Darcus Howe interview on the BBC

update: I think this video is better than the old one.
update no. 2: Lenin's Tomb, "The BBC vs Darcus Howe"

I'd never heard of Darcus Howe, before, and I note the linked wikipedia article seems to have been edited pretty extensively in the past 24 hours.


Somewhat coincidentally, I was reading Jack Crow's essay "Humiliation" last night when I came across a link via the comments from Justin:


"Why the Rich Fear Violence in the Streets"

Which inevitably made me think of events in Tottenham. (Justin is right, some of the comments at the WSJ link are genuinely malevolent towards poor people.) We may not know exactly what happened in Tottenham, but I'm struck by some things:

(1)Believing that precipitating conditions(like Cameron's austerity measures) are irrelevant while simultaneously condemning the rioters as morally reprehensible, less civilized, etc, and less worthy of empathy, is a little like believing in "free will for me but not for thee" while also being indignant at the putative sub-human Other for not possessing as much free will as you do, even as you may be part of the reason he has less freedom. (Or not possessing as much as you believe you do.) The belief in the sub-human other is rarely directly expressed of course, but it seems as if it comes to the fore pretty quickly.

(2) Automatically dismissing the possibility of agents provocateurs as having had a hand in the events, as opposed to being agnostic about the question without hard evidence pro or con, amounts to an ideological tenet. (I talked a little bit about the world of marketing co-opting the signifiers of radicalism and protest politics the other day; apparently www.agentprovocateur.com is an online lingerie seller.)

(3) Riots like this are opportunities for the elite to strengthen the loyalties of the middle class. Maybe this is thunderingly obvious, but relates to why I mention no. 2, above.

See also Will Shetterly, "Why rich people hate looters"

the emperor's bloody clothes

The editors of Slate reference this TPM post discussing GOP chairman Michael Steele's acknowledgement that the Afghan war is unwinnable, reducing it to political process. Some of the Slate commenters, filled with glee at a prominent republican apparently putting his foot in his mouth, are repellent in their myopic, doltish stupidity.


from Slate:

...the impulse to assign blame to the opposing party is apparently a bipartisan one. At a Republican fundraiser in Connecticut on Thursday, RNC Michael Steele tried to pin the war in Afghanistan—which started in 2001—on the current occupant of the Oval Office.

The gaffe-tastic chairman got on the subject when a audience member asked him a question about Gen. Stanley McChrystal's resignation. "The McChrystal incident, to me, was very comical. And I think it's a reflection of the frustration that a lot of our military leaders have with this Administration and their prosecution of the war in Afghanistan," said Steele. "Keep in mind again, federal candidates, this was a war of Obama's choosing. This is not something the United States had actively prosecuted or wanted to engage in." Steele went on to say that the United States had started an unwinnable war in Afghanistan—and that it's Obama's fault. "It was the president who was trying to be cute by half flipping a script demonizing Iraq, while saying the battle really should be in Afghanistan," Steele said. "Well, if he's such a student of history, has he not understood that you know that's the one thing you don't do, is engage in a land war in Afghanistan? All right, because everyone who has tried, over a thousand years of history, has failed. And there are reasons for that. There are other ways to engage in Afghanistan."

When TPM tried to ask some questions of an RNC spokesman (chief among them: "Didn't the war begin in 2001 under George W. Bush, in response to the 9/11 attacks?"), the response was a statement that begins, "The Chairman clearly supports our troops." Steele has weathered storms of his own making before, but this may be harder to survive than a little bondage-themed party. The Atlantic is calling this "the biggest Michael Steele gaffe of all," Repblicans operatives are calling it "the height of stupidity," and William Kristol is calling for his resignation.

While I doubt that I share many of Michael Steele's views on things like business regulation or taxation, I was pleasantly surprised when I heard about his comments from Thursday declaring the Afghan war unwinnable. Although I don't care about the GOP's fortunes any more than I care about the well-being of the democratic party, it was pretty clear that he was trying to nudge the republicans towards relevancy, and maybe even sanity. I guess the bipartisan flurry of criticism he has since faced was inevitable. His subsequent backing away from his comments wasn't, although it really was too bad.

Steele had an opportunity, especially poignant on the eve of the 4th of July holiday, to make the case against empire and all the unnecessary butchery of our own and others, and to flesh out the distinction between supporting the well-being of the troops and supporting an imperial war. It seems no good deed, or hesitant attempt at such, goes unpunished.

Stack attack

KXAN-TV

Joseph Stack's swan dive into the Austin IRS building is unlikely to result in any change, either in the behavior of the government or people's attitudes, apart from possibly more busy-work type regulations governing recreational aircraft and their pilots, or so I imagine. He obviously understood the Marxist concept of heightening the contradictions, when he wrote,

I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are.

He also wrote, "Nothing changes unless there is a body count." One would like to think he is wrong about that-- I know I would. I read Stack's manifesto, much of which, considered apart from his actions, seems like the product of an intelligent and lucid mind. The FBI may have requested it taken down at www.embeddedart.com, but it's available at numerous web sites. To me the statement Stack's ISP has posted there, telling you they complied with the FBI's request and also directing you where to see his statement, reinforces the veracity of Rob's comments here. (And yes, I was struck by the coincidence that I posted Gerald Celente's comments regarding a possible tax revolt the night before.) Anyway, I got his manifesto at the Business Insider, where (if you want another cheap irony) you'll notice that the first 20 or so comments were deleted because of complaints.


I also looked for a second-hand Piper Cherokee online, not wanting to buy one(As if! Me mucho poor.) but curious how much they go for, especially since Stack complained about how much money he was out. They seem to average in the mid 30 thousand dollar range used, although I found one that "needs work" for a quick sale for 15 grand. I suppose if all you need it for is to crash into a building you wouldn't care too much if it needed fixing up, not that I'm recommending that sort of thing. The photos also suggest that the back seat of a Cherokee is pretty cramped, so if he really did remove it to put an additional fuel tank in there it couldn't have been that large a tank. If he really was planning ahead you'd think he would have bought a different plane.


Over at ATR, Jonathan Schwarz described Stack's sentiments as "96 % left-wing", then said he was wrong, and it was "more like 76% left-wing, 15% right-wing, and 9% miscellaneous." (There's a 40 plus comments discussion about this, which is still open as I write this). I suspect that Stack's words and their relative lefty or righty-ness won't be evaluated in the wider world based on any standard intellectual criteria, but simply based on him being a middle-aged white guy and that his beef was primarily with the IRS, and those signifiers will be construed as shorthand for right-wing loon, case closed. Anyway, it's easier that way, in our increasingly tribal age. Why bother with reading, especially if its over 140 characters?

Fascism USA: 2009, 2010...

The audio sync is absolutely horrible here, and I apologize for that, as I've found no better copy of this anywhere. All the same this interview with Gerald Celente on Russia Today is fascinating.

(note: Although I came across this fairly recently, it's not exactly current, but was recorded in April 2009. I suppose I should say misrecorded, given the sound quality. I don't get why they have these horrible technical difficulties, presumably operating with more resources than their occasional correspondent Lori Harfenist(aka "the resident"), whose man-in-the-street interviews I've periodically embedded here before. She doesn't have any of these problems with her videos.)

Having said that, even though a lot of what he says strikes me as relevant, I think Celente is wrong about the likelihood of revolution. (Actually it's not entirely clear if he's forecasting one or advocating for one. Presumably the former.) If we're headed towards a right-wing truly fascist government, which I'll admit seems increasingly likely, the two-party system with its multiple security-state water-carriers seem like they're strongly enough ensconced to prevent that.

I'm thinking of Even Bayh's comments upon announcing his retirement yesterday, about how he wants democrats to compromise more(!), as if the gridlock in D.C. is substantially the fault of those no-good liberals. Bayh's comments come to mind just because they are recent, but there are many, many other examples.

[a revision: the two links to Bayh's retirement announcement above don't make it clear; but I was referring to his comments in a Yahoo News/AP story which I haven't found reproduced in full elsewhere, which is odd. I hate linking to Yahoo News stories because they tend to disappear from online after 21-30 days:

"Disillusioned Bayh advocates electoral “shock” to broken system"

as, no doubt, this one will too.]



Avedon Carol[2007][more recently] and a couple of regular commenters at ATR frequently talk about the Overton window, a theoretical concept that's increasingly useful in understanding the rhetoric out of Washington. But as far as I can see, the window doesn't just apply to republicans and other right wing types pushing it rightward, but phoney-baloney democrats like Bayh and Rahm Emmanuel and our pal Obama validating and reinforcing right-wing tropes. I'm just waiting for BHO to speak after the 2010 mid-terms and apologize for being a socialist.

"tenebroust", below, is somewhat overheated in his presentational style, but I think the broader picture he sketches of the dynamic between the two-parties is essentially correct:

Dinner With The Opposition

I had dinner with a group of friends last night and after generous doses of Cabernet for all of us, we fell to (apt expression!) talking politics. My opponents were of the opinion--and weren't shy about expressing it--that the only solution to our troubles is to get "them" before "they" get us. After all, "they" ran planes into the World Trade Center towers and killed Americans, didn't they?
No, "they" didn't, that was somebody else, but in this discussion--hey wait, that needs quote marks, too--"discussion," the point was moot. They're all "them," from those hot countries and their sole aim in life is not to get enough to eat, not to protect their children, not to live morally under their understanding of God--but to kill Americans. Why? Because they hate us for our freedoms, because they want to convert us to their religion, because they want to capture our oil reserves, because they're just cockamamie nut cases--who the hell knows?
The point here is that all my companions' anger, all their resentment, all their fears are directed toward people in other countries, the barely human, or certainly not as human as we Americans. "They" trashed the economy and took prayer out of schools, along with the dark hordes of illegal immigrants (and with the connivance of the gays and liberals), not the politicians and bankers. How do we know? Why, the media tells us, easily convincing the populace that all their troubles are caused by "them."
It's so quick and easy to cite Nazi Germany as an example--remarkably, both sides sometimes do, although they're arguing from entirely different premises. Often, the allusion is 'way off the mark, but here's one that isn't. It's Noam Chomsky, a calm, reasoned voice who alludes to that topic to great effect. I wish my dinner companians would take a look at this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MHEuudJ-o0