This Week in Tyranny
Sunday, January 30, 2011 at 03:52AM No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Our image in the Muslim world would probably improve if we stopped killing so many Muslims.
Combat operations have concluded for these soldiers. I wonder how many US troops have to die in a single incident for it to receive saturation coverage from American media.
The big news of the week is obviously Egypt. Over the years I’ve gotten the general impression that Hosni Mubarak’s government is pretty repressive and undemocratic, so on the face of it getting rid of him would be A Good Thing. That said, there are worse societal conditions than rule by iron-fisted dictator, which the average Iraqi could probably persuade the average Egyptian of. There’s no guarantee that Mubarek’s ouster will be more enlightened or capable.
Dear rest of the world,
Please don’t take it personally. We treat our own people abominably too.
Love,
America
When a domestic terrorist’s motives are arguable, it’s political catnip and the press gets no end of enjoyment in playing with it. After all, you can bring up all sorts of provocative theories but don’t have to actually hang the unpleasantness on any one group - which in the Village would be terribly gauche.
By contrast, when a domestic terrorist’s motives are firmly established (via) to be inspired by right wing hate, or even strongly trending in that direction, it’s best to just keep walking.
McClatchy is the closest thing America has to an indispensable for-profit news service:
- The official word on the meltdown (via). And your dissenting opinion.
- Behind the scenes of the incubating CFPC. Elizabeth Warren is the closest thing America has to a genuine hero in the bowels of the economic policymaking apparatus.
- The looting continues, and why wouldn’t it? It’s not like the last smash-and-grab ended poorly for them.
We are still torturing people in Guantánamo. The article quotes Candace Gorman, who posts at The Guantánamo Blog.
So a DDOS attack against WikiLeaks passes the federal government unnoticed but one against companies boycotting WikiLeaks gets a full scale FBI investigation. Good to know.
The revolving door spins away.
Belknap (New Hampshire) County Democratic Chair Ed Allard, on state Republicans: “They’re going to hang themselves. And we’re going to help them.” I suspect it will get a lot of play from the Both Sides Do It crowd. Once more, with feeling: Eliminationist rhetoric among prominent commentators and high ranking elected officials is almost exclusively the province of the right. The Belknap (New Hampshire) County Democratic Chair is not a high ranking elected official. He shouldn’t have used the language he did and deserves to be criticized for it, but it doesn’t mitigate the critique one iota.
Bad, worse and frightening.
Never corner a wounded ideologue: “They seem determined to make the entire working nation pay — heavily — for what their economists and politicians have gotten wrong for three consecutive decades and continue to get wrong, bringing us to the brink of another recession.”
In the spirit of Sharing Your Offspring’s Enthusiasms I recently read Suzanne Collins’ “Hunger Games” trilogy, which is set in the America of the moderately distant future. After a failed revolution, the capitol is relocated to the Rockies, the nation rechristened Panem and divided into districts, and a merciless crackdown is launched - followed by a long period of repression.
One of the interesting dynamics in the series is the ongoing contrast between life inside and out of the capitol. The capitol is depicted as opulent, prodigal and carefree; in the districts people scrape by, often at subsistence level or even below. I couldn’t help but think of it when I read this (via) about the president’s State of the Union address. Jonathan Schell notes president’s comments on the challenges facing America’s education system, innovation strategy and infrastructure, then writes:
none of those problems, needful of attention as they are in their own right, is the chief cause of the United States’s economic doldrums—its stubborn high unemployment, its persisting housing bust, its galloping economic inequality. These were the fruit of an economic crash brought on by a misguided, corrupt, incompetent, larcenous, unregulated financial establishment. The relevant remedies are not better technology or some contemporary equivalent of sending a man to the moon. (In any case, although Obama insisted “We do big things,” he didn’t offer one.) The remedies needed are a re-regulation and reconstruction of the financial system, plus a major, Keynesian style stimulus program to create jobs and purchasing power, and so to jar the economy out of its stupor. But none of that was in Obama’s speech. On the contrary, his proposal to freeze spending for five years threatened more economic stagnation.Washington, DC has constructed for itself a privileged, recession-proof environment. It must be easy and tempting to become willfully blind to the suffering beyond it. I’m sure walking around in their day-to-day lives everything looks peachy. Unemployment is low. Housing prices are stable. Sure, things could be better but it’s hardly a crisis right?
It would be presumptuous and most likely wildly inaccurate to say Collins had any allegorical intent in her story. That said, we all are products of our eras and cultures; she didn’t go into a hermetically sealed vault when she started writing. In the wake of the president’s unwillingness to directly address the biggest challenges facing the country, and his slightly off-kilter focus on peripheral issues, it was hard not to draw a parallel between the real and fictional capitols: Blindness in the bubble world to widespread misery.
George Will is almost 70 years old and it is only now occurring to him that the State of the Union speech is a spectacle? Of course not. He’s just pouting because the other side is running the show right now. Listen, I sympathize. I’m a Browns fan, so it isn’t especially pleasant to be in the middle of all this Steelers triumphalism leading up to the Super Bowl.
There are lots of things I could write about that. For instance, I could write that Pittsburgh’s star quarterback exists somewhere on the manhood scale between creepy, entitled jerk and sexual predator. Or that they have an unusually high proportion of cheap thugs who take on a wounded, innocent tone when called to account and even go into full diva mode by threatening to flounce away. Or how their fans love to rhapsodize about how they hold their players to a higher standard but squeal like stuck pigs when even ordinary ones are applied (let’s face it - they would lustily cheer a bunch of contract killers if they brought home the W’s). Or how the whole operation basically comes across as a sanctimonious version of the 70’s Raiders.
But what I won’t write is that the Super Bowl has become largely irrelevant, is only properly of interest to supporters of the teams involved, or has become a gaudy production unworthy of the American sports fan. It’s one of the biggest events on the sports calendar even when a rival team is playing, and it would come across as cheap, obvious disparagement pretend otherwise.
I would definitely feel differently about it if my favorite team was playing. If Cleveland ever does make it to the Super Bowl (it could happen!) I’m sure I will be convinced that the game represents all that is good and wonderful about the US, and that even casual sports fans - hell, even non-sports fans - owe it to themselves to give it their undivided attention. That’s how it works when your team is on top. That’s also why it seems so much less compelling when your team isn’t. George Will refusing to acknowledge the same dynamic in politics means that he either has precious little insight to show for his decades in the capitol or is deeply contemptuous of his audience.
Antonin Scalia skipped it, which ought to be the first thing he’s done as an Associate Supreme Court Justice that I wholeheartedly approve of - except that it’s pretty clearly a Will-esque fit of pique and not some kind of principled statement against aggrandizing the executive branch. As soon as one of his people is behind the podium again he’ll be there with bells on. Ah, the charade!
If we could do real-time hyperlinking of it I might be more inclined to watch. For instance, “nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world” would be immeasurably improved as “nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world.”
There’s a fascinating comment thread to this post. See this on people who should know better, this weak rationalization, this even weaker one, this response to the nonsense, and these words of wisdom from Bob In Pacifica:
The point is that the army will fuck with you. They fuck with their own, and their own will fuck back, and they will fuck with outside agitators. I have no doubt that there were instructions to fuck with anyone who tried to see Manning. If the tags weren’t expired they would have run a smog test. Something.For me, the real takeaway was that there is - on what is probably considered a left-leaning and politically knowledgeable blog community - a surprising tolerance for police state tactics. I was gratified to see well articulated rebuttals, but disheartened that they needed to be made in the first place. Maybe it’s simple tribalism, and folks are rallying to the defense of the leaders they voted for, maybe it’s genuine conviction.
I used to think objecting to the erosion of civil liberties and human rights in America was just a matter of getting the word out: that if enough people got a clear enough idea of the indecency that was being done in our name, there would be such a hue and cry that it would immediately be shut down. I don’t think that anymore.
ECONNED EXCERPT from page 169:
One of the salient characteristics of the capital markets business is the amount of discretion given of necessity to non-managerial employees, meaning traders, salesmen, investment bankers, analysts. In pretty much every other large-scale business, decisions that have a meaningful bottom-line impact (pricing, new sales campaigns, investment decisions) are deliberate affairs, ultimately decided at a reasonably senior level. By contrast, these firms, because they live in a transaction flow that presents often-fleeting profit opportunities, delegate substantial authority. Most businesses are on an agricultural model, seeking to build reputable, sustainable revenues. While some businesses housed in financial services firms are like that (funds management, where the income comes from low-risk fees on the amount of assets managed), many are on a hunter-gatherer model of being adaptive, reactive and opportunistic (even though these hunter-gatherers have high-tech support beyond the comprehension of the stone knives and bear skins set).
Readers often bristle at this characterization, seeing it as a form of Wall Street exceptionalism. But we are not talking about the real-world impact of these decisions we are talking about their significance to the organization. While an emergency room doctor clearly makes choices of great importance and often operates under acute time pressure, if he gets something wrong, while the results are catastrophic and people may die, his mistakes to not threaten the survival of his hospital. By contrast, a fairly junior trader, Nick Leeson, single-handedly blew up Barings, a 200-year old merchant bank (the UK analog to investment banks).Other trading businesses and deal-oriented firms give decisions with considerable bottom-line impact to non-managerial staff. But the peculiar characteristic of big capital markets firms is that they still have a good deal of dispersed, delegated, profit-impacting authority in a wide range of businesses. By contrast, other powerful trading firms, such as Cargill, have a narrower span of businesses, which makes it easier for the top brass to supervise the enterprise.
Reader Comments (5)
your Winter Break seems to have recharged your batteries. good roundup. thanks for all of the linky goodness and cogent commentary. welcome back.
Thanks much - glad you enjoyed it!
Three things:
1. I find it odd that a blog devoted to "pruning back the power of the Executive Branch" would take such a disinterested "hey, there are worse things than dictatorship" attitude about events in Egypt. Would it affect your response to realize that a real driving force behind the protests is not a so much a craving for democracy but economic hardship? (My own comments, more on the protests themselves and their impact rather than their genesis, are here and here, if anyone cares.)
2. "Flounce away?"
3. Two things reference above noted here, with credit.
Hi Larry. I didn't mean to take a disinterested attitude towards the aspirations of the protesters, and I apologize for giving that impression. What I was trying to get at was more like this: I don't want to jump in with both feet and pronounce it all awesome because it's possible for something worse to follow.
Getting rid of Mubarak isn't in and of itself a good thing. It's only good if his successor is better. I could easily imagine someone even worse seizing control amidst the chaos and uncertainty, and I just wanted to be clear about that. Again, I apologize for not getting that across better.
Well timed on the visit, by the way. I've got you queued up for BAD tomorrow. :)
it's possible for something worse to follow
True - but the thing is, that's always true of people trying to emerge from repression. You either take the risk or continue to submit. I'm always enthused when people are ready to take that risk, especially when the weapons employed have been mostly (not entirely, but nearly so) limited to rocks.
And just as a sidebar, in case the "someone even worse" you're thinking about is the Muslim Brotherhood: I've been reading up on them and they appear to perform the same role in Egypt as "The terrorists! The terrorists!" do here, that of boogeyman. That is, a threat which does in fact exist but whose importance and size have been seriously overblown to serve purposes of public control.