10 other things that Martin Luther King said

From Jay Smooth.



Happy MLK Jr. day.

Food for thought

In the vein of passing along other people's work or observations, here is a reading list for Barack Obama from the Washington Monthly (it's a great list; in my wildest dreams, I would maybe have time to complete it), and a reader message to TPM on the inauguration, reproduced here in full:

Honestly, my dominant emotion on anticipating this inauguration is melancholy.

It is part of the American national character to imagine a new day, to believe as Ronald Reagan was so fond of saying that "we have it in our power to begin the world over again." Americans are perhaps alone among the world's peoples in believing this, and it may be more true here than it is anywhere else. But it is not entirely true even here,

I rate the symbolic value of Barack Obama's inauguration lower than most; to my mind symbolism without substance is for suckers, and we haven't seen substance from Obama yet. I reserve the right to revise my opinion later, and dearly hope I will be able to, but I cannot forget the staggering failures, the personal unworthiness and systemic decay that have made Obama's accession to the Presidency possible. The first half of the 20th century was a period of great hardship and devastating wars; that the period that succeeded it was marked by a general increase in prosperity and the spread of freedom throughout the world even in the shadow of the greatest threat mankind had ever known was largely due to American power and American leadership.

These trusts were inherited by the last administration and recklessly squandered. America's good name was sullied, her power diminished, and a lot of people got killed. However, it is not just the outgoing President and his administration that have let the country down. Congress, the very heart of the American system of government, has made itself less relevant to national policy, while decadence and corruption have pervaded a culture of a people more capable of seeing the potential of man than any other, but also one prone to conceit and empty self-congratulation.

These are heavy burdens to be inherited by the new President, and not burdens he ought to be expected to bear alone. His challenge, and ours, is a challenge we have made for ourselves, the greatest we have imposed on our own country since the war that almost destroyed it so long ago. I contemplate with melancholy the necessity of meeting that challenge, and the sorely limited resources I have at my disposal to ensure it is met successfully.

Severe own goal

I can't believe this happened. Really? Really, Ehud Olmert?

Condi Rice sponsored a U.N. ceasefire resolution. Olmert wasn't happy. Olmert called Bush, Bush called Rice, Rice abstained from the U.N. vote.

How do I know this is the chain of events? Because Olmert said so in public.

...

So. Condi already just got herself humiliated and backstabbed by Bush (and, it turns out, Olmert) at the U.N. at the end of her tenure as Secretary of State. Now Olmert is going to go out and tell the world that this happened because he "shamed" Bush into it?

Olmert is going to simultaneously humiliate his greatest and staunchest ally and confirm the Arab and global perception that Israel is the tail that is wagging our particular dog?

I don't know what to make of this other than to say that that was incredibly stupid. So stupid was it that I assumed I must have read something wrong at first. Especially given how the Gaza offensive has been going and the timing of this incident, this is going to come back to haunt Israel but good. As Levy wrote (linked above):

This is not a way to publicly treat your friends. What example does this set for Israel with its other friends when the prime minister embarrasses an outgoing president and secretary of state in this way? Message to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton: whatever you do for Israel over the next four to eight years, don’t be surprised if this is the gratitude you get. Not a clever message.

[...]

When world leaders take phone calls from their Israeli counterparts and are convinced to take on-board an Israeli position and act on it, should they now always expect to be similarly publicly humiliated?

Bits and bobs about Gaza

Indonesian reactions to the renewed Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It's worth noting here that Indonesia boasts the largest population of Muslims in the world.


Islam is not an Arab religion; it is a religion. We must remember that, both to avoid counterproductive racialization of the religion and our conflicts with Muslim nations, and to understand the full ramifications of our foreign policies. The Middle East+ (i.e. ME plus Afghanistan, Pakistan) is not the only site of Islam by a long shot.

Meanwhile, Syria sends humanitarian aid to Gaza through a totally reputable Syrian humanitarian organization.

This is, er, not good political news for Israel.

Dammit, when will people learn to privilege their long-term interests over their short-term interests?

Defining terrorism

Nir Rosen in The Guardian:

Terrorism is a normative term and not a descriptive concept. An empty word that means everything and nothing, it is used to describe what the Other does, not what we do. The powerful – whether Israel, America, Russia or China – will always describe their victims' struggle as terrorism, but the destruction of Chechnya, the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, the slow slaughter of the remaining Palestinians, the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan – with the tens of thousands of civilians it has killed … these will never earn the title of terrorism, though civilians were the target and terrorising them was the purpose.

Counterinsurgency, now popular again among in the Pentagon, is another way of saying the suppression of national liberation struggles. Terror and intimidation are as essential to it as is winning hearts and minds.

Normative rules are determined by power relations. Those with power determine what is legal and illegal. They besiege the weak in legal prohibitions to prevent the weak from resisting. For the weak to resist is illegal by definition. Concepts like terrorism are invented and used normatively as if a neutral court had produced them, instead of the oppressors. The danger in this excessive use of legality actually undermines legality, diminishing the credibility of international institutions such as the United Nations. It becomes apparent that the powerful, those who make the rules, insist on legality merely to preserve the power relations that serve them or to maintain their occupation and colonialism.

Attacking civilians is the last, most desperate and basic method of resistance when confronting overwhelming odds and imminent eradication. The Palestinians do not attack Israeli civilians with the expectation that they will destroy Israel. The land of Palestine is being stolen day after day; the Palestinian people is being eradicated day after day. As a result, they respond in whatever way they can to apply pressure on Israel. Colonial powers use civilians strategically, settling them to claim land and dispossess the native population, be they Indians in North America or Palestinians in what is now Israel and the Occupied Territories. When the native population sees that there is an irreversible dynamic that is taking away their land and identity with the support of an overwhelming power, then they are forced to resort to whatever methods of resistance they can.

Not long ago, 19-year-old Qassem al-Mughrabi, a Palestinian man from Jerusalem drove his car into a group of soldiers at an intersection. "The terrorist", as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz called him, was shot and killed. In two separate incidents last July, Palestinians from Jerusalem also used vehicles to attack Israelis. The attackers were not part of an organisation. Although those Palestinian men were also killed, senior Israeli officials called for their homes to be demolished. In a separate incident, Haaretz reported that a Palestinian woman blinded an Israeli soldier in one eye when she threw acid n his face. "The terrorist was arrested by security forces," the paper said. An occupied citizen attacks an occupying soldier, and she is the terrorist?

I don't agree a hundred percent with this, mostly in that I'm not as radical about it as he is. A few points:

1. I believe that there is a useful and meaningful place for the word "terrorism." The main difference between intimidation as practiced by states and their armies and intimidation as practiced by terrorists has to do with power relations and technology. When states do it, it is a military action implemented by a national power against an equivalent or lesser national power or population. It has conventional military technologies and huge resources. When terrorists do it, they are by definition less powerful in the arena of force than their object--that is, they can't invade the object of their terror and just make what they want to happen happen. Their primary tactic is to get what they want through intimidation, whereas a state army uses intimidation among a broader array of tools (subjugation, shaping government policy, trying to win hearts and minds among the population). In addition, terrorists cannot engage on some level of diplomatic equality the way two governments, particularly two governments of similar military strength, can. The terrorists are not a government; there is no reason for a more powerful state to negotiate with them until they can make themselves known and dangerous by posing a threat. Until then, they are only concerned foreign citizens and easily ignorable.

Properly used, "terrorism" is a name for a particular technology or form of implementation, subject to severe military and political asymmetry. This is why terrorism and insurgency--another term for a technology or form of political-military action--are so frequently correlated; they are subject to the same restrictions in terms of power, resources, and legitimacy as a political actor. The distinction between intimidation as practiced by states and intimidation as practiced by small, non-state actors is important and useful. The problem is that "terrorism", predictably, is a highly politicized word that has come to include a negative moral dimension, which means it is very useful for anyone involved in any conflict to describe their opponents as terrorists--which, as we have seen, everyone does. Israelis are terrorists according to Palestinians and vice versa. The U.S. is a terrorist nation according to, well, lots of people, and lots of people are terrorist organizations or nations according to the U.S. The fine line between "terrorist" and "freedom fighter" has been discussed many times before (more on that later).

2. Following on that, and provided that that politicized context is present, I absolutely agree with his assessment of how "terrorism" is defined in practice, which is as any use of force that is inconvenient to the more powerful actor. Since the more powerful actor typically has the sympathy of the media as well as greater control over it, not to mention comity of interests with other powerful actors (for example, the U.S. and E.U. lists of terrorist organizations look pretty similar), it generally gets to dictate these terms more easily. This is the valuable thing about this article--he lays this out incisively and convincingly.

3. The paragraph describing the attacking of civilians as a last, most desperate use of force by people or groups without options seems a little too morally pure, and in places too radical, to me. The fact is that powerful actors with lots of options do it too--this is part of why Rosen is so pissed at Israel. Plus, it is entirely possible to understand why Hamas does what it does, or why groups operating sometimes with Hamas's consent and sometimes not such as Islamic Jihad do what they do (bomb Israel), why it makes sense for them, and why it's even morally understandable (everybody understands frustration and revenge), without declaring it morally justified. This is the difference between compassion, and/or realism, and partisanship.

I find his claim that the Israeli government "uses civilians", by which he means settlers in this instance, a bit far-fetched. Are there elements in the government--or at least in Israeli politics--who still refuse a two-state solution and see the settlers as a means toward eventually eradicating Palestinian territory? Almost certainly. Is that state policy? No. The Israeli government has, in the past, agreed to massively curtail settling and relocate existing settlers, and has in fact done so--at fairly intense political cost--rather recently (was it 2006? Maybe 2005--my memory is not perfect). The radical elements among settlers can safely be said to have gone rogue from the state, and this has been seen when Israeli soldiers attempt to intervene in neighborhood Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. That the state has not yet publicly acknowledged and faced this problem does not make it state policy. The more general version of this claim, that powerful actors use civilians as props in conflicts, is certainly possible and historically documented--I just don't think it applies here.

4. The final paragraph, I think, points to another sloppy elision in the use of the word "terrorist". A terrorist individual or organization has a stated objective, which they attempt to achieve through the planned and organized use of spectacular, pyrotechnic, but small-scale violence (as distinct from military force) and coordinated threats. Most of his examples seem to be instances of very frustrated and, at that moment at least, reckless individuals attacking their oppressors. If it can be proved that these individuals acted at the behest and with the support of actual terrorist organizations; and/or, that they planned these attacks in advance and attempted to extract some kind of concession from their victims before or after the attacks, then they can be said to be terrorists. If these conditions are not present, they are not terrorists; they are violent, and they are quite arguably very amateurish and disorganized freedom fighters.

5. Coming back to the definition of "terrorism", it is important to point out that it is objectively very possible to be freedom fighters and terrorists at the same time--in fact, especially in modern times, it is likely. "Freedom fighter" describes the objective, and "terrorist" the method. Theoretically, one can fight for freedom conventionally, without employing terrorist or guerrilla tactics (I'm having a hard time distinguishing between those two, and I'm pretty sure in practical terms the distinction is entirely moral and subject to the power relations described by Rosen), but that would require a balance of power, popular support, and resources that is almost never present in terrorist/guerrilla situations. Anticolonial struggles could take this form, since it became people's militias against the state, as could conventional civil wars (see the American or Spanish examples), but these circumstances are largely obsolete. At this point, any oppressed group within any state is small enough and oppressed enough that it cannot martial these kinds of resources, OR, in the case of some civil conflicts in Africa that come to mind (Rwanda, the Sudan) the violent group has always chosen to employ terrorist tactics even though it doesn't have to.

Now, an actor with the parity just described that engaged in the kind of horrific and pyrotechnic violence typical of terrorist acts could, I think, be objectively described as morally bankrupt and despicable (shout out to the janjaweed), and treated as such, because it would be engaging in horrific acts when it has other options. The Mongols might be an example of this. I would say, frankly, that Hiroshima or the firebombing of Berlin might count. That's why we have the term "war crime". (Abu Ghraib, anybody? Nazis?) This does not apply to any Palestinian organization, however, no matter how violent and horrific its tactics.

In this sense, then, the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists tends to be whether we like them, and/or whether we dislike the state or people they are attacking. Turkish Kurds are, for some Americans, freedom fighters who sometimes employ regrettable or even terrorist tactics; Islamic Jihad, to many Americans (if many Americans had ever heard of IJ instead of lumping them in with Hamas, as is common), would be terrorists who are, admittedly, in a shitty situation. That's what the many discussions of the line between freedom fighting and terrorism reflect.

Very rarely, of course, freedom fighters adopt the spectacularly nonviolent tactics of Nelson Mandela or Ghandhi. One could argue that these freedom fighters are also terrorists, but the force they bring to bear is not bombs or killings but the threat of total international disgust, divestment, and even military intervention by others to save the peaceful resistance from the violence of the state. However, since I firmly believe that "terrorism" refers properly to particular tactics of force, this would not be terrorism. I'm not sure there's a name for it; "nonviolent resistance" is such a politically and morally sanitary and sugar-laden term that it escapes the pragmatic element of tactics that I want to denote.

The New Year in Gaza

I don't really know what to say about this, other than to lift out these lines:

Adham Khalil from Jabaliya Camp, who blogs at Free Free Palestine, posts a text message he received with special greetings:

Ibrahim a friend sent me a message on my mobile said: look outside .. F16 warplanes are smiling for you, missiles are dancing for you, “Zanannaa” the discovery planes are singing for you, because I have requested them all wishing you “Happy New Year”

Read the whole thing. It pains me how easy it is to forget that two nights ago when I was dancing, this was happening.

ETA: One of the seemingly endless number of poems about land by a Palestinian refugee.

Land
his approach
to love he said
was that of a farmer

most love like
hunters and like
hunters most kill
what they desire

he tills
soil through toes
nose in the wet
earth he waits
prays to the gods
and slowly harvests
thankful
--Suheir Hammad

Like it's normal or something

Friday Fuck Yeah to HGTV for featuring gay couples on their shows without so much as batting an eye about it.

About that...

I linked in my previous post to a story about the Tennessee ash spill. I want to give the issue its own post also.

Here is a good NYT article on what's going on. The excerpt that stands out to me is this:

The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation also released a statement saying there was no indication of risk unless the ash was ingested.

But residents like Deanna Copeland were thinking further into the future.

“Our concern is, what happens if this liquid dries out?” Ms. Copeland said. “There are huge health concerns. It’s going to get in our house. We’re going to breathe it in. It would be like walking through a dust bowl, and we don’t know what’s in the dust.”

A round-the-clock cleanup effort continued on Friday, much of it clearing roads and railway tracks that were blocked by the sludge. Several booms, or skimmers, were installed on nearby rivers to catch floating cenospheres, a valuable component of the ash used to make bowling balls and other manufactured goods. A weir, or underwater dam, that would keep settled ash from moving downstream was about one-fifth completed, T.V.A. officials said.

Some nearby residents said that the authority had done little to address their concerns.

“We’re terribly frustrated,” said Donald Smith, 58, a laboratory facilities manager who lives in the affected area. “It seems like T.V.A. is just throwing darts at the problem, and they don’t have a clue how to really fix it.

“It was nice that they came by to talk to us. They’re making an effort. But what upsets me is they didn’t have a plan in place. Why hadn’t anybody thought, ‘What happens if this thing bursts?’ ”

Residents said they were stunned by the new figure for the size of the spill.

“That’s scary to know that they can be off by that much,” said Angela Spurgeon, whose dock and yard are swamped with ash. “I don’t think it was intentional, but it upsets me to know that a number was given of what the pond could hold, and the number now is more than double.”

That's been bugging me too. There was a number given for how much ash was in the damn pond, and almost twice that much has now flooded one of the fifty states. If someone would bother to explain that, I would be pleased.

In general, as the astute citizens of Tennessee have noted, the lack of any kind of wide-scale plan here is really frightening. I'm not just talking about having a contingency plan in place before this happened; I mean a plan now for how to deal with it going forward, because they're not going to be able to just hose everything down and then forget it. There will probably be environmental contamination for years. It's possible that people would be well advised to move, if only temporarily. (Hopefully they could stay within TN, because from the state's point of view, especially under these economic conditions, they really can't afford to tell people to leave because it's not safe to live in Tennessee.) They're going to have to build a new storage facility. They're going to have to overhaul regulations of the plant (the Governor has promised more oversight). They're going to have to go through the Tennessee Valley Authority, which runs the plant, with a fine-toothed comb and figure out what the hell happened there (how did twice as much ash as was supposed to exist end up in the pond? Why was ash being stored in a facility deemed inappropriate for this type of waste by environmentalists? Why was there no contingency plan? Why is the entire TVA apparently composed of fuckwits?) They're going to have to go through government archives with an equally fine-toothed comb and figure out how these disastrous decisions and gaps in foresight were approved or allowed by the state and, I hope, fire some people and make some rules. If they don't have some sort of office or authority in place for disaster management they need to damn well establish one.

I'm just not seeing any acknowledgement that this cleanup project is going to be a central issue for TN for years going forward and it makes me worried.

And then there's the short term. The TVA has not exactly covered itself in glory here. They have not informed people. They have not even acknowledged that the sludge "might" be toxic. They have not tested the water, or at least they haven't released any findings of such tests. Environmental advocacy groups and activists have been taking matters into their own hands to inform people, sometimes having to correct misinformation from state officials. Also, where the hell are the feds on this? Apparently the EPA is "overseeing the cleanup" and will determine its further involvement "when the extent of the contamination is known." (Same article as at the start of this paragraph.) This is the biggest fucking environmental disaster in the United States, ever in history, and they're not sure if they're going to be needed on this job? Is this not their goddamn purpose?


The thought giving me nightmares here is that this is going to be a slower, lower-profile replay of Katrina--a (sort of) natural disaster that was allowed through negligence, incompetence, and disinterest to kill, injure, sicken, and/or displace far more people than was ever necessary. Except this one isn't all over the nightly news where people can see it.

Link dump

This edition is going to be NYT-heavy. I got my daily headlines last night and wanted to read basically everything.

Eesh. Incredible story from the NYT about unbelievably widespread and blatant corruption in the Afghani government.

Control of the Green Zone in Baghdad was handed off from U.S. to Iraqi control yesterday, although apparently no one cared.

The ash spill in Tennessee just keeps getting worse. I can't figure out why the state or doesn't seem to be moved to do anything about it. They haven't even made public the results of tests of the water supply. Luckily, other groups are doing it anyway.

Originally under the TARP bailout plan, Treasury was supposed to buy up bad mortgages; Paulson decided to just give the banks the money instead. So the Fed has gone ahead and done what Treasury has not, and TPM's Josh Marshall revealed the other day that they've hired four major financial firms to purchase and manage about $400 billion worth of toxic assets. Today, we learn that all four firms--some of which have already received TARP money--refuse to discuss how much they're being paid for the gig.

U.S. manufacturing is at its lowest level in 28 years. For an in-depth look, check out this NYT piece about the domestic steel industry.

The Department of the Interior is in a sorry state post-Bushies, like, it seems, every other department.

The now-familiar move by Russia to cut off Ukraine's gas supply is playing out in a more subtle and interesting dance than usual. It will be very interesting to see how Russia's policies evolve as it becomes more and more cash-strapped as a result of low energy prices.

Where did this obsession with Iran come from? Apparently there are still people in the U.S. political world who think that now would be a great time to go to war with Iran. Unfortunately, those people include former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton in their ranks.

On a fluffier note as we head into the opinion pieces, I had to hand it to Blago: the Burris appointment was politically brilliant if what you want to do is thumb your nose at the world. Unfortunately, it seems to have prompted some backlash: IL lawmakers have moved up their plans for impeachment proceedings. Also at that link: if appointee Roland Burris tries to enter the Senate floor, armed police officers will detain him. This political drama is so delicious it must be bad for me.

The lefty blogosphere and intellectual infrastructurecontinues to pwn the right-wing equivalents.

Krugman on how the Republican Party built a strategy, a party, and a platform out of racial divisions, and (FINALLY, THANK YOU DEMOGRAPHIC TRENDS AND PROGRESSIVE EDUCATION) backed themselves into a corner with it.

Will the Republicans eventually stage a comeback? Yes, of course. But barring some huge missteps by Mr. Obama, that will not happen until they stop whining and look at what really went wrong. And when they do, they will discover that they need to get in touch with the real “real America,” a country that is more diverse, more tolerant, and more demanding of effective government than is dreamt of in their political philosophy.

Larison is still discussing Israel-Palestine at his place, and today he takes on the notion of collective responsibility--that the Palestinians are responsible for the last few years and must take the consequences because they voted Hamas in democratically. Larison completely implodes this idea in its stupidity, and the piece is important reading in its entirety. The thing that bothers me, though, is this: Hamas won a legislative election. They formed a government, yes, but the President was still Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah. While the embargo on Gaza had already begun, what kicked it into its present high gear was the ARMED COUP Hamas perpetrated to completely take over Gaza. Why does no one remember that--or are all Gazans responsible for that too?

I wouldn't say this David Brooks piece is particularly worth reading in its entirety--it's a bit disjointed and I'm not entirely sure what the point is, if he has one--but this bit at the end (paraphrasing someone else, natch) caught my eye--it's been something I've been conceptually groping around for nine months or so.

In the March 12 issue of The New Republic, John Judis gave us an early, brilliant explanation of the Barack Obama phenomenon. America has always had an Adamic tradition, Judis noted, a desire to begin anew. As D. H. Lawrence wrote, America “starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.”

Judis showed how this desire has played out in American literature, from Melville’s Billy Budd to Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, and in politics, from Jackson to Kennedy to Obama. He showed how Obama unconsciously played on the Adamic chords. He concluded on a hopeful but nervous note: “The American instinct to continuously remake ourselves in the image of Adam — to achieve a decisive and final break with history — has periodically proven seductive to voters. And, sometimes, this instinct can produce important, transformative results. Yet the past — in the form of race or war or deeply held partisan animosities — has a way of lingering around.”

Phew. So much to share, so little time.

Vandals at the walls of Rome

I didn't realize people actually thought these things and then got paid to have them printed in newspapers.

The issue of Israel sits at the very apex of the fight to defend civilisation. Those who wish to destroy western civilisation need to destroy the Jews, whose moral precepts formed its foundation stones. The deranged hatred of the Jews lies at the core of the Islamists’ hatred of America, the ‘infidel’ west and modernity, and is the reason why they wish to destroy Israel. Unless people in the west understand that Israel’s fight is their own fight, they will be on the wrong side of the war to defend not just the west but civilisation in general.

Melanie Phillips in the Spectator, quoted by Andrew McCarthy in National Review Online. Good. Fucking. Lord.


Maybe they're pissed off at the West because the West has colonized, exploited, manipulated, and generally fucked the Middle East for the past 100 years or so? No? Okay. Clearly, it's the West's explicitly Jewish basis. I just typed that sentence and I'm fighting the urge to smack myself across the face because it makes. No. Sense.

On a more general note, this whole "clash of civilizations"/"the battle for civilization" formulation makes me absolutely beside myself with annoyance and intellectual disgust. I mean, Jesus, if you're going to be shallow, at least let me wade farther than my goddamn ankles. It's lazy, it's stupid, it's demonstrably false, and any time you try to break it down into anything more specific than that phrase it falls apart in your hands. How do you define a civilization? What separates one from the next?

What the "clash of civilizations" thing is really about is a strategy to take whoever your enemies are as a monolith and define them as not just Other but nearly subhuman--extra-civilization, or that time-honored term, barbarian. We see this word used to describe terrorists, Hamas in particular, the Taliban, and any number of foes all the time. Currently, because the people who use this concept see their world order (or privileged position, depending on how you want to look at it) as under threat from Muslims, civilizations are supposedly based on religion (Islamic civilization, Christian civilization, etc.). At other times cultural practices, or technology, or skin color, or any number of other characteristics have been used to define "civilization" depending on who is seen as "civilized" and who is seen as a danger to them.

Relationship advice FAIL

Dennis "Completely Fuckwitted" Prager is at it again with the long-awaited followup to his last tour de force ("When A Woman Isn't In The Mood: Part I"), "When A Woman Isn't In the Mood: Part II".

Well, my hopes have not been dashed. After Prager's artful plumbing of the male and female natures to explain why women totally need to give their husbands sex whenever they want it because otherwise the poor men will shrivel up and die, I just couldn't WAIT to see how he would explain why it also followed that women need to do so even when they don't feel like having sexytimes. (NB: I will not spend time addressing the stupid and false division of libidinous labor between the genders, because Prager sort of maybe addressed it in Part I and has made quite clear that he will ignore the cases when the roles are reversed. Great, fine, fuck you too, moving on.)

I was rewarded. Money quote:

Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.

What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?

Well, let's see. Unless your wife is a hooker, I have a hard time seeing how on earth these two examples are IN ANY WAY COMPARABLE. If your husband refuses to go to work day after day, your family will eventually not be able to eat. I'm sure Prager can come up with an argument as to how female frigidity will destroy the family relationship, fucking up the kids so badly that they eventually find themselves homeless on the street at the age of 35, but I'm also sure that that argument is really fucking stupid.

Oh, boy, here comes the sidelong swipe at those Humorless Feminists!

Thus, in the past generation we have witnessed the demise of the concept of obligation in personal relations. We have been nurtured in a culture of rights, not a culture of obligations. To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that she can always say “no” -- and that this “no” must be honored -- renders the “property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations. She is simply wise enough to recognize that marriages based on mutual obligations -- as opposed to rights alone and certainly as opposed to moods -- are likely to be the best marriages.

What's at least rhetorically clever about this part is that he manages to couch what he's saying, toward the end, in what sounds like fairly reasonable and realistic statements--that marriages require compromise, that there are obligations involved, and that they should be navigated steadily and without being too subject to caprice.

This is a good point. But note the logic.
A: Women are convinced that being obligated to have sex whenever hubby wants (only married women have this issue of refusing sex, I guess, because if they're unmarried and sexually active they're obviously MASSIVE SLUTS who want it ALL THE TIME) is an invasion of their rights.
B: Women aren't having their rights invaded because they can say no and have that wish respected.
C: BUT they are obligated not to say no by codes of behavior and the paramount importance of keeping hubby happy.

Explain to me how A is different from C again? Is it the assertion that if she does say no her husband shouldn't rape her anyway?

Finally, though, this is the passage that shows that Dennis Prager is living in some kind of crazed fantasy world, possibly with the aid of huge amounts of medication, and he and his conclusions will always be irredeemable:

In the rest of life, not just in marital sex, it is almost always a poor idea to allow feelings or mood to determine one’s behavior. Far wiser is to use behavior to shape one’s feelings. Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving. Act religious, no matter how deep your religious doubts, and you will feel more religious. Act generous even if you have a selfish nature, and you will end with a more a generous nature. With regard to virtually anything in life that is good for us, if we wait until we are in the mood to do it, we will wait too long. [...]

That solution is for a wife who loves her husband -- if she doesn’t love him, mood is not the problem -- to be guided by her mind, not her mood, in deciding whether to deny her husband sex.

A gramme is better than a damn! Now you go out there and fake it, ladies! Fake it good! And then maybe someday we'll all manage to return to the halcyon days of universal emotional, sexual, and social repression commonly known as the 1950s. Bonus: Art Deco homewares!

Thinking Man FAIL

Good lord. The Thinking Man's Top Ten Sex Symbols is, well, a travesty.

I applaud the concept. I really do. But they fail, clearly, at being thinking men. Or, at least, at being non-heteronormative (all women on this list, of course, no homo here), for starters. (If you want to make an all-girl list, cool, but say the thinking straight man's sex symbols and then you get to avoid implying that no gay men are thinking! Bonus!) For the sexism, just see this introductory language:

A man has two minds. The lower mind is a brainless whore excited by any woman with breasts, curves, and a thong. The upper mind, which works with actual grey matter, is more persnickety. The upper mind, when employed, is moved by intelligence, success, power, self-confidence, a smart sense of humor, and, of course, not having a castrating nature.

And that’s the challenge. Can a woman be independent, creative, sharp, witty, strong, and self-empowering without making me feel like she wants to be a man?

Men as brainless animals enslaved by their hormones? Check. Men, even when being totes sensible, needing to be protected (the poor dears) from those scary castrating women? Supercheck. I mean, damn. You're not sexy if you threaten my sense of power (which comes from where? Oh, right, the fact that I'm a dude) AT ALL, girls! I hope you're taking notes!

To wrap up, here's our friendly reminder that anyone who is independent, creative, sharp, strong, and self-empowering clearly is a man or a wannabe man. Because only men are like that, duh! Oh, you chicks are so silly sometimes.


And then you get the comments on each sex symbol. The one that jumped out at me the most was what they had to say about M.I.A.:

"M.I.A. is one of my favorite musicians right now. It would be so fun to travel the world with her, viewing life as one big art project."

For one thing, that's all they had to say. They waxed poetic about any number of other women, but that is the entirety of what they have to say about M.I.A., who to me is far more interesting (and sexy) than Katie Couric. Hell, they talk about Meredith Vieira's SHOES about as much.

For another, I think this gets it entirely wrong. M.I.A. makes art about very real-life issues. Her dad was sort of in the Tamil Tigers. "Paper Planes," as far as I can tell, is entirely about illegal migration and the forms of gangsterdom and black marketeering that pop up in poor and oppressed places and groups. She has sat on buses and watched people shoot each other. She's not just some quaint arty type who "travels the world" (because she's exotic, don't you know) and quirkily sees things as art. She makes interesting art about life. This is the difference between a trust-funded performance artist who sees the significance in EVERYTHING ("It's just so...spontaneous, you know? You never know when art will happen. When I was watching the Orange Revolution from my safe vantage point in the Ritz while smoking Gauloises, I was wishing I could be out there with them just experiencing--for my next piece, of course") and a serious person blessed with talent that allows them to translate complicated and difficult experience into consumable art. It's, you know, an important difference. It is arguably a big part of what makes M.I.A. sexy, but screw that, Thinking Men--she's so ARTY! She can tell you the crazy shit she sees while you stare at her tits!

Finally, for a hint of general all-around crappiness, note their explicit congratulation of Sarah Silverman for figuring out a way to say horribly racist and otherwise problematic shit while passing it off as a joke. They literally call it "having her cake and eating it too." Because clearly her motivation is to get to say horrible things without consequence, not to create biting and effective satire that forces people to examine their prejudices--and that's so awesome! Hipster racism and so on at its finest. ("It's not racist, it's ironic.")

Illustrated political economy

There's a manga version of Das Kapital. And it's currently flying off the shelves in Japan.

In homage, I link you to the graphic version of The Road to Serfdom, which is ideologically the opposite of Das Kapital.

Trust the Japanese to restore balance to the universe of illustrated political economy.

Blago appointed a senator anyway.

Damn. This goes beyond chutzpah to a level approaching gangsta. Ta-nehisi agrees:

I didn't catch all of it but I did hear him say something like, "Don't see myself resigning, even if these feds house me/Big up to Jesse Jr. Big up to Jan Schakowsky..." And then he dissed Common.

What I want to know now is how Kanye and Lupe Fiasco fit into all this. You know they gotta be taking sides.

What killed Bush

This is a very interesting point, which I had missed largely because when the Terri Schiavo thing went down I was young enough and sensible enough not to be paying any attention:

I've long believed that what really killed Bush was the contrast between his handling of Katrina and his handling of the Terri Schiavo case, which had come only a few months earlier. It was just too stark. What the American public saw was that when the religious right was up in arms, the president and the Republican Party acted. Bill Frist performed his famous long-distance diagnosis; Tom DeLay fulminated on the floor of the House; Republicans tried to subpoena both Terri and Michael Schiavo; and President Bush interrupted his vacation and made his famous midnight flight to Washington DC to sign a bill transferring the case to federal court. It was both a whirlwind and a political circus.

And it showed that Bush could be moved to action if the right constituency was at risk. It wasn't just that Bush was mostly MIA during the early stages of Katrina, but that he was plainly capable of being engaged in an emergency if it was the right kind of emergency. But apparently New Orleans wasn't it. And that was the final nail in the coffin of his presidency.

Too right.

Milk

I saw Milk and I really liked it. I wish they would have addressed intersectionality a little more. They showed a few gay men of all races and a few lesbians, which is great--they can't change the facts of Milk's inner circle, which was primarily male and white--but every so often you would hear references to "the blacks" and "the asians" as a comparison with or distinction from "the gays" and I wanted to say, "What about the black gays? The asian gays?" etc. etc.

I also understand that intersectionality is complicated and has only gained purchase in feminist thought fairly recently (though it's been around much longer than that--mostly feminists of color have been largely ignored until recently, and even now intersectionality is only current in some circles), let alone in gay activism (which I know far less about), and it's not that I expect Milk himself to have been a paragon in this regard. It's a hard thing to tackle from a political perspective. I don't even know, exactly, what the movie should have done about it--I just sort of thought of all the people who had one part or the other of their identities erased by that formulation, and wished it wasn't so.

In the NYT article on resumption of full-scale warfare between Israel and Hamas, I was struck by this paragraph:

Israeli officials said that anyone linked to the Hamas security structure or government was fair game because Hamas was a terrorist group that sought Israel’s destruction. But with work here increasingly scarce because of an international embargo on Hamas, young men are tempted by the steady work of the police force without necessarily fully accepting the Hamas ideology. One of the biggest tolls on Saturday was at a police cadet graduation ceremony in which 15 people were killed.

The cycle of radicalization continues. Goddammit.

It is certainly arguable whether Hamas has pursued "all the peaceful options" as they say they have, though I'd venture that within their particular framework of jihad they've made a decently good-faith effort despite some more extreme rhetoric that is, in truth, more in line with their stated principles. (Rhetoric, of course, is political action and should not be discounted.) Regardless, from a realist perspective, the Israelis have done a remarkably bad job of providing Hamas--or any Gazan--with reward for more restrained behavior or incentives to chill the fuck out.

The paragraph alludes to the economic isolation imposed on Gaza by Israel with the cooperation and support of West Bank authorities, the U.S., and the international community (whatever that is supposed to mean). When Palestine is economically integrated with--which is to say, dependent on--Israel, Palestinians are far more likely to decry aggression by their representatives. They have much more to lose. In this situation, the only cost is really the size of the body count.

That is not nothing by any means, but the fact is that people die in Gaza from lack of medical care and from deprivations resulting from the embargo as it is. People die as a result of the violence that almost inevitably emerges from the lack of wealth and economic opportunity resulting from the embargo. People die from the ongoing, if sporadic, violence between Israel and Gaza, which is of course more politically feasible and useful for leaders when there is no quality of life left to lose, and nothing to gain from waiting out a siege that can go on indefinitely as far as its architects are concerned. Finally, people die or are crippled because Hamas is by no means perfect as a governing entity, but when Hamas is at war with Israel they have less need to subjugate the populace by violence, and it's easier for them to gloss over those incidents.

The surest way to prevent conflict is to unite your enemy's interests with your own. From the paper I killed myself over two weeks ago:

For Israel’s part, nothing of much use can be done in the current mindset. To deal effectively with this problem, Israel will have to change the basis on which, for the most part, it has acted since the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is understandable that Israel has sought to weaken the Palestinians as much as possible and to concede to them as little as possible. However, it must be clear by now that the only internationally acceptable end to this conflict will be a two-state solution of some kind, and that the Palestinians will not disappear through repression and warfare. It is now in Israel’s interest to have as stable, viable, and friendly a neighbor and negotiating partner in Palestine as possible....

I understand that Israelis object to aiding or even tacitly allowing the prosperity of an enemy that has repeatedly attacked and killed their fellow citizens. I understand that there is real concern that no matter what Israel does, Hamas will always oppose it and always violently. Hell, it's in Hamas's charter. But given that, Israel will never defeat or accomodate Hamas. Its best hope is to turn away the public's support for them and their mission, and bombing the fuck out of that public is probably the worst way to do it.

The only chance for success in this situation is to break the cycle that produces more and more radicals on both sides (the longer this goes on, the stupider and weaker moderates look). In my view, Israel has greater latitude and so greater responsibility in this matter as the more powerful actor. I'm sure this perception is colored by the fact that I live in the pro-Israel U.S., but to argue on any realist basis that Israel is not the more powerful actor is laughable. Furthermore, Israel's position in the Middle East would be strengthened, not weakened, by showing some clemency toward the Palestinians. The struggle against Israel is legitimated by its framing as on the behalf of Palestinians; when Israel is seen to be reasonable and generous toward them, its opposition in Syria and elsewhere starts to look much less righteous.

I don't mean to erase the real cost to Israeli security that would unavoidably accompany a softening toward Palestine. But I do think that in the long term, such a cost will be necessary if this equilibrium, which is painful and costly as it is and poisons nearly every other political question in the region, is ever to be broken.

The best meditation I've yet heard on Rick Warren's role at the inauguration, from Ta-Nehisi.

Semiotics of torture

Some interesting discussion on the political, moral, and philosophical consequences of the Bush Administration's torture agenda:

...it's not that torture had been non-existent in liberal states until the torture shown in the Abu Ghraib photos. The US torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Baghram, and elsewhere reflects the techniques developed through CIA documents dating to the 1950s. The liberal state, more generally, has always functioned on an opposition between its conception of civilization - grounded in a liberal conception of rationality - and what's beyond civilization.

[...]

That is, "barbarism." In the name of basic liberal principles and of rationality itself, the liberal state must be defended against its barbarian enemies. But since these principles - of, for instance, autonomy, liberty, dignity, etc. - in the liberal political-philosophical tradition are taken as universal (for Kant, for example, grounded in natural law), and since torture is a fundamental denial of those principles, the liberal state had to conceal torture. Foucault suggests something similar in Discipline and Punish. Torture, when practiced by liberal states, could never find a place in actual law. Otherwise, we’re no longer talking about liberal states, but something else.

Torture is fundamentally extra-legal in this sense and this is why there's so much talk of states of exception and states of necessity. But this is also why the Bush administration's institutionalization and attempted legalization of torture is so radical. It's an assault on the foundational principles of the liberal state.

Yup. That's why visible torture is so dangerous to America's international reputation, too. It's not about hypocrisy, it's about being revealed to be something other than what the country was supposed to be--including what it believes itself to be. It's revelatory and it's the kind of moral-philosophical shift that has real consequences.

I really need to read Discipline and Punish. There will never be enough time, goddammit.

Awkward

Apparently Condi, Bush and the first Lady have been raking in the swag from foreign leaders. The biggest chunk by far is Condi's $300,000+ worth of jewelry from Arab leaders.

All of which, at least, has to be turned over to the General Services Administration and government archives.

Except now I'm wondering what they've got stashed away in some Cave of Wonders. Possibly the same undisclosed location Dick Cheney hides out in all the time.