Not much happening
Last weekend of ice skating. I'll be sure to get there today and tomorrow. It doesn't feel like the end without a show, but one of those hasn't been scheduled for the last few years. I guess if they had anticipated staying open until February 25 they might have planned an Academy Award theme. I don't think I'll be paying attention to that. I haven't watched an Academy Award show since probably the 1990s. They're getting early, aren't they. I remember watching them at Easter time. What's the rush? I hardly see any of the movies any more, anyway. Everything's early this year. Daylight savings coming up in two weeks.
Monbiot buys the Ward Churchill version of events in regard to the attacks of September 11, 2001--that is to say Osama and a small number of cave-dwelling Wahhabi fanatics magically made NORAD stand down and defied the immutable laws of physics, thus delivering one to the conclusion a piece of paper cannot be slipped between Monbiot and the moonstruck followers of the neocons, as they all buy the same Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
--Kurt Nimmo
The real story of the Clintons: The art of politics without conscience.
In Muccino’s movie, the lengths required to achieve economic security testify, in fact, to the elusive and chimerical nature of the so-called American Dream.
--Joanne Laurier
[C]heckpoints have made potential warriors of Palestine's grandfathers at the price of emasculating their sons and grandsons.
--Jonathan Cook
Now I know Tom's usually a far too ponderous grappler for real folks to dine out on, what with his smokestack English grunting and gripping and his all-too-conspicuous cast-iron union suit, but here his blend is oddly perfect.
--Owen Paine
Did we place too much trust in the Americans? Were we too dependent on external forces? No. It would be mere demagoguery for a Haitian president to pretend to be stronger than the Americans, or to engage them in a constant war of words, or to oppose them for opposing’s sake. The only rational course is to weigh up the relative balance of interests, to figure out what the Americans want, to remember what we want, and to make the most of the available points of convergence. In 1994, Clinton needed a foreign policy victory, and a return to democracy in Haiti offered him that opportunity; we needed an instrument to overcome the resistance of the murderous Haitian army, and Clinton offered us that instrument. We never had any illusions that the Americans shared our deeper objectives. But without them we couldn’t have restored democracy.
--Jean-Bertrand Aristide (interviewed by Peter Hallward--short version)
It’s very hard to predict the Bush administration today because they’re deeply irrational. They were irrational to start with but now they’re desperate. They have created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should’ve been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can’t control it and it’s almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can’t discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons they can’t get out would be to concede the reasons they invaded.
--Noam Chomsky (interviewed by Michael Shank)
I’m sticking with my conspiracy analysis that everything the Bush Administration does can be explained on three grounds, not necessarily in order of importance: political power, and its retention; money (this is the necessary, and sufficient, explanation for Cheney’s involvement; whatever happened to those Halliburton options, anyway?); and at least in the Middle East, Zionism.
--Xymphora (I have a little bit of trouble keeping track of Xymphora's point)
One other thing: Dick Cheney also presents a problem for the broad, alternative consensus that America has been warring in Israel's service. There is a kind of truth there, but one which only accounts for the appearance of things rather than their depths, and can't account at all for Cheney's intent. As Joseph Cannon recently wrote, "Does anyone really think that Cheney gives a damn about Zionism or Jews or the return of Jesus or Islamofascism or any of the other religious motivations one hears about?" Radicalizing seventy million Iranians and baiting the entire Muslim world towards acts of retaliation doesn't seem like a sensible strategy for Israeli security, just as we have no problem admitting it isn't one to make America safe, either. So perhaps we should stop thinking that that's really what's going on here.
--Jeff Wells (I think Xymphora and Wells have squared off against each other)
Rare footage from the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing that reveals that there were 3 explosive devices planted INSIDE the building. How did Timothy McVeigh pull that one off?
Over the past three decades, the American ruling elite has carried out an ever more vicious assault on jobs, social programs and all constraints on the accumulation of profit and personal wealth. Top corporate executives and large investors routinely pull in tens of millions of dollars a year, even as the living standards of the majority of the American population stagnate or decline, and ordinary working people face a lifetime of economic insecurity and an increasingly crushing burden of debt. Such enormous levels of inequality are ultimately incompatible with the maintenance of democratic forms of rule.
--Joe Kay
The centrists love to gaze tenderly upon the disillusioned political tough guy they see in the mirror, but for all their worldliness they have somehow managed to blink out one of the most basic facts of history: Politicians not only obey public opinoin, they make public opinion. They can alter the "facts on the ground," they can build movements and change minds. The centrists' self-imposed ignorance of this is the reason they were caught napping by Ross Perot's crusade in 1992 and the trumped-up gay marriage panic of 2004. A zealous attentiveness to movement-building, persuasion and mind-changing, on the other hand, is one of the reasons conservatives have enjoyed their improbable multi-decade winning streak. Mastery beats drift every time.
--Thomas Frank
Excerpt from Critiques of Libertarianism by Mike Huben:
Dred Scott and the Fugitive Slave Laws were examples of government enforcement of slavery.
No. There's a subtle distinction: they were enforcement of property rights of slaveowners. It was entirely the owners' assertion that he was property that the government was acting upon. If the owner had at any time freed him, he would not have been a slave.
Libertarians would love to lay slavery at the feet of government precisely because slavery is a sin of capitalism. The US government NEVER enslaved the blacks. The US government never said "you must now own this slave" or "you've never been a slave before, but you are one now." US slavery was initiated by capitalists.
The US government was NOT in the business of proclaiming people free or slaves: that was a private sector responsibility until that Evil Statist Lincoln stole that sacred private right for the State. Until that time, only private, capitalist owners had the right to declare whether a black person was free or slave.
The World's Smallest Political Quiz [Nolan Test].
This libertarian quiz asks a set of leading questions to tempt you to proclaim yourself a libertarian. The big trick is that if you answer yes to each question, you are a macho SELF GOVERNOR: there is an unspoken sneer to those who would answer anything else. It is an ideological litmus test.
The most obvious criticism of this quiz is that it tries to graph the range of politics onto only 2 axes, as if they were the only two that mattered, rather than the two libertarians want the most change in. For example, if socialists were to create such a test, they would use a different set of axes.
The second obvious criticism is typical of polls taken to show false levels of support: the questions are worded to elicit the desired response. This is called framing bias. For example, on a socialist test, you might see a question such as "Do you believe people should help each other?" Libertarians would answer "yes" to this question; the problem is the "but"s that are filtered out by the question format.
Many libertarians use this as an "outreach" (read: evangelism) tool. By making it easy to get high scores on both axes, subjects can be told that they are already a libertarian and just didn't know it. This is the same sort of suckering that cold readers and other frauds use.
Monbiot buys the Ward Churchill version of events in regard to the attacks of September 11, 2001--that is to say Osama and a small number of cave-dwelling Wahhabi fanatics magically made NORAD stand down and defied the immutable laws of physics, thus delivering one to the conclusion a piece of paper cannot be slipped between Monbiot and the moonstruck followers of the neocons, as they all buy the same Brothers Grimm fairy tale.
--Kurt Nimmo
The real story of the Clintons: The art of politics without conscience.
In Muccino’s movie, the lengths required to achieve economic security testify, in fact, to the elusive and chimerical nature of the so-called American Dream.
--Joanne Laurier
[C]heckpoints have made potential warriors of Palestine's grandfathers at the price of emasculating their sons and grandsons.
--Jonathan Cook
Now I know Tom's usually a far too ponderous grappler for real folks to dine out on, what with his smokestack English grunting and gripping and his all-too-conspicuous cast-iron union suit, but here his blend is oddly perfect.
--Owen Paine
Did we place too much trust in the Americans? Were we too dependent on external forces? No. It would be mere demagoguery for a Haitian president to pretend to be stronger than the Americans, or to engage them in a constant war of words, or to oppose them for opposing’s sake. The only rational course is to weigh up the relative balance of interests, to figure out what the Americans want, to remember what we want, and to make the most of the available points of convergence. In 1994, Clinton needed a foreign policy victory, and a return to democracy in Haiti offered him that opportunity; we needed an instrument to overcome the resistance of the murderous Haitian army, and Clinton offered us that instrument. We never had any illusions that the Americans shared our deeper objectives. But without them we couldn’t have restored democracy.
--Jean-Bertrand Aristide (interviewed by Peter Hallward--short version)
It’s very hard to predict the Bush administration today because they’re deeply irrational. They were irrational to start with but now they’re desperate. They have created an unimaginable catastrophe in Iraq. This should’ve been one of the easiest military occupations in history and they succeeded in turning it into one of the worst military disasters in history. They can’t control it and it’s almost impossible for them to get out for reasons you can’t discuss in the United States because to discuss the reasons they can’t get out would be to concede the reasons they invaded.
--Noam Chomsky (interviewed by Michael Shank)
I’m sticking with my conspiracy analysis that everything the Bush Administration does can be explained on three grounds, not necessarily in order of importance: political power, and its retention; money (this is the necessary, and sufficient, explanation for Cheney’s involvement; whatever happened to those Halliburton options, anyway?); and at least in the Middle East, Zionism.
--Xymphora (I have a little bit of trouble keeping track of Xymphora's point)
One other thing: Dick Cheney also presents a problem for the broad, alternative consensus that America has been warring in Israel's service. There is a kind of truth there, but one which only accounts for the appearance of things rather than their depths, and can't account at all for Cheney's intent. As Joseph Cannon recently wrote, "Does anyone really think that Cheney gives a damn about Zionism or Jews or the return of Jesus or Islamofascism or any of the other religious motivations one hears about?" Radicalizing seventy million Iranians and baiting the entire Muslim world towards acts of retaliation doesn't seem like a sensible strategy for Israeli security, just as we have no problem admitting it isn't one to make America safe, either. So perhaps we should stop thinking that that's really what's going on here.
--Jeff Wells (I think Xymphora and Wells have squared off against each other)
Rare footage from the day of the Oklahoma City Bombing that reveals that there were 3 explosive devices planted INSIDE the building. How did Timothy McVeigh pull that one off?
Over the past three decades, the American ruling elite has carried out an ever more vicious assault on jobs, social programs and all constraints on the accumulation of profit and personal wealth. Top corporate executives and large investors routinely pull in tens of millions of dollars a year, even as the living standards of the majority of the American population stagnate or decline, and ordinary working people face a lifetime of economic insecurity and an increasingly crushing burden of debt. Such enormous levels of inequality are ultimately incompatible with the maintenance of democratic forms of rule.
--Joe Kay
The centrists love to gaze tenderly upon the disillusioned political tough guy they see in the mirror, but for all their worldliness they have somehow managed to blink out one of the most basic facts of history: Politicians not only obey public opinoin, they make public opinion. They can alter the "facts on the ground," they can build movements and change minds. The centrists' self-imposed ignorance of this is the reason they were caught napping by Ross Perot's crusade in 1992 and the trumped-up gay marriage panic of 2004. A zealous attentiveness to movement-building, persuasion and mind-changing, on the other hand, is one of the reasons conservatives have enjoyed their improbable multi-decade winning streak. Mastery beats drift every time.
--Thomas Frank
Excerpt from Critiques of Libertarianism by Mike Huben:
Dred Scott and the Fugitive Slave Laws were examples of government enforcement of slavery.
No. There's a subtle distinction: they were enforcement of property rights of slaveowners. It was entirely the owners' assertion that he was property that the government was acting upon. If the owner had at any time freed him, he would not have been a slave.
Libertarians would love to lay slavery at the feet of government precisely because slavery is a sin of capitalism. The US government NEVER enslaved the blacks. The US government never said "you must now own this slave" or "you've never been a slave before, but you are one now." US slavery was initiated by capitalists.
The US government was NOT in the business of proclaiming people free or slaves: that was a private sector responsibility until that Evil Statist Lincoln stole that sacred private right for the State. Until that time, only private, capitalist owners had the right to declare whether a black person was free or slave.
The World's Smallest Political Quiz [Nolan Test].
This libertarian quiz asks a set of leading questions to tempt you to proclaim yourself a libertarian. The big trick is that if you answer yes to each question, you are a macho SELF GOVERNOR: there is an unspoken sneer to those who would answer anything else. It is an ideological litmus test.
The most obvious criticism of this quiz is that it tries to graph the range of politics onto only 2 axes, as if they were the only two that mattered, rather than the two libertarians want the most change in. For example, if socialists were to create such a test, they would use a different set of axes.
The second obvious criticism is typical of polls taken to show false levels of support: the questions are worded to elicit the desired response. This is called framing bias. For example, on a socialist test, you might see a question such as "Do you believe people should help each other?" Libertarians would answer "yes" to this question; the problem is the "but"s that are filtered out by the question format.
Many libertarians use this as an "outreach" (read: evangelism) tool. By making it easy to get high scores on both axes, subjects can be told that they are already a libertarian and just didn't know it. This is the same sort of suckering that cold readers and other frauds use.