddafi would fall? I'm not holding my breath, but I really hope pundits will think twice about essentially calling for other writers to be shunned by all right-thinking people based on one data point. Let's judge ideas on their merit, not the identity of the person propounding them.I hope Zack is aware that all the terrible shit went down in Iraq after Bagdhad fell. I mean goodness gracious. This thoroughly misses the point. The large majority of critics of intervention weren't criticizing out of a conviction that the rebels had no chance to win. (I'd appreciate links if he thinks they were!) Rather, they were pointing out that military superiority can lead to lots of destruction but is often entirely incapable of reaching satisfying conclusions for peace and democracy. You can check my own record if you want: the concern has always been equally about what happens after the fall of Qaddafi. Beauchamp seems supremely confident that he has identified the good guys and the bad guys in the Libyan. But actual human life does not operate that way. Witness Kosovo:
But Kouchner quickly discovered that victims could be very bad. There was an extraordinary range of ethnic groups in Kosovo.I have a distinct lack of regard for Muamar Qaddafi and a serious moral and political investment in the idea of revolution. But I can't pretend that this revolution will not devolve into civil war, or lead to a new repressive regime, or collapse the state, or whatever else.
There were:
Muslim Albanians
Orthodox Serbs
Roman Catholic Serbs
Serbian-speaking Muslim Egyptians
Albanian-speaking Muslim Gypsies - Ashkalis
Albanian-speaking Christian Gypsies - Goranis
And even - Pro-Serbian Turkish-speaking Turks
They all had vendettas with each other - which meant that they were both victims and horrible victimizers at the same time.
It began to be obvious that getting rid of evil didn't always lead to the simple triumph of goodness.
What is so disturbing and so disappointing about Beauchamp's posts today is that he seems to have missed the important point of all of us: if the goal is not to reach short-term military victories, which as any gloss of recent history will show do not always lead to humanitarian gains, but rather to achieve lasting improvements in the well-being and freedom of the Libyan people, then there is nothing yet to celebrate. History is riddled with new orders which ended up just as bad as the first. What makes me deeply uncomfortable with Beauchamp's commentary is that he doesn't even seem to realize that military victory doesn't lead inevitably to humanitarian benefit; or that short term successes can become long term failures; or that oppressed people can turn very quickly into oppressors; or that at the most basic and elementary level, the Libyan conflict is not resolved at all.
I have advice. Here is a response from Daniel Larison that should serve as a model for Beauchamp. It is, typical of Larison, measured and supported by evidence. Again, Beauchamp was mocking Yglesias and Larison for predictions that they themselves weren't making. They were reporting on and responding to the predictions of NATO officials, and the frequently confused positions of the Libyan rebels themselves. As Larison says in his own defense, he was merely echoing Admiral Mike Mullen. Does Beauchamp think that he was in better position to speak on the matter than Admiral Mullen at the time Larison made the original comments? I said that Beauchamp was being dishonest by acting as if Larison and Yglesias were making these predictions in a vaccuum, rather than responding to the statements of senior military officials and political figures. I firmly stand by that opinion.
Incidentally:
I know that the point here is that he didn't, actually, feel bad about my criticism. Fair enough. For what it's worth, I am sorry if Beauchamp felt personally affronted. The point was not that "I don't like him very much," as I hope is clear. I would remind him that he is writing on one of the most popular, influential, and powerful blogs on the Internet. Criticism should and will come.
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