manifestoon

wrr: women's reproductive freedom

The defeat in Oregon of Measure 43, which would have required parental notification when a minor seeks an abortion, and the repeal in South Dakota of the law allowing for abortion only to prevent the death of a pregnant woman, both mark modest defeats for those opposed to women’s reproductive freedom. But in the campaigns around these measures, the rhetoric of anti-choice advocates has increasingly adopted the argument that abortion should be banned because it harms women.

Like the groups trying to suppress multicultural education in the name of academic freedom, or to disrupt the teaching of evolution in the name of scientific debate, many anti-choice advocates have been appropriating the language of their more progressive opponents.

We can see some of this in the career of Eric Keroack, recently appointed by George W. Bush to be the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Population Affairs, a position that oversees a number of Health and Human Services programs, including the Office of Family Planning.

Until recently, Keroack was medical director for a chain of “crisis pregnancy centers” called A Woman’s Concern, which use a variety of techniques, including deception, to pressure pregnant women to continue their pregnancies, avoid contraception, and remain abstinent until marriage. His career has been dissected and his arguments refuted on the website talk2action.org, as well as a number of other venues.

For instance, the idea that it’s concern for women that’s expresessed by A Woman’s Concern when they try to encourage women to continue unwanted pregnancies is refuted by the American Psychological Association’s statement that

research shows that the ability of women to make decisions about their own childbearing (including timing) is a necessary condition for their health and mental health, as well as for their families. Abortion is a safe medical procedure that carries relatively few physical or psychological risks and that yields positive outcomes when the alternative is unwanted pregnancy.

In an article in the American Prospect, reposted on AlterNet, Reva Siegel and Sarah Blustain have noted that all of that evidence and argument was rejected by the South Dakota legislature and the document on which they based their decision,

a 70-page set of findings contained in the “Report of the South Dakota Task Force to Study Abortion” -- by far the most comprehensive government account of the arguments and evidence for protecting women from abortion.

South Dakota’s official endorsement of these arguments gives them more validity than ever and virtually assures that they will be employed to justify abortion restrictions across the nation.

The task force’s report … argued that the state needed a ban because of the epidemic overriding pressures on women to abort -- from a family member, a husband or boyfriend, or an abortion clinic -- that make extra protection from abortion necessary. Finally, to make credible its claims about women’s health and women’s choices, the task force made repeated claims about women’s nature. It asserted that women would never freely choose an abortion -- even absent outside pressures -- because doing so would violate “the mother’s fundamental natural intrinsic right to a relationship with her child.” The task force took as a statement of biological and psychological fact that a mother’s connection to her unborn baby was more authentic than her own statement of desire not to be pregnant. These gender-role convictions are at the heart of the movement’s claim that the nation must now combat an epidemic of dangerous and coerced abortions.

The legislature also heard testimony from women who said that their experiences of legal abortion had caused them psychological trauma.

The task force argues that abortion causes symptoms of what it calls Post-Abortion Syndrome (or PAS) because abortion violates women’s nature: “It is simply unrealistic to expect that a pregnant mother is capable of being involved in the termination of the life of her own child without risk of suffering significant psychological trauma and distress. To do so is beyond the normal, natural, and healthy capability of a woman whose natural instincts are to protect and nurture her child.”

In July, Democratic Congressman Henry A. Waxman released a report on the “False and Misleading Health Information provided by Federally Funded Pregnancy Resource Centers.” These anti-abortion and “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), according to a March report in The Washington Post based on a review of federal records, received more than $60 million in federal funds between 2001 and 2005 and represent a small fraction of the more than 3,000 centers in North America. According to Waxman’s report, the centers provided “false and misleading” information about a link between abortion and breast cancer, the effect of abortion on future fertility, and the mental-health effects of abortion. Indeed, Waxman’s report details the major government and professional studies that discredit PAS.

Which is why the stories of women are so important. What the PAS movement lacks in scientific credibility, it makes up for with dramatic and often touching stories of individual women who feel it is legal abortion that allowed them to be coerced into giving up pregnancies they wanted to continue. Crisis Pregnancy Centers (or CPCs) help women understand that feelings of loss and self-destructive conduct can be traced to unacknowledged guilt over past abortions. In offering suffering women this relief, the CPCs produce meaning. In the process, abortion comes to symbolize women’s disempowerment -- and its prohibition promises women healing, protection, maternal recognition, and freedom.

The predicament of women who grieve their abortions raises questions about the counseling and social supports available to women facing unintended pregnancies.

But criminalizing abortion is not a response. It would not only force motherhood on women who would choose to terminate their pregnancy under any conditions, but it would do nothing to

address the needs of women who seek an abortion because they lacked contraception or were raped or are living in an abusive relationship, or will have to drop out of work or school to raise a child alone, or are stretched so thin that they cannot emotionally or financially provide for their other children.

There is a cautionary message in all this, as well, to supporters of choice … who in recent years have embraced a vocabulary of grief around abortion. There is an ocean of difference between “safe, legal, and rare,” as Bill Clinton put it, and criminal, as in South Dakota. But it is plain that the [liberal] emphasis on abortion-as-tragedy will feed right into the woman-protective frame unless the pro-choice camp anticipates its opponents’ arguments and grounds the case for abortion rights in ... a broader agenda of progressive family values.

But beyond the claims of Siegel and Blustain, progressives might also want to clarify the real causes of women’s disempowerment, and call again for the real conditions of our freedom.

chicken

Robert Jensen on Academic Freedom in Counterpunch:

All teaching -- especially in the humanities and the social sciences -- has a political dimension, and we shouldn't fear that. The question isn't whether professors should leave their politics at the door (they can't) but whether professors are responsible in the way they present their politics and can defend their pedagogical decisions. It's clear that every decision a professor makes -- choice of topics, textbook selection, how material is presented -- has an underlying politics. If the professor's views are safely within the conventional wisdom of the dominant sectors of society, it might appear the class is apolitical. Only when professors challenge that conventional wisdom do we hear talk about "politicized" classrooms.

But just because the classroom always is politicized in courses that deal with how we organize ourselves politically, economically, and socially, we should not suggest that it's all politics. Because there's a politics to teaching doesn't mean teaching is nothing but politics; indeed, professors shouldn't proselytize for their positions in the classroom. Instead, when it's appropriate -- and in the courses I teach, it often is -- professors should highlight the inevitable political judgments that underlie teaching. Students -- especially those who disagree with a professor's views -- will come to see that the professor has opinions, which is a good thing. Professors should be modeling how to present and defend an argument with evidence and logic.

opium

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions.

tag, you're it

"The basic idea is that airports could be fitted with a network of combined panoramic cameras and RFID (radio frequency ID) tag readers, which would monitor the movements of people around the various terminal buildings."

The plan, he said, would be for each passenger to be issued with a tag at check-in.

He said: "In our system, the location can be detected to an accuracy of 1m, and video and tag data could be merged to give a powerful surveillance capability."

wake up

habeas who?

Habeas Corpus, R.I.P. (1215 - 2006). It was so pre-9/11 anyway. Instead we may get "our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts." What could go wrong?
(via mefi)

no turning back

Estelle Freedman, No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women

The NTB website has links to both primary source documents and contemporary oprganizations and resources for Chapter 4: "Race and the Politics of Identity in US Feminism."

Some documents mentioned in Chapter 4:
The Hayden-King memo

The Woman-Identified Woman

Also possibly of interest
Linda Martín Alcoff
What Should White People Do?

the abolition of work

No one should ever work.

Work is the source of nearly all the misery in the world. Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working.

That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. . . . Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.

The ludic life is totally incompatible with existing reality. So much the worse for “reality,” the gravity hole that sucks the vitality from the little in life that still distinguishes it from mere survival. . . . Some [conservative old ideologies], like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else.

But is that really what Marxism believes in? For one thing, Marx doesn’t binarize work and play so absolutely—a rhetorically effective but conceptually simplistic move. And Marx wants to get rid of alienated labor, since it’s the effect of exploitation, but then sensuous human activity includes what Black means by play, I think. Also, I’ve found laziness an effective tactic.

bad housekeeping not fatal after all

From the New York Times:

STAMFORD, Conn, Aug. 28 — The Connecticut Supreme Court on Monday overturned the conviction of a woman who prosecutors said had kept such a messy home that it endangered the safety and mental health of her 12-year-old son, who killed himself in 2002. . . .

pluto demoted

The planet named for the god of the underworld has been exiled, demoted to a dwarf planet.

We’d love to exile mortality, banish death.

Certainly we don’t want to be seeing those mutilated bodies or those flag-draped coffins.

Plus, he’s faithful.

unbelievers, unite!

Jonathan Miller's Atheism: A Rough History of Disbelief is muchly on the persecution of English atheists.

Plenty of class bias here. And where are the women?

But I like that when he talks about the wtc twin towers he doesn’t show the usual clip—nothing of the towers coming down: we see the cleanup, W’s posturing.

And I appreciate the point that one wouldn’t think about one's disbelief if it weren’t being raised so much of late in culture.

Ends by excoriating the Christian fundamentalist cabal in the White House.

b&w is more realistic

Which director will commit to celluloid the story of your life?

Ingmar Bergman
Your film will be 66% romantic, 31% comedy, 53% complex plot, and a $ 40 million budget.
Your life will be portrayed on film as an intense psychological drama, likely with some actresses screaming at the camera (Persona), or maybe a pleasant chess game between the Grim Reaper and a Crusader (The Seventh Seal). This Swedish director's films are intensely scrutinized and studied in colleges all over the world to this day. This means that most Americans still don't understand his films!

maya deren

Have I mentioned how much I love the work of Maya Deren (1917-1961), avant-garde film maker, a major, radical figure?
My favorite of her works is the early Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), a surreal noir melodrama that I like best silent, without the later-added music. It tops Senses of Cinema's list of best films by women directors. I also like At Land (1944). I'm less fond of later works like Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946) or her film about voudoun, Divine Horsemen. I guess I like best the films on which she collaborated with Alexander Hammid, who also made The Private Life of a Cat. Her statements on her work tend to be a bit too arty and mystical for my taste, though the films make brilliant use of the medium. Most of her films can be seen on DVD, and there's a very good documentary about her life & work, In the Mirror of Maya Deren.

if you can't stand the heat. . .

. . . get off of the planet.

Around 55 record highs were shattered on Friday. Phoenix, Ariz. had its hottest day in almost 11 years (118). Hillsboro, Ore. set an all-time record high of 108. San Jose, Calif. may have recorded its hottest morning low on record (74). Even more amazing is that Needles, Calif. had a morning low of 100 degrees, which was an all-time hot low temperature.
Records were set or tied Saturday at all five of the National Weather Service's recording locations in California Central Valley: 109 degrees in Sacramento, 111 in Redding, and 112 in Red Bluff, Stockton and Modesto.
Emergency workers scrambled to help heat exposure victims in downtown Los Angeles, where 99-degree temperatures broke the 96-degree record set in 1960. Temperatures in the city's Woodland Hills section hit a record 119 degrees, topping the 116-degree high set in 1985.
Records were also set throughout the San Francisco Bay area, including Livermore at 115 degrees, San Rafael at 108 degrees and San Jose at 102 degrees, according to the weather service. San Francisco's 87 degrees topped an 81-degree record set in 1917. (Note: San Francisco is suppoed to be FOGGY alla time.)

equality of suffering

Last week in TomDispatch, Ruth Rosen discussed “The Hidden War on Iraqi Women” To the roster of American shame that includes Abu Ghraib, Haditha, and Guantanamo, Rosen notes, we can now add “Mahmudiya, a town 20 miles south of Baghdad. There, this March, a group of five American soldiers allegedly were involved in the rape and murder of Abeer Qassim Hamza, a [fourteen year old] Iraqi girl. Her body was then set on fire to cover up [the] crimes, [and] her father, mother, and sister [were] murdered.”

Rosen discusses in detail the ways that “the invasion and occupation of Iraq has had the effect of humiliating, endangering, and repressing Iraqi women in ways that have not been widely publicized in the mainstream media: As detainees in prisons run by Americans, they have been sexually abused and raped; as civilians, they have been kidnapped, raped, and then sometimes sold for prostitution; and as women -- and, in particular, as among the more liberated women in the Arab world -- they have increasingly disappeared from public life, many becoming shut-ins in their own homes.”

Tom Engelhardt, in his preface to Rosen’s essay, quotes Riverbend, who writes the “girlblog” Baghdad Burning from Iraq:
"Rape. The latest of American atrocities. Though it's not really the latest -- it's just the one that's being publicized the most. The poor girl Abeer was neither the first to be raped by American troops, nor will she be the last. The only reason this rape was brought to light and publicized is that her whole immediate family were killed along with her. Rape is a taboo subject in Iraq. Families don't report rapes here, they avenge them. We've been hearing whisperings about rapes in American-controlled prisons and during sieges of towns like Haditha and Samarra for the last three years. The naiveté of Americans who can't believe their 'heroes' are committing such atrocities is ridiculous. Who ever heard of an occupying army committing rape??? You raped the country, why not the people?"

Engelhardt suggests that the secrecy around rape as a taboo subject marks an area where the US is more enlightened than Iraq.
“In the United States,” he says, “rape is now a public crime. Cases are regularly discussed and followed in the media; victims are far less often blamed; if you turn on a TV program like Law & Order: SVU, rape cases are national drama and even entertainment.”

The idea of rape cases as entertainment seems not to strike Engelhardt as troubling.

Lucinda Marshall in Counterpunch sees coverage of the Mahmudiya story some what differently:
“despite the enormous press coverage and airplay that this story is getting, the context in which the atrocity took place will only nominally be examined, if at all. That aspect of the story is not what is newsworthy. Or to be a tad more crass and honest, it is not what sells. And the dissemination of news is most definitely a business, one that is now owned and controlled primarily by large corporations who are far more concerned with the bottom line than with truth and integrity.

“. . . . it should not be at all surprising that when a news story that contains the same elements as a . . . porn plot occurs, the media doesn't hesitate to frame the story from that angle. Sex sells. . . .

“Like Abu Ghraib, the brutal rape and murder of . . . Abeer Qasim Hamza was just such a story. Young soldiers, the supposed . . . defenders of our rights and values, in a premeditated act of sex and violence against a . . . girl who had earlier refused their taunts and advances at a checkpoint. . . . In [a] sense, this story bears a resemblance to the coverage of cases such as the . . . the Duke University rape allegations. Virile young men [behaving] . . . in sufficiently obscene ways to be titillating and very marketable stories.

“None of this is lost on news producers. . . . [and it] impacts how the media frames the story, even to the extent of editing the facts to fit the story. In an Op Ed piece about the Duke rape allegations, David Brooks waxed poetic about the reputation of the Duke Lacrosse team--their good grades and community service; That the alleged victim was an honor student and a military veteran was conveniently omitted from his piece. To have included that information would have damaged the media portrayal of the alleged victim as being deserving of whatever may have happened that night by virtue of her 'behavior'.”

The hidden war on women, or its repackaging as entertainment, brings to mind the question that forms the title of Catherine MacKinnon’s latest book, Are Women Human? According to reviewer Martha Nussbaum, writing in the latest issue of The Nation magazine, the book argues that “women suffer aggression and exploitation, "because we are women, systemically and systematically,"” and considers the “hypocrisy of the international system when it faces up to some crimes against humanity but fails to confront similar harms when they happen to women, often on a daily basis.”

“Similarity of treatment, [MacKinnon] has argued throughout her work, is not sufficient for the true "equal protection" of the laws. Mere formal equality often masks, or even reinforces, underlying inequalities. We need to think, instead, of the idea of freedom from hierarchy, from domination and subordination. . . . To deny women benefits that they need in order to function as equals (medical pregnancy benefits, for example) is to violate equal protection, even when the treatment of men and women is similar (no men get pregnancy benefits, and no women get them either).”

Another example would be abortion rights. In an essay on Alternet.org, Carmen Valenzuela argues that a woman's right to end her pregnancy must be considered an international human right. As 70,000 women die each year around the world as a direct result of unsafe abortion, and 600,000 more are seriously injured, Amnesty International is currently considering adding a woman’s right to safely terminate a pregnancy to the rights that they support. Denying men the right to abortion would not make its denial to women equal.

Conversely, that suffering is shared by men does not make it of less concern to women. Judy Martin, writing for Women’s eNews, reports on a conference of Iraqi women sponsored by the NY-based group Global Peace Initiative of Women, at which women from Iraq cited as their chief problems violence against civilians, widespread infrastructure damage, and the consequent instability of daily life. They noted the need for potable water and for health care, the shortages of electricity, and the lack of social services.

Reporter Nir Rosen on Truthdig suggests that "Focusing on Abu Ghraib and Haditha distracts us from the daily, little Abu Ghraibs and small-scale Hadithas that have made up the [US] occupation [of Iraq]. The occupation has been one vast extended crime against the Iraqi people, and most of it has occurred unnoticed by the American people and the media."

photo op

daily mail via commondreams

have his carcase

In 1866, the Supreme Court overturned Lincoln’s wartime suspension of habeas corpus. In that ruling, Justice David Davis wrote:

The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield of its protection all classes of men, at all times and under all circumstances. No doctrine involving more pernicious consequences was ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism, but the theory of necessity on which it is based is false, for the government, within the Constitution, has all the powers granted to it which are necessary to preserve its existence, as has been happily proved by the result of the great effort to throw off its just authority. (Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866))

Dave Lindorff in Counterpunch comments, Those stirring words should be mailed to every member of Congress as they now consider the Supreme Court's Hamdan ruling, with many Republicans clamoring to pass a law exempting the Guantanamo detainees from the Geneva Convention's jurisdiction.

hindsight

Virginia Governor Timoth M. Kaine has pardoned Grace Sherwood, who was convicted of witchcraft in 1706. "With 300 years of hindsight, we all certainly can agree that trial by water is an injustice," Kaine wrote.

On the other hand, without the retrospective view it's not so certain we can all agree that it is torture:

CIA DIRECTOR Porter J. Goss insists that his agency is innocent of torturing the prisoners it is holding in secret detention centers around the world. "This agency does not torture," he said in an interview. "We use lawful capabilities to collect vital information, and we do it in a variety of unique and innovative ways, all of which are legal and none of which are torture." One of these techniques is "waterboarding," in which a victim is strapped to a board and lowered into a vat of water until he or she believes that drowning is imminent. The subject is then removed from the water and revived. If necessary the process is repeated. The torture is designed to be psychological more than physical, as the victim is led to believe that he or she is being executed. This reinforces the torturer's control and makes the victim experience mortal fear. Here's What's Left also noted the connection.

lightbulbs, no joke

Amy Belanger complains helpfully about the limits of Gore’s film and its overemphasis on turning off the lights instead of taking political action. She also points to this site touted by Oprah and which does advocate lobbying your mayor to sign the Climate Protection Agreement, which ours has. But there, too, with the lightbulbs. And apparently Leonardo diCaprio also has a little global warming movie, which has some suggestions other than changing bulbs. But commondreams also reprints the lightbulb idea. So, ok, ok, I'll change the lightbulbs. But where to get them made by someone other than the evil GE? More bright ideas to come. . . . (photo by Will Pate.)

update on the bare bear

Talking with A. about the poor drowning polar bears, he pointed out that what's so distressing about that image in the movie is its suggestion of homelessness and abandonment. Which is of course what the sentimentality of the image taps into: one can project one's own feelings about that onto the cute cuddly animated bear. Poor bears. Poor us.

just unjust powers

Oh, for the days when government derived their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Chris Floyd in the Moscow Times points out

That the United States, once touted as the "world's greatest democracy," is now ruled by a presidential dictatorship is a fact beyond any serious dispute. . . . The Bush Administration no longer bothers to hide the novel theory of government upon which its rule is based, but declares it openly, in court, in Congress, everywhere.

The theory holds that the president has the arbitrary right to ignore any law that he feels is an unconstitutional infringement of his power -- and a law is automatically unconstitutional if the president feels it infringes on his power. This neatly squared circle makes Congress irrelevant and removes the judiciary from the loop altogether. Thus, the only effective instrument of power left in the land is the "unitary executive": the fancy modern name that the legal minions of President George W. Bush have given to the ancient concept of "tyranny."

Which pretty much sums it up. Except of course that dictators tend to rule indefinitely.


Bob Cesca in HuffPost suggests the inscription on this bust of Bush is evidence of plans to cancel the next presidential election. But Raw Story cites a source saying it’s just because it was completed during Bush’s first term. We shall see. Though it's not as though they can't rig the election to replace him with some other, equivalent, figure. The problem of course is systemic (especially now that the machinery is in place with the supremes), not individual. And anyway Cheney could stay on as Dicktator.

drowning polar bears

So I went to see An Inconvenient Truth and frankly the most distressing part was about how polar bears have started drowning because there's not enough ice anymore. It wasn't the scariest part, or the most important part. But the most distressing. They had a cartoon polar bear swimming in an endless sea. Poor bear. Why is the suffering of animals so particularly distressing? Like the pets left behind in Katrina. Is it just sentimentalism? I'm sure the cartoon quality makes it cuter than an actual bear and therefore more available for sentimental response. But still. Poor bears. They really are endangered.

But of course the most irritating parts of the movie are the things it leaves out, like Gore's shabby environmental track record, or that part of the problem might actually be capitalism. The end credits encourage mostly individual actions, and the website points to "free-market" mechanisms for controlling CO2 emissions. I mean, I suppose, fine, I'll go get me some flourescent bulbs. It's a point. But it hardly seems enough to save the poor bears.

wrr: pride

I'm glad to report that yesterday Portland did not suffer an earthquake, a tsunami, or a terrorist attack, nor did the Bonneville dam collapse. All of these events were predicted by a Salem Pastor as God’s punishment for our celebration of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride, as reported on Alas, a blog, as well as by the Portland Mercury.

Pride celebrations usually occur in June in commemoration of the 1969 Stonewall riots, when police raided the Stonewall bar in New York, and the patrons, especially drag queens of color, fought back. Clashes between police and the gay and lesbian community continued for several days, and the incident is considered a turning point in the modern gay movement. Marches were held the next June in New York and San Franciso, and Pride Parades and events now occur all over the world, including Sao Paolo, Jerusalem, Taipei, and, of course, Portland.

Last month, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, gay and lesbian activists attempted to hold Russia's first gay pride march in Moscow, timed to coincide with the 13th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Russia. Although the march was thwarted by opposition from police and from nationalist and fundamentalist opponents, organizers considered the turnout a sign of victory, as queer Russians claimed their rights to public space.

But in the US, Pride events have other problems, too. Ryan Murphy, on his blog liberalserving,
bewails the commodification of pride, asking,

From a spontaneous riot of trans women and other sundry queers who were fed up with police harassment evolves . . . - a corporate branding opportunity?. . . .
How can they crap all over us in legal discrimination after constitutional amendment but throw products and advertising at us like we're Jane Q American?

Charlie Hinton, writing last month in dissidentvoice.org, recalls that

In 1975, [he] became a founding member of an historic organization called Bay Area Gay Liberation. This was the time of the war against Viet Nam, the civil rights movement, black power, brown power, and women’s liberation. [Queers] became the next group to challenge the traditional values of heterosexual white male ruling class dominance. . . .
The idea behind gay liberation is that no one is free until all are free. The politics of liberation advocate building a united movement to overcome all forms of discrimination and oppression, if LGBT people are someday to be truly free. . . .
In the late 1970s, a gay rights approach to gaining equality became the dominant ideology in the lesbian/gay movement, replacing the gay liberation approach. The idea behind gay rights is more limited -- build a movement that addresses strictly gay issues -- housing and job discrimination, military, marriage/partnership, etc. and unite solely on the basis that we’re gay; Gay Pride Day [being a] good example.

Hinton advocates returning to a liberation approach.

At the very least, gay men should unite with women to protect choice and reproductive rights. The same groups are trying to take away all our rights (as well as any rights for immigrants and prisoners) and it’s stupid and self-defeating not to join forces to fight them together. . . .
In the bigger global picture, it’s the same anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-democratic Right wing forces that drive the conservative agenda, which includes the occupation of Iraq, Afghanistan, and unquestioning support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. . . .
Do we make the world safer with more war and more and bigger weapons, or with more justice and equality that all can share?

And speaking of Iraq, Gary Leupp, also on dissidentvoice, observes that even

Leaving aside the daily “collateral damage” killings of Iraqi civilians, and the occupiers’ failure to accomplish the most basic reconstruction goals, the collapse of law and order and accompanying empowerment of fanatic religious militias has made life hell for women, Christians and other religious minorities, and intellectuals, [and, of course, for queers]
Last month Ali Hili, who used to run a gay nightclub in Baghdad, told The Times of London he knows of more than 40 Iraqi gay men killed this year. “We could never envisage this happening when Saddam was overthrown,” the 33-year-old now in exile declared. “I had no love for the former president, but his regime never persecuted the gay community.” He told Democracy Now!, “It’s a very dark age for gays and lesbians and transsexuals and bisexuals in Iraq right now. And the fact that Iraq has been shifted from a secular state into a religious state was completely, completely horrific.”
In April 2005, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani declared that homosexuals should be killed in the “worst, most severe way.” [and Iraqi militia have been] tracking down and brutally murdering gay men and boys. Last month, following the murder of a 14-year-old boy by the Iraqi police, al-Sistani removed the anti-gay male fatwa from his website (retaining one against lesbians). Not that this will necessarily change the militiamen’s behavior towards gays.
Al-Sistani is of course viewed by the occupiers as an ally of sorts, since he has discouraged armed resistance and commands the respect of the . . . Shiite politicians. So while officially “troubled” by the bourgeoning misogyny, religious intolerance, anti-intellectual and homophobic plagues unleashed by the illegal overthrow of the former regime, U.S. spokespersons can’t attack too squarely the Muslim fundamentalist repression exercised by their sometimes allies.
“If someone is in danger of being slaughtered or persecuted, we do all we can to stop it,” says Army Maj. Joseph Todd Breasseale, chief of the Media Relations Division of the Multinational Corps in Iraq. In other words, the U.S. military, which officially regards bans gays who are out unsuitable for military service, does want to stop the slaughter of Iraqi gays. But he adds:
“It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, when we’re in a fledgling time like this, to go in and say, ‘Here’s these issues that are going to repel 80 percent of the population and this is what we want to inflict on you.’ We’re trying not to get into too many values judgment type issues and just do the right thing.” That’s what Breasseale told the Washington Blade, the capital’s GLBT newspaper.

So let me get this straight. [Leupp continues] In this “fledgling time,” while the primordial chaos of the criminal invasion still prevails, the occupiers -- bogged down in suppressing resistance to their presence, slaughtering civilians in the process -- haven’t much wherewithal to prevent other, indigenous Iraqi slaughter. . . .The occupiers have better things to do than to “get into” the “values judgment issue” of shooting 14-year-old gay boys, especially if 80% of the population has no problem with that. That’d be “inflicting” somebody else’s values (although not, apparently, the Major’s), and that just wouldn’t make sense, would it?

So doing the “right thing” must mean doing something else: publicly acknowledging that gay people shouldn’t be murdered, probably, and it’s not the occupiers’ policy that they should be. But, hey, this is the Iraqis’ business. At least they’re free now.

racial profiling ok'd

Racial profiling of immigrants, that is, because foreigners evidently don't deserve the same rights as real Amurkans.
from the NYTimes (registration required):
Judge Rules That U.S. Has Broad Powers to Detain Noncitizens Indefinitely

A federal judge in Brooklyn ruled yesterday that the government has wide latitude under immigration law to detain noncitizens on the basis of religion, race or national origin, and to hold them indefinitely without explanation. . . .
This is the first time a federal judge has addressed the issue of discrimination in the treatment of hundreds of Muslim immigrants who were swept up in the weeks after the 2001 terror attacks and held for months before they were cleared of links to terrorism and deported. . . .
"This decision is a green light to racial profiling and prolonged detention of noncitizens at the whim of the president," said Rachel Meeropol, a lawyer for the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represented the detainees. "The decision is profoundly disturbing because it legitimizes the fact that the Bush administration rounded up and imprisoned our clients because of their religion and race.". . .
"The executive is free to single out 'nationals of a particular country' and focus enforcement efforts on them," the judge wrote. "This is, of course, an extraordinarily rough and overbroad sort of distinction of which, if applied to citizens, our courts would be highly suspicious.". . .
"It doesn't seem to limit the motives the government has to have in being slow in removing them; it could even be just basic neglect," [a lawyer] said. . . .
But David Cole, a law professor at Georgetown University and a co-counsel in the lawsuit, said the ruling was the only one of its kind and made New York "an equal protection-free zone" because the government can detain immigrants wherever it chooses. . . .

wrr: iran, irant, irate

The US administration’s recent reversal on the question of diplomatic negotiations with Iran may have left us breathing a bit easier, but some observers remain skeptical. The roots of that skepticism go back to a history available in any standard encyclopedia—Britannica, for instance. In 1951, Mohammad Mossaddeq was democratically elected prime minister of Iran, and immediately nationalized the country’s oil industry. In 1953 a coup funded by the CIA overthrew Mossaddeq’s government. The Shah returned to Iran, and a Western multinational consortium accelerated Iranian oil development. There was no further talk of nationalization, as the Shah repressed political dissent within Iran. Opposition to the Shah led, of course, to his ouster in 1979 by a coalition of leftist and religious dissidents, and ultimately to the current Islamic republic.

Tom O’Donnell in an article for Z magazine
draws some of the evident conclusions from this and other evidence.

Just as the true reasons for the U.S.-British invasion of Iraq were not “weapons of mass destruction” or “links to Al Qaeda,” so too, the true reason for the present U.S.-Iran crisis is not the ostensible “nuclear threat” posed by Iran. Rather, the American push against Iran’s nuclear program and for “regime change” is about maintaining American hegemony in the oil-rich Persian Gulf Region.

As one might not learn from the mainstream media, but can learn from other sources including the United Nations website, Iran has signed the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, under which states have the right to pursue nuclear power. To that end, they have been trying to enrich uranium for fuel, a very different matter than building a bomb or even than enriching uranium for use in a bomb. As Juan Cole has pointed out on his blog, the Iranians have something like the ability to make those old Mickey Mouse watches that glowed in the dark because they were painted with radium.

Hans Blix, chair of the U.N.'s WMD Commission, noted on a recent Democracy Now that there are reasons why the Iranians might want nuclear weapons:

They see 130,000 American soldiers in Iraq and they see American bases in Pakistan and in Afghanistan and more American military activities to the north of them. . . .It is not inconceivable that [they] may feel that their security is being threatened.

Especially with US politicians saying all options are on the table.

But O’Donnell argues that

even if they were near to building a nuclear bomb, Iranian nukes would not, per se, be why Washington is out to remove the mullahs from power. Just this February, Bush was . . . pleased to recognize India as a nuclear power . . . . He did this after India sided with the U.S. against Iran at the International Atomic Energy Agency {the I.A.E.A}. So too, Bush hasn’t insisted that Pakistan, a country which admits to having proliferated nuclear weapons . . . give up its illegally developed nuclear weapons – rather, he called Pakistan a “close ally” of America.

Neither India, nor Pakistan, nor Israel has signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Mina Hamilton on dissidentvoice.org points out that

Israel's nuclear facilities have never been inspected by the I.A.E.A or any other representative of the international community. The existence of the nuclear arsenal sitting deep underground in the Negev desert continues to be scrupulously ignored by . . . most . . . US establishment media. Also off the radar is the fate of UN Security Resolution 687 [which] ended the Gulf War of 1991. It was signed by the US and called for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East.

O’Donnell argues that

the reason for U.S. hostility to Iran can neither be explained by nukes nor by Islamic fundamentalism, nor, for that matter, by any Iranian support for terrorist organizations. Rather, the uncompromising first principle for Washington when it comes to Iran, or to any other state in the Persian Gulf Region, is that the U.S. and the U.S. alone shall remain the regional hegemon – which is … about oil.
… Whoever has predominant influence in this region has their hand on “the global oil spigot” – a prize which brings enormous power and leverage far beyond the region itself, reaching over every country and enterprise that needs the region’s oil. Washington has worked since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 to keep Iran … from once again becoming the oil-producing powerhouse it was under the shah, . . .

O’Donnell points out that since 1996 the US has imposed sanctions on Iran to block development of its oil and natural gas resources, and the sanctions have been devastatingly successful . . . They have preserved U.S. hegemony in the Gulf Region from any significant threat by Iran, and, as a bonus to the U.S., have greatly weakened the Iranian economy and the mullahs’ domestic position.

They have also prompted potential concessions we hear little about. Juan Cole has noted on his blog that in 2003 Iran offered the US full cooperation with the IAEA-- and more--including Recognition of Israel within 1967 borders. In response, Bush reprimanded the Swiss embassy for daring to forward the proposal, because, Cole argues, Bush and his various constituencies (including the military-industrial complex…) do not want peaceful relations with Iran.

And they may not get what they do not want.

Frida Berrigan and William Hartung, writing on TomPaine.com last week, observe that the US proposal--that Iran will be allowed to continue its enrichment program, as long as it agrees to first suspend all activity, and “prove” that its intentions are entirely civilian—sets the bar awfully high. They note that,

One administration official has indicated that a rejection of the U.S. overture by Iran may in fact be the White House’s objective. Such a rebuff would allow the Bush administration to take forceful action without being seen as unreasonable unilateralists.

This cynical approach is similar to U.S. actions in the run-up to the Iraq war, when President Bush falsely claimed that a diplomatic solution was possible even after the decision to attack Saddam Hussein's regime had been [taken].

Berrigan and Hartung ask,

What would the United States be doing if it were truly committed to a diplomatic resolution? In addition to pursuing a more gradual approach that would give the negotiating process months or years, not weeks, to bear fruit, non-aggression pledges by the United States and Israel might get things moving.. . . . The clearest route to a nuclear-free Iran, is a nuclear-free Middle East. [and ] The clearest route to a nuclear-free Middle East is concrete steps towards nuclear disarmament by nuclear heavyweights. And that has to start with the heaviest heavy of all—the United States of America.

hell, meet handbasket

people shouldn't be afraid of their governments...

Governments should be afraid of their people. Count me with those who liked V for Vendetta a lot. Just what I needed. Ok so it’s a comic book. But what’s wrong with the idea that revolutions should include dancing? The only thing that worries me is that there's a positive review on The Conservative Commentator or some such site. And no, I am not linking to that.

well, shut my mouth

I feel kinda bad now for having had a NYTimes letter published critiquing Souter back when he was appointed. He looks better and better all the time (well, the rest of the court looks worse & worse). This from DHS’s dissent in Ceballos:

The Court holds that “when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” Ante, at 9. I respectfully dissent. I agree with the majority that a government employer has substantial interests in effectuating its chosen policy and objectives, and in demanding competence, honesty, and judgment from employees who speak for it in doing their work. But I would hold that private and public interests in addressing official wrongdoing and threats to health and safety can outweigh the government’s stake in the efficient implementation of policy, and when they do public employees who speak on these matters in the course of their duties should be eligible to claim First Amendment protection.

Lawyers Guns and Money points out,

He's particularly strong on the potential implications of this new doctrinal creation; as he notes, "[t]his ostensible domain beyond the pale of the First Amendment is spacious enough to include even the teaching of a public university professor, and I have to hope that today's majority does not mean to imperil First Amendment protection of academic freedom in public colleges and universities, whose teachers necessarily speak and write "pursuant to official duties."

wise freud

The individual in any given nation has . . . a terrible opportunity to convince himself of what would occasionally strike him in peace-time—that the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrong-doing, not because it desired to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it like salt and tobacco. The warring state permits itself every such misdeed, every such act of violence, as would disgrace the individual man. It practices not only the accepted stratagems, but also deliberate lying and deception against the enemy; and this, too, in a measure which appears to surpass the usage of former wars. The state exacts the utmost degree of obedience and sacrifice from its citizens, but at the same time treats them as children by maintaining an excess of secrecy, and censorship of news and expressions of opinion that renders the spirits of those thus intellectually oppressed defenceless against every unfavourable turn of events and every sinister rumour. It absolves itself from the guarantees and contracts it had formed with other states, and makes unabashed confession of its rapacity and lust for power, which the private individual is then called upon to sanction in the name of patriotism.

Sigmund Freud, "Thoughts on War and Death," trans. E. Colburn Mayne, in Collected Papers, ed. Joan Riviere (New York: Basic, 1959), 4:293-94. Written in 1915, in the midst of WWI, The Great War to end all wars.

wrr: hell, no

What sort of resistance to business as usual can we find in the US Military? We know that a number of retired generals have lately spoken out against the war in Iraq, and a recent Zogby poll showed that 29 % of US troops in Iraq favor immediate withdrawal, while another survey shows 72 percent of them think the US should withdraw within the year. Soldiers like Kevin Benderman, Carl Webb, Pablo Paredes, and Kelly Dougherty have sought conscientious objector status, 400 have sought refuge in Canada, and some 9,000 have failed to report for duty since combat began in Iraq, while military recruiters have fallen notoriously short of their goals. In March, members of the group Iraq Veterans Against the War marked the third anniversary of the invasion by marching with Katrina survivors from Mobile, Alabama to New Orleans, Louisiana, calling on the government to “Abandon Iraq, not the Gulf Coast!” Iraq Veterans Against the War are also offering active-duty soldiers free DVDs of the recent film Sir, No Sir!: The Suppressed Story of the GI Movement to End the War in Vietnam, directed by David Zeiger. Along with the book Soldiers in Revolt: GI Resistance During the Vietnam War, written by David Cortright, and recently reissued with a new introduction by Howard Zinn, it provides an illuminating antidote to the right-wing’s revisionist history of the 60s and 70s.

One canard those works refute is the idea that the US could have won the war if only cowardly Washington politicians had not tied the military’s hands and prevented it from unleashing its awesome power against Vietnam. Cortright argues that opposition to the war from within the rank and file forced the Pentagon to wind down the ground war. One problem was personnel shortages. By the Pentagon’s own figures, well over 500,000 “incidents of desertion” occurred between 1966 and 1971; by 1971 entire units were refusing to go into battle in unprecedented numbers. 206,000 never reported for the draft. From 1970 to the end of 1972 (shortly before the draft ended) 145,000 successfully applied for Conscientious Objector status. It wasn’t just the enlisted ranks affected, either: college ROTC ranks, the main source of junior officers, dropped precipitously. Disciplinary problems further depleted the ranks. Administrative discharges for “unfitness, unsuitability, or misconduct” – including antiwar activity– grew steadily through 1971. After resistance of the soldiers on the ground led the US government to shift to an air war, such discharges increased in the Air Force, peaking in 1973.
Cortright calls these extra-legal rebellions the “GI Resistance”; which includes the instances of “fragging” in which soldiers killed their commanding officers, often using fragmentation grenades, as well as mutiny and sabotage. The GI Resistance wasn’t always overtly political or collectively planned, but it reinforced the efforts of what Cortright calls the “GI Movement,” referring to carefully planned opposition within the military and purposeful protest-- actions that were designed to exert pressure on politicians and the higher echelons of the military. GIs signed petitions, placed advertisements in newspapers, formed picket lines, and marched at the head of peace demonstrations. They built organizations, created media, set up networks and agitated.

Another myth challenged by both Cortright’s book Soldiers in Revolt and Zeiger’s film Sir! No Sir! is that draftees led the GI opposition to the war. In fact, the greatest dissent came from those who had volunteered, the vast majority of whom were from working-class backgrounds. Many enlistees felt betrayed. One summed up the dynamic when he said, “draftees expect shit, get shit, aren’t even disappointed. Volunteers expect something better, get the same shit, and have at least one more year to get mad about it.” Soldiers in Revolt cites a number of studies that found that the bulk of organized resisters in the military had volunteered. Dissent and sabotage also occurred in the Navy and Air Force, neither of which used conscripts. Finally, the rejection of – and more than occasional rebellion against – the war effort among combat soldiers who were overwhelmingly enlistees confirms Cortright’s assessment.

On the other hand, as Rob Saute points out in a review of Soldiers in Revolt in Citizen Soldier,
many enlistees volunteered so that they could avoid being drafted, and the presence of the draft heightened civilian opposition to the War. The same forces that affected the rest of American society – the counter-culture, the civil rights movement, the general loosening of authority – influenced servicemen. Black soldiers, who led much of the opposition, brought with them consciousness and political insights from the civil rights and Black power movements. And far from spitting on returning vets (an urban legend that Sir! No Sir! takes pains to debunk) Civilian anti-war activists provided moral support, counseling, and other forms of legal and political aid.

In an essay in the May 8th issue of the Nation magazine, Christian Parenti argues that the military response to the Vietnam-era GI Movement and Resistance has shaped the current armed forces:
Ending the draft, he writes, excised much of the disgruntled element from the ranks, and by professionalizing the services, it has helped create a deepening military-civilian divide. Within today's all-volunteer military, there is much more intense solidarity than during the Vietnam era. After Vietnam the military also improved its housing, wages, benefits, food and training; it reached out to the families of soldiers and modernized its disciplinary systems and promotions methods, all of which improved morale.

Another key difference between this war and Vietnam is the use of whole-unit rotations as opposed to individual rotations. In Vietnam a soldier was dropped into a unit for 365 days and then, if he survived, plucked out. In Iraq and Afghanistan, battalions of 500 to 800 soldiers train together, deploy together and come home together. During Vietnam the constant flow of men in and out of line companies fighting the war seriously undermined unit cohesion and camaraderie.

On the other hand, Parenti notes that activist vets all point out that unit cohesion can cut two ways: It works like Kryptonite to stop rebellion, but after a tipping point unit cohesion can serve to make rebellion even more intense.

If 1960s activism was fueled by disillusioned outrage, Parenti suggests, then today's activism is fettered by a type of world-weary cynicism. Iraq Veteran Against the War Fernando Braga says most of the guys in his unit assume the war is based on lies and that it's all about oil, but they won't get involved in peace activism because "They say, 'You can't change anything.' But if you read history you see that usually people already have changed things," he says. "Movements have made lots of things happen."

coincidence?

Is there any relation between the willingness of companies like AT&T and Verizon to hand over phone records to the NSA, and their wish to censor the internet so they can make more money by forcing us to go only to commercial sites? Inquiring minds want to know.

qwest gets something right

I've had my annoyances with their billing practices and so on, but at least they haven't been turning all their customer data over to the NSA.

boom goes london, boom paris

Even the U.S. will not dare to unilaterally break 60 years of nuclear taboo and drop a nuke on an Iranian city. However, it probably can get away with using "tactical nuclear bunker buster" bombs against ostensibly military targets. The world will be outraged, of course. But after a few months of media spin, the U.S. would likely quell the opprobrium.

says Pravda

no wonder I feel stupid

Moderate Drinking Good for Women's Brains

Women who had up to two drinks a day scored about 20 percent higher on a test of mental ability than women who had less than one a day or didn't drink at all, according to a report in the April 7 issue of Stroke.

huey

When I first learned about Huey Long , my mother (b.1921, grew up in Louisiana, among other places) said he was a demagogue. But I thought he sounded like a pretty good guy. He believed in Sharing the Wealth, provided free textbooks, built roads, wanted to provide minimum and maximum income levels. Stuff like that. He wasn't so great on free speech issues. But there's still good to be said of him.

He comes off pretty badly in All the King's Men, at least in the 1949 movie version. (Who knows what the 2006 version will be like.) But it still doesn't seem quite right to have named All the President's Men after the earlier work. Nixon was no populist.

wrr: attacks on higher education

The Well-Read Red has been reading up on right-wing attacks on higher education.

I don’t mean the targetted assasinations of Iraqi academics, nor even the denials of visas to foreign scholars who have been invited to US conferences or hired to teach at US universities. I mean something more local, what Henry Giroux has called “the relentless attempt to destroy critical education as a foundation for an engaged citizenry and a vibrant democracy.” Giroux points out that

the attack on all levels of education is evident not only in the attempts to corporatize education, standardize curricula, privatize public schooling, and use the language of business as a model for governance, but also in the ongoing effort to weaken the power of faculty, turn full time jobs into contractual labor, & hand over those larger educational forces in the culture to a small group of corporate interests. Public schooling is increasingly reduced to training and modeled after prisons -- with its emphasis on criminalizing student behavior and its prioritizing of security over critical learning. Educators are now viewed largely as deskilled technicians, depoliticized professionals, paramilitary forces, hawkers for corporate goods, or grant writers.

Giroux doesn’t mention it, but those educators who don’t fit such descriptions are liable to be attacked, as, well, “dangerous”: Last month David Horowitz published a book called “The Professors: The 101 most dangerous academics in America,” listing scholars to the left of center, including luminaroes like Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. Another figure on the list, Journalism professor Robert McChesney, responded that

If Horowitz believes that publicly supported universities have an obligation to have faculties that represent the range of U.S. political opinion, and that it currently tilts too far to the left, he should follow the logic to its obvious resting place. Generals and military officers are far more important to the functioning of a government – and, as history shows in depressingly frequent detail, a much greater threat to democratic governance -- than [are, say,] anthropology professors. In the United States the military is enormous, it is entirely funded by taxpayers, and the officer corps is significantly right-wing Republican. If Horowitz is going on some sort of rampage about getting political balance in important publicly funded professions, he can only be taken seriously if he starts at the Pentagon. When he has established how to do it there we can proceed to the campuses.

Horowitz is also the man responsible for promoting versions of what he calls an “Academic Freedom Bill of Rights”— a title that needs to be interpreted as we do the “Clear Skies” initiative, or the “liberation” of Iraq.

Bills allowing college students the power to sue "dictator professors" who offend their beliefs by teaching material which contradicts those beliefs have been proposed in several states, and Pennsylvania has a congressional board set up to investigate such cases of ‘bias’ in the classroom.

The satirical website fafblog last year put it this way:

Freedom is ever-marching, and its latest target for emancipation is none other than the Gulag Academia, where millions of students are held hostage by totalitarian educators whose cruel practice of teaching them things they don't already believe could soon be put to an end.

For far too long, higher education has been concerned with "education" and "instruction," mere euphemisms for harsh indoctrination into the totalitarian ideology of Fact. But now students will be given the tools to fight back, to free themselves of their oppressive enslavement to a world in which life evolved over millions of years through natural selection, dinosaurs weren't wiped out six thousand years ago by the flood of Noah, and the evil Xemu was not responsible for the existence of body thetans.

Will students learn more in such an environment? Of course not. But this is precisely the point: America has done so much to oppose tyranny in the form of earthly despots that it can only proceed to liberate humanity from the greatest dictator of all: Reality, which tyrannically insists that we acknowledge That Which Is rather than That Which Would Be More Convenient For Us.

Freed from the tyranny of Reality and the dangerous threat of its advance guard, Information, America's youth will be free to live in a world consisting solely of their own pre-existing beliefs, where messy ideological review and examination of fact have become unnecessary.

More seriously, and more recently, Sophia McClennen on Counterpunch
noted that although

These attacks have typically been disguised as a defense of student rights . . . really the assault is on the student.
. . . the right now claims that students are victims of indoctrination. Brainwashing and mind control in classrooms constitute a parent's worst fears. . . [and the idea] immediately makes the public suspicious of professors. But let's consider for a moment what such charges presume, especially when they are bundled with the . . . claim that students need more access to conservative faculty.

Throughout the Bush reign the public has been repeatedly asked to uncritically believe, to have blind faith, to sacrifice, and to obey. The connections between the type of public ideally imagined by the administration and the nation's youth should be obvious. If you require an obedient populace, then it is essential that you begin training the youth accordingly. Favoring tests over critique, memorization over engagement, loyalty over social commitment, individualism over community, and so on implies a student educated to passively consume what the government provides rather than to actively participate in the construction of a democratic society. This negative view of the unthinking student repeatedly appears in arguments that assume that students are docile and submissive, easily persuaded to accept their professors' politics. The right also confuses the necessary confrontations that arise in an atmosphere of critical pedagogy with hostility towards students’ views.

What really worries the right, McClennan argues, is not left-leaning faculty, but the intellectually sphisticated students such faculty hope to encourage.

She concludes,

As education becomes increasingly privatized and . . . students increasingly consider education as a consumer product, it will become more and more difficult to encourage students to use the university as a site of social engagement and collective critique. On the positive side, the greatest advantage the left may have in this battle is its respect for the student. Fostering wakefulness over dreams, engagement over loyalty, vigilance over obedience, political activism over passive consumption, and hope over fearfulness may very well be our best weapon.

don't drink and drive

Make that don't drink and drive. Texas has been arresting people for public drunkenness in bars. See also.

no more parables

Octavia Butler died yesterday. She had planned to someday write a follow up to the fabulous Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, Parable of the Trickster, dealing with the Earthseed community on its new planetary home. But that won't happen now. Her last interview was February 6. There's one thing you can predict about the future: we will die.

not flying

If you get to the airport and find out you're on the no-fly list, can you get a refund for your plane ticket?

uses of the erotic

from Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "Uses of the Erotic: the Erotic as Power" (1978):
The erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.
The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.
Within the celebration of the erotic in all our endeavors, my work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered.
Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do. For instance, how often do we truly love our work even at its most difficult?
The principal horror of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need--the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fulfillment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we love. But this is tantamount to blinding a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it is also profoundly cruel.
The erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, …or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Another way in which the erotic connection functions is the open and fearless underlining of my capacity for joy. In the way my body stretches to music and opens into response, hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which I sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.
That self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which I know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of my capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it be lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible, and does not have to be called marriage, nor god, nor an afterlife.
This is one reason why the erotic is so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all. For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within our lives. And this is a grave responsibility . . . not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.
In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.
Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world.

guns don't kill people, bullets kill people

Or, guns don't wound people, Vice Presidents wound people. Dick Cheney shot a fellow hunter. After the first few hours, spin control takes hold and headlines start to include the word "accidentally." He shot him in the face and chest.
Spoof headline: Cheney Accidentally Shoots Leak Case Lawyer.
Here's the Mefi thread.
And then there's this Eric Idle song.

simulacrame

Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

blue nude

the starling can't get out

from Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1767)

In my return back through the passage, I heard the same words repeated twice over; and looking up, I saw it was a starling hung in a little cage--'I can't get out--I can't get out,' said the starling.

I stood looking at the bird: and to every person who came through the passage it ran fluttering to the side towards which they approach'd it, with the same lamentation of its captivity--'I can't get out,' said the starling--God help thee! said I- -but I'll let out, cost what it will; so I turned about the cage to get to the door; it was twisted and double twisted so fast with wire, there was no getting it to open without pulling the cage to pieces--I took both hands to it.

The bird flew to the place where I was attempting his deliverance, and thrusting his head through the trellis, pressed his breast against it, as if impatient--I fear, poor creature! said I, I cannot set thee at liberty--'No,' said the starling-- 'I can't get out--I can't get out,' said the starling. . . .

Disguise thyself as thou wilt, Slavery! said I--still thou art a bitter draught! and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.- -'Tis thou, thrice sweet and gracious goddess, addressing myself to Liberty, whom all in public or in private worship, whose taste is grateful, and ever will be so, till Nature herself shall change--no tint of words can spot thy snowy mantle ao chymic power to turn thy sceptre into iron-- with thee to smile upon him as he eats his crust, the swain is happier than his monarch, from whose court thou art exiled-- Gracious heaven! cried I, kneeling down upon the last step but one in my ascent, grant me but health, thou great Bestower of it, and give me but this fair goddess as my companion--and shower down thy mitres, if it seems good unto thy divine providence, upon those heads which are aching for them.

my job is to presidate

Brilliant. Watch this movie. Now.

from The Smirking Chimp.

wrr: a little alito goes a long way too far

He has argued that the federal government has no responsibility for the "health, safety and welfare" of Americans; that "the constitution does not protect the right to an abortion"; that the executive should be immune from liability for illegal domestic wiretapping; that illegal immigrants have no "fundamental rights"; that police had a right to kill an unarmed 15-year-old accused of stealing $10; and that it should be legal to fire, and exclude from funded federal programmes, people with AIDS, because of "fear of contagion ... reasonable or not.” As a judge, he argued that federal regulation of machine guns was unconstitutional; he approved the strip search of a mother and her 10-year-old daughter although they were not named in a warrant.

Commenting on Judge Alito’s smooth persona and “dinner-table geniality,” Pierre Tristam on his website Candide’s Notebooks observes:

Not to make exaggerated claims, but it’s possible to be a crook, a hit man, a Jay Gould or [a Jack] Abramoff and still be a terrific dinner companion. . . . Alito is not a boor in person, he is a boor only in his legal philosophy. . . . It’s all there in his past decisions, his speeches, his on-the-record advocacies. . . . his infamous abortion ruling that drips of contempt for women, his imperial [view] of the presidency that drip[s] with contempt for Congress, his John Roberts-like, courtier’s draw to power, and in defense of power, at the expense of the weaker, the ordinary, the individual, for whom the Bill of Rights was written.

Alito, Tristam argues, is “just mean.”

For instance, less than three years ago Alito’s Third Circuit Appeals court heard a case about a prison inmate placed indefinitely in solitary confinement, where he was not allowed books, magazines, newspapers, or pictures from home. Only religious and legal tracts. . . . The inmate, Ronald Banks, claimed his First Amendment rights were being infringed by not having newspapers to read. The warden disagreed. The ban, he reasoned in court, was not only to punish inmates, but also to keep them from using newspapers as catapults and incendiary devices. Apparently, inmates are into flinging [fecal matter] at guards with rolled up periodicals, and sometimes burning them. But if that were so, why couldn’t they use the religious or legal magazines for the same purpose? Two judges ruled in favor of Banks, calling the rules unjustified, exaggerated, unsupported by evidence of necessity, irrational. In other words: cruel, arbitrary, unusual.

Samuel Alito dissented, noting, by way of evidence that the prison rules aren’t irrational, that they apply only to “the most disruptive and dangerous .1%” of the prison population. That should be worrisome to anyone who thinks that the law is not a matter of numbers: It doesn’t matter if one person’s First Amendment rights are being flouted, as opposed to one thousand people’s. [But] to Alito, it apparently does, especially when the .1% are not ordinary humans, but “the most disruptive and dangerous” of their kind. That alone is enough to suggest that Alito sees such things as the Bill of Rights as applying in a hierarchical, subjective sort of way: He leaves it to the warden to decide how to apply them.”

The decision that Tristam discusses resembles Alito’s dissent in Planned Parenthood v Casey, which is discussed (among other places) on the blog “Lawyers, Guns, and Money.” In his dissent, Alito argued to uphold a law that required women to sign a statement notifying their husbands unless they met a fairly narrow set of exceptions. The Supreme Court subsequently voted to nullify the notification requirement.

The core of Alito's argument that the provision does not constitute an "undue burden" is his acceptance of the state's argument that the spousal notification provision would only affect a small percentage of women seeking abortions. This argument is not only illogical, it’s also wrong as a matter of law. As the plurality opinion (O’Connor et al.) noted in Casey:

The analysis does not end with the one percent of women upon whom the statute operates; it begins there. Legislation is measured for consistency with the Constitution by its impact on those whose conduct it affects. . . . The proper focus of constitutional inquiry is the group for whom the law is a restriction, not the group for whom the law is irrelevant.

In both of these cases, Alito seems to suggest that it is fine to violate people’s constitutional rights, as long as it’s only a few people, and perhaps especially if they are members of disfavored groups.

On the other hand, there is one person to whom Alito would like to give more power: the president.

In 2000, Alito declared his belief in the “gospel” of the “unitary executive”—the theory that “the president, as commander-in-chief, is sole judge of the law, unbound by hindrances such as the Geneva conventions, and has inherent authority to subordinate independent government agencies to his fiat.”

Sidney Blumenthal, writing in the Guardian UK, suggests that Alito's belief in the “unitary executive” was perhaps the paramount credential for his nomination by Bush to the supreme court.

During the Reagan Administration, Alito promoted the use of “signing statements,” which have been adopted with the greatest gusto by George W Bush. For instance, when signing the Defense appropriation bill containing the McCain Anti-Torture Amendment, Bush issued a signing statement reserving the authority to ignore the very law to which he had just put his name—in the interests, of course, of “protecting the American people from further terrorist attacks.”

Last month, John Yoo, the former justice department official who wrote the crucial memos justifying Bush's policies on torture, detainees, and domestic surveillance without warrants, debated Notre Dame law profesor Douglass Cassel on the subject of the “unitary executive.”
Cassel asked, "If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?"
"No treaty," Yoo replied.
Cassel prompted, "Also no law by Congress. That is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo."
Yoo said, "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that.”

I think it’s safe to assume Bush would again cite his need to “protect the American people.”

John Nichols, on commondreams.org, quotes James Madison, who drafted the Constitution and later became the fourth president, and who said,

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. . . In war . . . the discretionary power of the executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds are added to those of subduing the force of the people. . . .War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement . . . .The same malignant aspect . . .may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war. . . .No nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.