Carlin

29 June 08
“Dear Lord, that’s the loudest profanity I’ve ever heard.” - Ned Flanders

Noted Air Force veteran George Carlin died last week. Coverage of Carlin’s death invariably focused on the seven dirty words but they’re a minor part of what he was about. Carlin’s whole outlook was that everything sacred needs to be mocked, poked and shit on and that includes people shocked by what was once called indecency.

On stage, of course, he often looked and sounded angry and the few times I watched or listened to him with people who didn’t like his thinking that was often their impression. To people who didn’t get it he was just some vulgar nut, angrily ranting about things. But the joke was on them, in fact the joke was even on some of the fawning members of the audience. Whenever Carlin would lambaste things that “piss me off” cheers would often arise from the crowd. The laughs came too, but the cheers bespoke an agreement with the anger. “Hey, those things piss me off too!” Except that for Carlin the anger was an act, not everyone seems to have gotten that.

Back in February, as publicity for his 14th (and final) HBO comedy show, Carlin was interviewed by Heather Havrilesky at Salon.com. It’s a great read and here’s the telling passage in response to a question about whether or not he’s a generally angry guy:

. . . I don’t lose my temper. I mean, I can get irritated, I can get mad and angry about something, which is a good, healthy thing, I guess, but no. Anyone who’s been around me for five minutes or five years would have to say that I’m pretty even-tempered, and I’m pretty open with strangers and fans and stuff.

The closest I can get to that [anger] is to say that, at some point there leading into the ’90s, I divorced myself from any stake in the human adventure or the American adventure. That sounds kind of pompous so let me just break that down. What I decided was that I didn’t give a fuck about what happens on this planet to these people. I mean, I see the nice things in people, I see the good things, but I also see what a depraved, sick species we are, the only species that kills its own for personal gain.

Carlin saw people for what we are (sick, disgusting and wonderful) and he happily included himself. Here was a man laughing at the whole world and everybody in it, and if you wanted to laugh with him you were always welcome. But if you didn’t want to laugh at some of the things he laughed at, and this guy joked about genocide, rape and natural disasters, well that just meant the joke was on you. He didn’t give a fuck what anyone else said or did because to him everything was funny.

He’s dead now, and in some ways that’s too bad, but in the grand scheme of things it’s pretty unimportant. It does give us a unique opportunity in terms of public mourning though. Usually when someone famous kicks off there are tribute articles and often they’ll include quotes from the family, acquaintance or the dead cunt’s spouse to the effect of, “Well he’s in a better place now”, “He’s looking down on us”, or “He would’ve enjoyed this”, etcetera. Not this time, the dead man himself had no use for preening displays of self serving emotion.

Carlin had the guts to acknowledge the most unpleasant truth of life: we’re all gonna die. What’s worse, once we’re gone nobody is going to care about it for very long. Most people avoid thinking about that, one’s intellect just kind of swims around it without ever acknowledging it, but this cocksucker dove right in. When an ordinary person talks about these kinds of downer topics it pisses everyone off. Carlin’s great talent was his ability to speak these unpleasant truths out loud and merely piss off most people. The rest of us doubled over laughing.

Like all good ex-Catholics Carlin detested piety. He saw it for what it was, a dishonest way to dodge intellectually repugnant things like death. Piety, like most self serving dishonesties, is a tool used by those who want to get away with things and still be thought virtuous. Poking fun at those motherfuckers is a bottomless well of comedy. The instant something is declared sacred the intellectual rot begins to set in and mockery is the only path to redemption.

Carlin questioned everything, especially the sacred things which Authority wants unquestioned. “Question everything”, it sounds like a platitude, and it is often deployed as one, but if you take it seriously it leads very naturally to where Carlin eventually found himself. If you’re not willing to automatically cede any credibility or authority to government, religion, or any other person or organization you’re left with a world of questions, most of which don’t have good answers. One of Carlin’s most enduring bits, I promise it’s the only one I’ll mention, is his reduction of the Ten Commandments:

Once you’re down to the Two Commandments (I. Thou shalt always be honest and faithful II. Thou shalt not kill) you’ve still got a decent set of rules for living your life but you no longer have the infrastructure of morality. The rituals, the ceremonies, the funny costumes, and, of course, the collection plate are all just a scam perpetrated by people who believe that they know better. It’s a means of control and the ornate buildings and elaborate histories are just decoration to obscure yet another unpleasant fact.

It may or may not be a healthy way to do things, but it is, to its core, an honest way to do things. All you’re left with, all you’ve ever had really, are yourself and the people around you. For a little while anyway, until we all die.

Tits.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Dangerous Precedents

25 June 08

“And that pizza delivery truck has been parked across the street for two weeks.  How long does it take to deliver a pizza?” - Marge Simpson

Over at Salon Glenn Greenwald has been doing his customarily thorough job of exposing the rank stupidity and crass corruption swirling around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill currently under consideration in Congress.  (Plenty of others are on the case as well, but Greenwald is a good clearing house if you only want to make one stop.)  The short, short, short version of the story is this: after September 11th the Administration asked for, and got, phone taps, e-mail information and other electronic data without warrants.  The phone companies acceded to the request.  Consumers got wind of it courtesy of The New York Times and, as doing so is illegal, sued the phone companies in federal court.  Those lawsuits are pending at this very moment.

What does that have to do with FISA, you may ask?  It’s a good question and one to which no honest answer has been forthcoming from either the feds or the telephone companies.  Embarrassingly for them the real answer is: not much.  The short, short, short history of FISA is this: it was originally passed in 1978 as a reaction to the outrageous government conduct exposed by the Church Committee.  During the Cold War the government routinely spied on Americans, usually because they either were Communists or were suspected of being Communists.  That was bad enough, but it reached its peak during the Vietnam War (especially during the Nixon Administration) when the government went balls to the wall spying on American citizens who opposed the war, including tapping their phones and opening their mail.  Most of the information gleaned had no real national security implications and as such was a massive waste of resources that could’ve been used against legitimate threats.  The most famous example of this is the years long telephone surveillance of that notorious anti-American Martin Luther King, Jr.

FISA extended the 4th Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure to modern communications but allowed the government to quickly get a warrant in cases of national security by going to a specially designated court.  It was amended in 2001 to include non-government sanctioned groups (i.e. terrorists).

The preceding is a long way of saying something that is frequently papered over when discussions turn to eavesdropping these days:  FISA exists because the government cannot be trusted with unlimited powers of domestic surveillance.  When they had such powers, before the Church Committee, they invaded the lives of innocent Americans and squandered their own resources on pointless political witch hunts.

There is ample evidence that this is exactly what the government was up to and the lawsuits, filed on behalf of ordinary Americans, are an effort to shine the light of day on these events and decisions.  On Friday the House voted for a bill which would, in effect, quash these lawsuits and put illegal activity beyond the reach of the federal courts.  A vote was expected in the Senate some time this week, though now there may be another delay.

(Barack Obama, who had previously pledged to help filibuster any FISA bill which included immunity for the telecom firms, had his campaign put out a meek press release supporting the House bill.  They issued it at the end of the day on Friday, guaranteeing that it would make minimal news.  That was disappointing, if not unexpected given just how long it took them to respond.)

What’s important here isn’t just this specific instance of Administration lawbreaking, though there’s that.  It’s also the telecom companies.  AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etcetera, with the ongoing decline of broadcast television and print news these are the companies which increasingly control the flow of information in our society.  To one degree or another they all offer cable television, home internet access, home telephone service, and cell phone service.  That covers pretty much every means of both mass and interpersonal communication save postal mail.  Now they want to be able to inspect your communications, without cause or permission, and we’ll all just have to trust them that nothing untoward is going to happen.

That is beyond foolish, especially since we are only at the dawn of what electronic surveillance can do.  Five or ten years from now, with this FISA bill as precedent for legalized lawbreaking, what is the next thing they’re going to try?

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

First Principals

22 June 08
“The only way you’ll get me to talk is through slow, painful torture and I don’t think you’ve got the grapes.” - Stewie Griffin

The Third and Fourth Geneva Conventions, the ones about the ethical treatment of civilians and prisoners, the ones the current Administration has been so keen to discard, were negotiated into their current state in 1949.  That was a time when the U.S. stood astride the world like no other power in history.  The American homeland saw no damage and destruction from the war and alone among all the nations of the world the US possessed nuclear weapons.  Iron Curtain or no Iron Curtain, it was an American World.

The accords were negotiated from a position of unprecedented American strength and they reflect that.  In no way, shape or form do they limit useful action by the United States of America, quite the contrary.  They helped to protect America’s position in the world by globally enshrining the ideals we espoused, and they were doing a good job of it right up until Bush the Younger and his team of dingbat fanatics panicked after the attacks of September 11th.

We can see the resulting folly in the five part series on Guantanamo Bay that McClatchy ran this week.  For anyone who is not a knee jerk reactionary it should serve as a final and authoritative takedown of the place itself, the policies that led to it and the officials who thought it up.  The cruelty and stupidity on display are beyond measure.

Not only was almost no useful information gained, but Thomas White, then Secretary of the Army, said it was obvious from the get go that at least a third of the guys didn’t belong there.  And that was just at the beginning, a majority of them, most after years of detention, have been let go as immaterial!  That’s what happens when people can be held with little to no way to challenge their imprisonment.  It was a perfect embodiment of the nightmare the Founding Fathers hoped to stave off by including the right to habeas corpus in the Constitution.  No one has the authority to simply command someone else to be held without cause, you have to have a reason and that reason has to be good enough to withstand impartial scrutiny.

Guantanamo was built specifically to deny that right to these guys and the results serve as one more reminder that abandoning our principals is a fool’s choice.  By denying the men status as prisoners of war and denying them access to civilian courts the Administration hoped to create a new legal space where no protections existed.  That they failed (albeit by a mere 5-4 vote in the Supreme Court two weeks ago) is a triumph of our system of government and of the principal that we are a society of laws not of men.

Of course, during the time when they had their legal limbo, both at Guantanamo and at foreign detention sites, torture and chaos were the order of the day.  McClatchy documents the random cruelty that resulted when American troops, untrained in handling prisoners, were told to soften up detainees who probably had no worthwhile information anyway.  The rule book was ignored and, not surprisingly, discipline among the guards broke down as well.
American soldiers, who killed a number of detainees through callous abuse, were once American kids.  And American kids, and I wholeheartedly include myself in this category, are raised on movies and television shows where it is the Bad Guys who don’t respect the Geneva Conventions.  It is the Bad Guys who abuse prisoners and act cruelly against the weak.  The Good Guys don’t do that stuff, the Good Guys are always magnanimous towards those they dominate, think Stalag 17, think Bridge on the River Kwai, think Great Escape; even in Platoon, when Americans do horrible things to that village, it’s Charlie Sheen (the Good Guy) who stops the others from raping the girl.  This is a concept is so simple and universally accepted that no less a man than Chuck Norris hung an entire action trilogy off of it.  As a people Americans are ill equipped to do these things because our entire culture indoctrinates us against it.

Consequently, when the White House and its staff of penny ante lawyers came up with circle jerk justifications for - ahem - enhanced interrogation they had to do it in legally and morally convoluted ways.  That confusion seeped down the ranks and resulted in the discarding of rules that kept us the Good Guys.

In some sense there isn’t much point to rehashing yet another of the Bush the Younger’s foul mistakes.  Guantanamo Bay, like the Japanese internment camps before it, is a wound on America’s soul.  With the upcoming end of the Bush Administration though we have a chance to heal it.  Closing Guantanamo, apologizing for Guantanamo, blaming Bush the Younger, and publicly rededicating ourselves to the ideals that won us the Cold War will cause it to heal.  Like all serious wounds it will leave a scar, but scars are not bad things.  They remind you of where you’ve been and, sometimes, of mistakes you’ve made.

Prisoners of war have the right to humane treatment during the conflict and repatriation afterwards.  Men held in government custody who are not prisoners of war have the right to challenge their detention.  These rights are not granted by the Constitution or any other document.  They are natural rights, inherent to everyone on Earth.  The Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, these documents protect those rights.  The people who wrote them had been through the most trying of times.  They knew then what we are rediscovering now: that government officials, in any age and of any nationality, can abuse their power; that while discarding these principals can often seem expedient in the face of a newly fashionable fear, it is absolutely essential that it never be done.

What was true then is true now: there is no reason to abandon our most fundamental principals.  Never has been, never will be.

No Comments » | Guantanamo Bay, Habeas Corpus, I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, Sophomoric Imperialism, Torture | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Fear Fading Fast Enough?

18 June 08
“Hi there!  I am Omar’s daddy and I am a ‘President for Life’.  I rely on terror and oppression . . . because everyone plots against me.” - Omar’s Dad

Writing at Alternet this week Matt Taibbi (he of the wonderful and hilarious Jesus retreat story in Rolling Stone) breaks through any remaining post-racial kumbaya bullshit by getting into some of the uglier realities of the 2008 election.  He digs out and highlights the red meat of the still nascent campaign to paint Barack Obama as an effete, terrorist supporting, you-know-who.  Along the way he encounters several John McCain supporters who can’t quite express what they don’t like about Obama, they just know that they don’t like him:

Cindy Oestriecher, a McCain supporter who turned out for his speech in New Orleans, is stumped when I ask her for an example of Obama’s lack of patriotism. “What was that thing about anti-American?” she asks a friend. “What were they referring to?”

“What thing?” asks the friend.

“People were talking about that thing, that anti-American thing,” Cindy says, frowning.

“You mean about the flag, the thing on the Internet?” the friend replies.

“Yeah, I guess,” says Cindy. “The anti-American thing.” “That bothers you?” I ask.

“Of course it does!”

“But you don’t even know what it is,” I say. “You just know that someone else said he was anti-American. You don’t even know who it was that said it!”

She shrugs. What’s my point?

Link (via The American Conservative)

That exchange reminded me of a strikingly similar incident recounted by Mark Danner in the New York Review of Books.  This one occurred in 2004, just days before the election:

When Bush, in full rhetorical flower in Tinker Field, declared to his delirious audience that “Americans need a president who doesn’t think terrorism is ‘a nuisance,’” my neighbor Ms. Richardson-Pinto nudged me with her elbow and shouted over the laughter and cheers, “Do you believe Kerry said that?” Actually, I shouted into her ear, Kerry hadn’t said that, and then I paraphrased for her the actual quotation:

“We have to get back to the place we were, where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance. As a former law enforcement person, I know we’re never going to end prostitution… [and] illegal gambling. But we’re going to reduce it, organized crime, to a level where…it’s something that you continue to fight, but it’s not threatening the fabric of your life.”

Hardly exceptional; indeed, Bush himself had only weeks before said something very similar. Ms. Richardson-Pinto, a well-educated, worldly woman-a doctor, and a two-time Olympic gold medalist in women’s softball-listened to me intently, nodded politely, began to form a question, and then, thinking better of it, looked at me for a moment longer before turning back to the President. She’d had a choice what-or rather whom-to believe; and she’d made it.

Those two exchanges happened three and a half years apart.  That interval has seen the Iraq war drag on without end, the destruction of New Orleans, the Democratic takeover of Congress and the public’s permanent disillusionment with Bush the Younger, but you wouldn’t know it from the quotes.  The fear that sunk John Kerry, that he was somehow un-American and a threat to us all should he get his manicured hands on the levers of power, still exists.  The essential question is whether or not those feelings are still prevalent enough to consign Barack Obama to the same fate.

Taibbi’s piece points out the fact that exploiting those feelings, with the 2008 twist of skin color thrown in as well, is likely McCain’s best (if not only) hope for victory.  As Danner documents, on 2 November 2004 the policies of Bush the Younger were already unpopular, but the man himself was not.  Here in 2008 the policies and the man are unpopular (dramatically more so in fact), but the man isn’t running.  In order to win John McCain needs to make Barack Obama, who has the popular policies, personally unpopular; and to do that he has little choice but to let the shit, racism and all, fly fast and heavy.  There’s something else worth considering though.

At this moment we are now farther from Election Day 2004 than it was from 11 September 2001.  The fear and the anger from that day were a lot more potent four years ago than they are now.  The fear was that there might be another attack if Bush the Younger was deposed.  The anger led to the Iraq War, and then built on itself when some so called Americans questioned the legitimacy of it.  Those two primal emotions doomed any equivocal positions John Kerry took, and he took a lot of them.

In Obama we now have a candidate whose position on Iraq is as close to unequivocal as can be in modern politics.  Now we have a country less fearful and less angry.  Now we have a campaign that directly responds to smear attacks at their earliest inkling.  Will it be enough?  The polls look good, the fundraising looks good, and we are a media world away from where things were in 2004.  John Kerry ran a middling campaign in very difficult circumstances and still came very close to pulling it off.  Barack Obama has already proved himself a better campaigner; he’s also got a friendlier environment and a weaker opponent.  If sliming him is enough to overcome al  that then we’re all in deep shit, but it won’t be.

(P.S.  As I go to post this, what do I see on Talking Points Memo?  Exactly what I’m talking about.)

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, John McCain, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Puppet Rebellion

15 June 08
“Good Heavens Smithers, they’re not afraid of me anymore!” - C.M. Burns

Puppet.  There is a wonderful simplicity to that word, especially as it pertains to our sophomoric efforts at imperialism in Iraq.  It’s a word which tells you everything you need to know: that there is a local government, headed by a local guy, but we’re paying all the bills and doing most of the fighting.  Naturally we feel entitled to a say in how things are run, but like all the imperial powers that have gone before us our idea of how big our “say” should be is a lot more expansive than the locals’.

Nouri al-Maliki is an American puppet.  He was not the first choice but he was selected by the United States government.  The government he putatively leads is paid for by U.S. taxpayers and is based on a constitution which was drafted by Americans.  The walled compound in which his government primarily exists, the embarrassingly named Green Zone, is defended by American troops.  His position in the government, his very station in life, is dependent on Americans; in normal circumstances that might lead him to give us a great deal of deference, but these are not normal days.  Instead, in the last few days, he told our government to go fuck itself.

The key issue is an artfully named Status Of Forces Agreement, or SOFA.  “Sofa” is an absolutely fantastic term to use when inviting oneself over to somebody else’s country.  Reportedly, the United States was asking for fifty-eight permanent military bases (oxymoronically they wouldn’t be truly permanent, just permanently rented), extraterritoriality (which we’ll get to in a moment), and the right to decide whether or not another country (e.g. the Islamic Republic of Iran) had attacked Iraq.  It was an offer that implied childlike irresponsibility on the part of the Iraqis and, not surprisingly, they balked.

As often as possible I try to think about the Iraq war from an Iraqi perspective.  As someone who has never been there, does not speak the native language, and has only the most cursory of understanding of their history I am inherently crippled on that score.  But try I do and in this case I got to wondering, why in the world would Maliki agree to any of this?  He isn’t stupid; he knows that there’s an election coming up in the US and that one way or another Bush the Younger is on his way out.  (He has his own election to worry about as well but it’s on a much less rigid timeline.)  Why would he agree to anything that, for all practical purposes, will cease to operate around 11:30 pm Eastern Time on the fourth of November?

Patrick Cockburn, who is basically Our Man in Baghdad, first reported these idiotic negotiations.  Over at Hullabaloo, dday was justifiably thinking that this agreement was primarily a tool for Bush the Younger to bind his successor (whoever that may be) to a deep presence in Iraq by raising the political cost of withdrawal.  Instead, the Iraqis rejected our outrageous demands and Bush the Younger was once again humiliated, this time by a puppet government of his own choosing.  The ways in which this man has been shamed are almost uncountable.

Bush has said that he’s hopeful the negotiations will restart but at the center of all this is a fact which can be camouflaged and distorted but never fully hidden: the American presence in Iraq is harmful and destructive for all involved.  Our demands in the negotiations for the status of forces agreement were merely a naked grasp for legitimacy. The welfare and well being of the Iraqis is barely considered.  Our demand for extraterritoriality, in essence immunity from Iraqi courts for American troops and mercenaries, gives away the whole lie.  The current Administration just wants to be in Iraq, it gives no thought to the human costs of being there and as a result is clueless enough to expect carte blanche.

There will almost certainly be some kind of an agreement, but it’s going to be a lot different that what the Administration originally wanted.  Bush’s leverage over Maliki, already at its lowest point, grows weaker as each new day brings the U.S. election closer.  Maliki knows that any agreement with Bush won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on in six months time.  He has no incentive to give away anything he doesn’t want and he knows it.  Bush is trying to commit his successor to his policies in Iraq but he isn’t going succeed in that effort any more than he’s succeeded at anything else in that country.

No Comments » | Bush the Younger, Iraq, Permanent Bases, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Breathing in Beijing

11 June 08
“And in environmental news, scientists have announced that Springfield’s air is now only dangerous to children and the elderly.” - Kent Brockman

There is an old joke about air quality in China.  An American diplomat is posted to Beijing.  He’s into fitness in a big way, jogging three miles every morning.  After two years he rotates back to the States and has a mandatory physical.  The doctor comes in with his results and tells him, “Well, you’re in pretty good shape, but I really think you should quit smoking.”  And the diplomat replies, “But doctor, I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life!”

I heard that joke for the first time in 2002, by then it had already achieved enduring and apocryphal status.  For all I know it was originally about some Soviet shithole or some other heavily polluted place unsuitable for delicate Americans, but the point remains.  The air quality in China’s large cities is awful.  Of late it’s received quite a bit of attention in relation to the upcoming Olympic Games.  Athletic competition, after all, requires quite a bit of breathing.

Articles and rumors about how Host City X is way behind or is going to somehow screw up the Olympics are pretty common fare in the run-up to the Games.  They are almost always overblown and dumb for the simple reason that any large one-time undertaking like hosting an Olympics is bound to have some part of its preparations encounter problems.  The International Olympic Committee has been through it all before and has a pretty good track record of making sure that things go relatively smoothly.  Nightmare scenarios about suspending endurance events until the skies clear and the like make for good copy but are unlikely to actually come to pass.

On his blog at The Atlantic Monthy’s website, star correspondent James Fallows has been irregularly chronicling the state of the air in Beijing.  Fallows currently resides in the city and has posted a number of pictures from his apartment window showing everything from clear skies to smog infused sandstorms.  Back in February Fallows took some comfort from the way the skies cleared and then quickly re-clogged themselves during and after the Chinese New Year holiday shutdown.  If shuttering polluting activity for a couple weeks could improve things that dramatically then doing the same prior to the Games, as is planned, stands a good chance of having a similar effect.  The real issue here is not whether or not they can clear the skies for a couple of weeks, of course they can; it’s what effects does all that dirty air have on the people who actually live there?

Fallows himself has an article in the most recent Atlantic about just that very thing.  It’s worth reading in full, but this statistic leapt off the page:

China’s announced growth rate has been 9 to 10 percent each year over the past two decades; the report said that environmental costs could represent between 2.9 and 5.8 percent, which would reduce China’s miraculous-seeming growth rate to sclerotic European levels.

The numbers come from a World Bank report and they are staggering.  Lopping even 2.9% off of annual GDP growth is a significant number with immediate real world costs either in the form of jobs not created and economic activity not happening or in the health and life costs that go with rampant, unchecked pollution.  Turning off the cement furnaces and restricting traffic for a few weeks may make the Olympic air passable, but after the closing ceremonies there’s still going to be one and a half billion people breathing toxic air.  The Chinese government, to its credit, is aware of the problem and is beginning to address it, but those staggering costs are constantly accruing.

The Olympic air in Beijing is a minor example, but it serves a useful purpose in highlighting just how costly, in terms of real money and real lives, it can be to allow even local environments to go to shit.  It costs the Chinese directly and the rest of the world indirectly and it is the furthest thing from free.  It’s not much, but it’s something to keep in mind the next time you hear about the negative economic effects of treating any environmental crisis, no matter how big or small.

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Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Primary Post Mortem

8 June 08
“Ah Bobo, reunited at last.  But I can’t help but wonder what the future holds for you.  Ah yes, wonder . . .” - C.M. Burns

It took longer than everyone expected, but now we officially have our title fight contenders.  In the Red corner we have John McCain.  In the Blue corner we have Barack Obama.  They are both men and they are both United States Senators, other than that they have very little in common and five short months from now one of them will be elected President of the United States.  The history and context of their respective primary wins cannot yet be written because we do not know what will happen in November.  As such, we are mostly left with questions but it seems like a good idea to get some ideas down now while the events are still fresh.

Evolution or Aberration? - At this close vantage point the Blue primary seems like it will be mainly remembered because it came down to a black man versus a white woman instead of the usual monochromatic y-chromo cluster fuck.  Four or eight years from now, which isn’t that much time when you get right down to it, we’ll be right back at this though.  Will this year’s contest be the start of something new, or will this year be seen as a strange one?  It’s not like the Democratic Party is never going to nominate a white guy again, the question is, has the playing field been permanently expanded or not?  If Obama wins does that open the door even more, and if he loses does is slam shut for another couple of decades?

Wither Nixonland? - I’m just getting into Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland; what I’ve read has been excellent.  The central point (so far at least) is one alluded to by Robert Caro in his Lyndon Johnson books, made explicit by Paul Krugman here (the Larry Bartels PDF Krugman links to is a devastating read) and, I’m sure, advanced by many others: that the new American middle class which arose after World War II was deliberately made fearful (of blacks, Communists, hippies, etcetera) by Republican political operatives as a way to smash the liberal consensus that held sway during much of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s.  One of the things that struck me about the 2008 Republican primary was the fact that, with the exception of Ron Paul, every candidate up there was still committed to the concept of Nixonland.  Watching clips from and reading transcripts of some of those Republican debates was really funny.  They were up on stage competing with each other to see who could most effectively terrorize whites with the idea that people different from them are coming to take their shit and rape their women.  If McCain wins in November the politics of 50%+1 polarization will have been validated one more time.  If he loses (coupled with likely further losses in Congress) will it mark the expiration of the politics of the late 60s and 70s?  If elected, Obama would be the first truly post-Vietnam president, imagine that.

Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Last of the Mohicans? - There never were much in the way of policy distinctions between Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The general consensus is that he was stronger on Iraq and she had a better medical plan but given the unknowns either of them would face as President it was always silly to harp over the differences; both pledged to end the war and both pledged to create universal health care.  It was their campaign styles, and what those foretold about their governing styles, that separated them.

Clinton, as we all well know by now, is a fighter, a tooth-and-nail, praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-ammunition fighter.  So much so that up until Wednesday evening she still had a lot of people worried that even with all the bullets fired and her decks awash in blood she might still give the order for ramming speed.  Obama, by contrast, is the new man of the people, or perhaps he’s the man of the new people.  He is running a campaign that lacks the bitterness of the previous decade(s) for the simple reason that he is too young to have participated in them.

Politics has always been and will always be a vicious kill or be killed game where rules and niceties are used as part of the arsenal rather than as impartial boundaries, but the style of fighting perfected by the Clintons has run its course.  Hillary and Bill, who seemed even more out of touch than her, were practicing nineties politics one election too late.  By the standards of 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004 her initial advantages would’ve proved irresistible.  Instead the skinny kid with the funny name came out running an aughts campaign and blindsided her.  It is no longer about winning news cycles, coming to play on pundit teevee and locking down big donors.  Of course, if Obama loses the general, maybe it is.  Speaking of donors . . .

Everything Takes Longer Than You Think It Will - I went to John McCain’s website during his 2000 run.  I had read an article about how he was getting cash, not much but some, from on-line donations and how it was vital to his combat against the Bush money machine.  I didn’t make a donation, at the time I had made one (1) online purchase in my life, but I wanted to check it out.  On the day the Iraq War started, three years of experience with Amazon.com after having gone to McCain’s website, I dropped $50 on Howard Dean without blinking.  These days Barack Obama doesn’t even need my money.

McCain-Feingold was once colloquially referred to as “The Democratic Party Suicide Bill”.  The Democrats paid for everything with big donors and bundled checks.  It was easier, and vastly more efficient, to get a bunch of rich liberals in a room and serve them dinner in exchange for thousands of dollars than it was to solicit tiny amounts of money from vast numbers of people.  You needed a pretty hefty average donation just to pay the costs of the fundraising.  But there is safety in numbers and the technology to become rich one $25 donation at a time is now widespread and effective.  It took longer than the technovangelists predicted, but now it’s happened and it’s only going to accelerate.

Sexism Exists, but N Always Equals 1 - Serious political scientists have a hard time studying presidential elections because there isn’t enough data on which to test a hypothesis.  There is only one relevant data set every four years so it’s basically impossible to control for variables (if you take several elections together you’re adding in decades of other changes to the country), this is known as N=1.  The question on a lot of minds now is: did sexism lose Hillary Clinton the nomination?  Or, perhaps, how much did sexism affect her chances?

You’d need to be blind to miss a lot of the misogynist crap flung Hillary’s way (Judith Warner had a nice rundown Friday) but there are still a lot of perfectly good non-sexist reasons for opposing her candidacy.  There’s also the fact that for most of 2007 virtually everyone with access to a keyboard or a microphone was willing to proclaim her the winner almost by default.  Sexism wasn’t a silent issue then but it didn’t seem as pertinent because she was seen as winning.  (The same will apply to Obama.  If he loses in November the hand wringing over race will be tremendous.)

You can say that sexism cost Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination; you can say that her gender was vital to her getting as close as she did; or you can say that it was irrelevant, but no matter what your opinion it is just that, an opinion.  We just don’t have many other examples to use as controls.  You can cite the fact that we don’t have many examples as evidence of continued male dominance, but in the realm of presidential politics N still equals 1.  We’ll just never know.

And that’s it for the primaries sports fans.  They were highly but the field is now down to two and elections are won in September and October, not June and July.  So while the pace and intensity of the coverage will increase over the summer most of it is going to be utterly meaningless.  Up through the conventions political reportage (in print, on-line, and on radio and television) will be filled with speculation about vice-presidential picks, the daily press release war, in-depth articles about get out the vote plans, fundraising, and the numbers behind the polls.  Almost without exception it will be a waste of time and effort for both the people creating it and the people consuming it.  Barring a truly major scandal or development (video of Obama in a dashiki dancing to Parliament’s Chocolate City, McCain having a stroke/heart attack/erection lasting more than four hours) there will be very little of real importance said.  So enjoy the weather and remember: America, fuck yeah!

1 Comment | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, I Love America, John McCain, Republican Presidential Primary, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You

4 June 08
“Boy, you’re gonna have to be punished for this.” - Homer Simpson
“Dad, you could punish me, but that means you’d have to think of a punishment, sit here and make sure I do it-” - Bart Simpson
“Ohhh.” - Homer Simpson
“Or, you could let me go play with Milhouse while you spend the afternoon watching unpredictable Mexican sitcoms.” - Bart Simpson

Writing for Salon on Sunday Walter Shapiro had a rundown of that silly rules committee meeting the Democrats had on Saturday. It was short, concise and was about the right amount of attention that should’ve been paid to the whole thing. Right at the end he wrote this:

Despite the marathon cable TV coverage and the breathless sense of showdown, Saturday’s rules committee meeting was never really about Obama vs. Clinton. Rather, it was designed to paper over the Michigan and Florida disputes, while, at the same time, underscoring that states that hold illegally scheduled primaries will be penalized. Those accomplishments will probably matter far more than Clinton’s Saturday bounty of 24 delegates.

He is, of course, correct. Obama’s delegate lead, while slim in terms of percentage, was great enough that the rules fight never threatened it. But there are long term implications to the decision to seat Michigan and Florida at 50% that are obscured by the distorting lens of Barack versus Hillary. Both national parties have now tacitly agreed that state parties can schedule their nominating contests for any time they like provided that they are willing to forgo half of their representation. To be sure, half looks like a stiff penalty, but it doesn’t seem so harsh when weighed against the zero influence that comes by being at the end of most nominating processes.

Take a look at the Republican contests in Michigan and Florida this year. They were competitive and occurred with barely a mention of the delegate penalty. Mitt Romney’s victory in Michigan revitalized his campaign and made him seem like a viable candidate after his disappointing silver medal finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire. John McCain’s victory in Florida all but clinched the nomination for him. These states were vital to the nomination and that’s exactly what their state parties wanted.

The Reds in effect sanctioned rule breaking. Until last Saturday the Blues had the better claim to party discipline but they caught so much flak for alienating two important states that they’ve now embraced the same toothless penalty. Without coming right out and saying it, both parties have abandoned the principle that the national party has the power to set the nominating schedule by settling on the same compromise: half your delegates in exchange for a free hand.

It may seem silly to contemplate this on the day after the Blue nominating contest finally ended with every single state contested. After all, Pennsylvania had a media blowout primary despite its late date on the schedule and the states which got the least comparative amount of attention were the ones which jammed themselves together on February 5. While the example of the 2008 campaign might lessen the pressure on states to get the earliest possible primary date it won’t change the fact that states which go earlier have a greater chance of influencing the nominee than those which go later.

Michigan and Florida have, in effect, called the bluff of the national parties. They were in a position to do so because of their size and relative competitiveness in general elections but the door is now clearly open. Wikipedia has a list of states by population (the figures being used are 2007 estimates and not the 2000 census numbers that determine federal representation, but for our purposes the difference is irrelevant). In terms of population, Michigan is the smallest of the moderately big states, coming in below Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Florida, New York and Texas are in the tier above and California is in a league of its own. Strictly in terms of electoral votes California, New York and Illinois are as Blue as the ocean and Texas is just as Red as they are Blue. On that list it is Pennsylvania and Ohio which jump out immediately as very similar to Michigan and Florida: populous and purple.

You’re kidding yourself if you don’t think that the state parties in Pennsylvania and Ohio weren’t paying attention on Saturday. Having their moment in the sun so late in the schedule this year is unlikely to diminish their desire to do so again. If anything, their experience with being key battlegrounds would only increase their desire to have an important say every time around. That desire isn’t going to be confined to those larger states either. All but the tiniest states could withstand a 50% penalty and still have enough delegates at stake to make campaigning in them worthwhile.

I don’t know enough about the internal structure of either party to comment intelligently on how this is likely to play out in four or eight years. At the moment we don’t even know which party will have an open contest in 2012, much less 2016 or dates further in the future. We also can’t know what the media environment will be like four or eight years from now (will every candidate have an Obama style on-line money machine?). But if the 2008 Republican primaries in Michigan and Florida are anything to go by, a half delegate penalty is one that plenty of states would gladly pay.

No Comments » | Democratic Presidential Primary, Republican Presidential Primary, Systems Analyst, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Yeah, Vista Really Does Suck

1 June 08
“They have the internet on computers now.” - Homer Simpson

My older sister recently purchased a new Compaq laptop.  It came loaded with Windows Vista and I had the dubious pleasure of setting it up for her.  Prior to this my direct experience with Vista has been tangential.  I’ve used it a little bit on other people’s PCs, but I’d never had a chance to really sink my teeth into the thing.  From my initial limited experiences I suspected that it sucked, but I had no idea just how bad it truly is.

As a corporation Microsoft gets a lot of negative press, some deserved, some not.  They are reviled in many nerd communities for their stupid policies, greedy tactics, and crummy software.  One of the exceptions to that ill will was Windows XP.  Even friends of mine who are Linux devotees have positive things to say about XP.  It’s easy to use, it’s relatively secure, it’s quite stable.  It’s far from perfect, but as a basic operating system for personal computers it’s not bad.  None of those same compliments can be applied to Windows Vista, the questions is, why?

First, a short history of Windows Vista.  Vista began life with the name Longhorn.  Before XP even had a Service Pack 2 there was Longhorn.  News of it would routinely spread across the internet and the big draw, the fancy new feature that had all the computer geeks aflutter, was WinFS.  WinFS (which stood for Windows Future Storage according to Wikipedia) was going to improve the way data was stored in Windows by incorporating the principals of a relational database to allow easier filtering and retrieval.  It was, in other words, going to be somehow revolutionary.

Windows XP uses something called NTFS (New Technology File System).  It’s getting a little long in tooth now but it also works just fine, and that puzzled me whenever I’d read breathless articles about all the cool stuff WinFS could do.  Was the world suffering because of NTFS?  Was it hobbling the ordinary computer user?  Was I just in over my head and didn’t get it?  To me it looked like a solution in search of a problem.  It turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought so because Microsoft announced, two whole years before Vista was released, that WinFS had been dropped from the next version of Windows and that they were, more or less, going back to the drawing board.

That was August of 2004.  Imagine you’re Microsoft at that moment; you’ve just very publicly and embarrassingly canceled the next version of Windows.  Oh sure, there’s still going to be a next version of Windows, but it’s not going to resemble - in any way - the one you’d been bragging about for a year and a half.  Still, the show must go on, right?  That is the environment in which Windows Vista was built.

The new keystone concept they hit on was security.  In at least one way this counted as progress as they were now addressing a real problem.  Unfortunately it’s a problem that likely does not have a solution.  It can be mitigated, but it cannot be solved.  Allow me to explain.  Bible thumping Mac users and the Linux Fedaykin will scream about how pathetic the security is in Windows.  It is vulnerable to all kinds of attacks that can compromise not only the user’s private information, but can convert the afflicted PC into a spam spewing zombie, amongst other unfortunate outcomes.  That’s all true as far as it goes, but it ignores the fact that the biggest security vulnerability is always the user.

Grey-hat and White-hat security people are pretty good at finding and fixing under-the-hood security flaws in common applications before they get a chance to do real damage.  But you’ve still got ordinary human beings, many of whom struggle to put songs on an iPod and think the word “download” is a blanket term covering dozens of operations, running amok and clicking on things they shouldn’t.  People are dangerous behind the keyboard because many of them have zero understanding of the underling technology.  I’m not talking about transistors, logic gates and binary code here; I’m talking about really basic shit.  Ask someone what an “mp3″ is and they’ll tell you it’s a song.  Ask them why it’s called an “mp3″ or what makes it an “mp3″ and they’ll have no clue.  The concept of file extensions, just the idea that there are different types of files that do different things and you tell them apart with the three letters after the dot, is lost on a lot of the public.

I know that statement can come off as nerd arrogant, but it’s true and I mean it in the least arrogant way possible.  If a person didn’t grow up using a computer for personal applications (be they games, communications, finance, whatever), the concepts can be difficult to grasp and, moreover, there isn’t a reason to grasp them. Up until about ten years ago, when broadband internet started becoming widely available in residential areas, PCs were like pre-Model T cars, kind of neat but still only attractive to hobbyists and tinkerers.  “I don’t need a computer to balance my checkbook,” and “I don’t need one of them horseless carriages,” are the same thought expressed a century of development apart.  In the last ten years though computers have invaded every aspect of life, forcing themselves on people like unwelcome houseguests.

Pornography was the original killer app for casual internet use, but it’s since been eclipsed by shopping, entertainment and news.  Whatever they’re doing though, the on-line world is now populated by the same people that once laughed knowingly at “I can’t program my VCR” jokes.  These people are not technically sophisticated and the overwhelming majority of them never will be.  They don’t care to learn and they shouldn’t have to, they just want to shop, check their e-mail, pay their bills, read message boards about their favorite hobby, and see the occasional funny video.  It’s low intensity computing and it shouldn’t require much in the way of effort or understanding from the user.

It is those users who are vulnerable to on-line scams, malware, and dangerous e-mail attachments.  Part of my job is technical support work and in that capacity I deal with a very broad swath of the public.  Everyone I speak with hates Vista, especially the less technically savvy, because for all it’s sophistication it still has to trust that the user knows what he’s doing.  Vista responds to perceived security threats by graying out the rest of the screen and forcing the user to allow specific actions if they could in any way shape or form constitute a security threat.  It limits functionality out of paranoia and puts the decision of whether or not to allow a process to proceed in the hands of a person who does not understand the question.  You cannot solve the security problem by relying on end users, it can only be mitigated and the only wait to do so is by minimizing the decisions that the user has to make.

A sentiment I’ve heard dismayingly often from the other end of the tech support phone line is the imagined need to upgrade.  By touting security as Vista’s main selling point, Microsoft has made XP look unsecured when in fact its security flaws are negligible.  But security, or a perceived lack of security, scares people.  The end result is technically unsophisticated people dumping an operating system that was working fine because that’s what Microsoft’s marketing department wanted them to do.  They don’t know that running XP won’t limit them in the least and as a consequence they spend time and money in unproductive ways like waiting for Vista to install.

Which brings me back to my sister’s new laptop.  Now, this one wasn’t even an upgrade install but from the time I took it out of the box and pushed the power button to finally having control over the Windows desktop was twenty six minutes.  In that time the PC asked me for almost no information; it just sat there installing and configuring.  No wonder people find Vista frustrating.  There is no justifiable reason for a PC to take almost a half-hour to boot the first time, what on earth was that operating system doing in all that time?  I’m sure I could look it up, but I’m also sure the answer is irrelevant.  Even the most basic computer users can notice things like their system slowing to a crawl.  I’ve had more than one person at their wits end because upgrading their PC to Vista caused programs that once worked without incident to die.

Installing just the meager software she uses, a browser, some picture software and some other piddling crap took longer than it used to because every time I popped in a new disc Vista was in my face asking if it’s what I really wanted to do, including other programs from Microsoft like Office and Publisher.  It was difficult to get it to recognize other computers on the LAN and when I did get it to work it was by disabling half the security features.  The bottom line is that it is simply harder to use.  For whatever reason, profit, institutional momentum or just plain stupidity, Microsoft lurched down the path with Windows Vista.  The rest of us will pay the consequences.

New laptops come with a lot of stickers on them.  Little ones denoting the processor, or touting the multimedia buttons, or giving you warranty information.  All of the stickers came off cleanly and easily except for one.  As a final insult the Windows sticker left a gluey mess.

No Comments » | Systems Analyst, Windows Vista | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Try Our New Quotes Page

1 June 08
“I will not celebrate meaningless milestones.” - Bart Simpson (Chalkboard Prisoner)

There’s a new page here at Tethered Swimming.  It is a chronological list of all previous posts containing links and the cartoon quote that I used for that post.  Someday, relatively soon I hope, it will also contain links to episode guides.  Some further explanatory thoughts are contained on the page itself.  Because if there’s one thing the internet needs, it’s another random, poorly organized list of some moron’s Simpsons quotes.  The plan is to update it at the start of the month, we’ll see how it goes.

No Comments » | Solipsism | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos