eye of the storm

seborga is about the right size for a nation. 

so peter galbraith, who was helping oversee the un's role in the afghan presidential election, quit in protest and went public roughly with the charge that the un wanted to cover up the fraud in order to prop up the karzai regime (to put it gently, the u.s. gov is in the same position/dilemma: not knowing where to go excpt karzaii, still mouthing the platitudes of democracy). his ex-boss kai eide (the broken english to be excused on the grounds of norewegianness), responds:  

Yes, it has affected me. It's been attacking my integrity. I think it is - has not been dignified, it's not been fair, it's not been true. Of course, for the U.N. mission, we have suffered from that. And of course it has also had an impact on the election process because it has, in fact, considered to heightening the temperature of the discussion. Of course, these last few weeks has had a negative impact.

now i take this to be a form of the following paradigmatic human excuse, which i've...heard over dinner: i didn't do what you're saying i did, and here's why i was perfectly justified in doing it. the problem with galbraith's whistle-blowing is that it "has an impact on the election process" (?) by "heightening the temperature of the discussion." well, exactly. that's why we shouldn't talk about the fraud publicly, or go public with the details, peter. but plus i never tried to withold the details from the public, though i'm telling you, this is why i didn't go public with the details.

then he goes on to what, in my experience, is the amazing and essential third element of the ultimate rationalization/excuse: it never happened; here's why it was justified; and this is not an excuse: "I have decided to address you today; not to defend, not to attack, but to explain." this suggests a possible infinite elaboration. 'that was not an excuse. and here's why i was justified in offering an excuse.'

now the fact that you will, demonstrably, say absolutely anything to defend yourself, by definition without regard for the truth, as you're contradicting yourself in consecutive sentences, makes the total outrage that your integrity and honesty has been impugned (the fifth element of the perfect excuse) even more extremely impressive.

so when kip eide wonders "why don't they believe me?" he might consider, literally, how it would be possible to believe him, what you would believe if you did believe him. perhaps he is suggesting that we should shatter our rationality entirely and embrace the contradiction, believe the absurd and paradoxical, achieve a completely arbitrary and impossible leap of faith, transcend human reason or even thought, and just say 'yes.' yes! kip eide, yes!

Officials hope that the pressure -- to be applied at previously scheduled talks Thursday in Geneva -- will force Iran into a broader discussion about its program and then into a serious set of negotiations.

my feeling is that that is not the way this sucker is going to unfold. the way this sucker is going to unfold is that israel is going to bomb iran. soon. the only hesitancy, i assume, would be that it will strain relations further between israel and the obama admin. but there will also be an element of the american government that more or less implicitly supports such a move. also, no american administration can simply unequivocally condemn any aspect of israel's policies. i feel, offhand, that unless iran does actually already possess nuclear weapons (which i don't think they do, but who knows?) iran cannot project real military power in israel's direction, though there is liable to be some retaliation.

the result of an israeli strike are of course impinderable. obviously, regime change cannot be accomplished by foreign powers. an israeli strike is likely to strengthen ahmadinejad's hand (and that of whatever portion of the clerical hierarchy is on a's side). but there might also be a slow disintegration of the theocracy, if their impotence is really demonstrated. if iran were in a position to go to war with israel, a goodly portion of the world might be embroiled in the confrontation eventually. the tensions between "islam" and "the west" might be ratcheted up to almost unbelievable levels. there might be renewed waves of terrorism etc.

then, of course, the end of the world, which i hope you are looking forward to as much as i am. the world, and in particular our species, has persisted far beyond its worth or interestingness, as i understand again every time ahmadinejad addresses the un.

here's an interesting approach: moammar gaddafi is obviously insane and dangerous because he condemns the use of alcohol. it's incomprehensible, as if he condemned freedom and puppy dogs. once i heard hoagland decry crack. then i knew that nothing else he said should be taken seriously.

it's not hard to guess that at some point russia is going to be a bigger problem than iran or pakistan. obviously, the russian security services have gone further than anyone else with cyber-warfare. one might remember  this, for example, and a wave of crashes coincided with the russian attack on georgia last year. i'll just repeat. it's an inyourface authoritarian regime. it leveled chechnya in a useless genocide, in an attempt to regain the pride of empire. its submarines are cruising around the east coast of the u.s. everyone is making nicenice - albeit with an oddly fixed smile, but there are liable to be ever-more pointed confrontations. indeed the cyber-attacks are likely to be the node: if they ever actually interrupt communications or commerce in a substantial way, people with power will be screeching. that they'd bring down twitter etc to stop a single blogger is a very bad sign for the future; no doubt they could justify something like that six times a day every day, and of course it shows you just what putin thinks of free speech, not that anyone should have had any doubts. the center of the nightmare, of course, is how heavily armed they are.

i'm kind of hoping that north korea grabs bill clinton and puts him on trial for espionage. i always wanted to do that, but never had the guts.

i'd have to say that what iran needs now is a few bombing runs on...theocratic targets.

tyrants might yap allah, the race, dialectical materialism, or even (dick cheney) freedom. but they all love a good coerced confession, and are the only people who believe such a thing, being entirely unable to disinguish reality from appearance. this confusion begins with the question of who they themselves are and why they're doing what they're doing. as caligula would say, i wish they all had one neck, from which we might disattach the head.

sometimes you see why it's hard to negotiate with israelis. that latimes piece by yisrael medad is just...strange. the conclusion appears to be that jerusalem should be immediately recognized as part of israel. but i don't actually get the argument, and the napoleon anecdote is positively weird. is the argument actually that millennia of jewish lamentation should determine geo-political boundaries? (anyway, i guess i find it a bit odd to sob over events of 2,000 years ago, and if i wanted to use sobbing as a political argument, i'd want to evaluate it for...sincerity, immediacy, applicability; i'd want to quantify the sobbing of various peoples in evaluating their claims.)

And there is more State Department trickery. Births of children of American citizens in any of the Arab towns or Jewish communities outside of Jerusalem and beyond the Green Line will have their birthplace noted, as per the above-mentioned regulations, as the "West Bank." Is the "West Bank" a state? Is the State Department engaged in creating new states? ...

The "West Bank" never existed as a geopolitical entity until April 1950, when Jordan annexed the area. That annexation, incidentally, was considered by all the world -- except for Britain -- as an illegal occupation. Yet the U.S. has established the "West Bank," with the stroke of a pen, as if it were a state entity.

If the U.S. insists on using boundaries dating to 1948, shouldn't it also use the place names in use at that time? "Judea" and "Samaria" were both names written into the U.N. partition resolution. A baby born to U.S. citizens in Shiloh, for example, should therefore be registered as having been born in "Shiloh, Samaria."

um. is the claim that the interior details of passport entries of american citizens born in the west bank - in their myriads - is a major or substantive or any sort of issue? at any rate, spending the next couple of years on that, or its ilk, will keep us from taking up any actual issue; if nothing else, it's a delaying tactic. why in the world would you insist that if we are (supposedly) consulting the 1948 borders on this massively trivial issue, we should use the names extant (only among israelis!) for place names in that year? obviously, to insist that we call a place by the name it is called in your holy book but not in theirs is just a demand for an empty subordination to your ideology.

and it has some sort of magical claim or force, i think: the names we print on passports are going to, say, ameliorate or erase concrete forms of injustice, or concrete exclusions from citizenship etc. in its typical waffling between realities of the current situation and the teachings of the hebrew bible and the lamentations of millennia, along with talmudic parsings of irrelevant details as slights, we see a consciousness that simply cannot be turned to compromise. and we see, ultimately, a consciousness that doesn't register any practical interests, even its own, that ultimately displays no everyday contact with everyday reality.

the argument, it seems to me, is that all this is ours and your claims have no basis, on the grounds that my religion teaches that it is, or in short, that only we count or have access to the truth. ok, well, i guess if that makes you happy or keeps your traditions alive. but obviously it makes no claim whatever on people who don't share your elaborate and, er, completely arbitrary or contingent belief system. if medad is actually trying to say that the obama admin should do something differently, he needs - putting it mildly - a form of argument that is recognized more widely than in some group of esoteric kabbalists.

this, we might say, is the legitimate function of "reason," of which, as you may know, i am often skeptical. i will argue about what might bring peace or prosperity or reduce oppression and so on. but, like obama and anyone else who is not inside your hermetic discourse, i cannot take seriously as guidelines for policy the names by which places are called in your holy book and suchlike. you cannot take your esoteric doctrines and use them as a mode of outreach, or an appeal to policy-makers who don't really know or care to know what your esoteric doctrines are.

to be honest, i'd like to know who decided to publish that as an op-ed column in the latimes (for which i've written dozens of essays over the years). it just doesn't appear to be comprehensible to anyone outside a small fundamentalist community. how insular or detached from reality that community is is demonstrated by the fact that medad appears to believe he is making some kind of argument for a general audience.

one funny thing about communist governments. they purport(ed) to speak universally on behalf of "workers," to be completely immune to ethnicity, nationalism, religious faction, and all that old-fashioned identity-stuff that they resolved to treat as an illusion concealing underlying economic realities. and yet, as chinese colonialism demonstrates, they're just as ethnically oriented as - i don't know - milosevic. they've tried to overwhelm tibetans and uighurs with a massive han influx, and then they cover the story entirely from a han perspective.

the chinese government is, obviously, a han ethnic nationalist and expansionist government.

that's the problem with ideology, above all with marxist ideology: you keep expressing your belief in something you can't actually believe, to the point at which every action represents or entails misinterpretaton of your own motives

i always love this sort of idea: obama: honduras coup illegal. illegal! these people seem a bit confused about what law is. no doubt, according to the former government, it was illegal to overthrow the former government. but i'm betting the new government has legalized their own coup. but on the other hand, why bother? or maybe it's against international law to overthrow your government? what's the origin of the governments who ratified such a law? at any rate: why not cruel, counter-productive, oppressive, vicious etc? 'illegal' is as weak and irrelevant as it is conceptually confused.

i think eventually people might realize that ivy league law schools of today - which produce our entire leadership class - are more or less like the medieval university of paris or worse: an endless scholastic discourse, based on a series of false or perhaps literally meaningless postulates: infinite refinements, the foundation of which is an incoherent ontology: a gigantic edifice based on absolutely nothing. a noble, touching testament to human perversity and industry, but an idiotic detour into arbitrary incoherent superstition.

i'm saying this seriously and literally. our understanding of law is full-bore theology; our law schools are seminaries; our government is a theocracy. it worships a being it can't even describe coherently, interpreting its will in whatever way serves its actual human purposes. it enthralls and flummoxes you with its esoteric texts and incomprehensible ceremonial mumbo-jumbo. it runs you through a ritual cycle and tests your loyalty. it launches crusades or inquisitions. and it makes no sense.

first, you invent it. then you declare it to be the ultimate external reality and power. and then you spend the next x centuries interpreting its will. a century or two after it's over, people can't even enter far enough into the system to understand how anyone could ever have believed it, or what it means to believe it. one can still read the texts, but one cannot actually know what such people believed; their fantasy world is dead.

there is a story to tell of our law schools and the transition from catholic theology to our theology. aquinas essentially replaced the active, arbitrary intervention of god with the idea of natural law: god's will expressed in the nature of his creatures. the supreme being is manifest in the universe as law: the origin of the modern shift to a scientistic conception.legalistic protestantism and its political theory - in locke, or madison, say - avails itself of these conceptions: one word for it might later be "deism." if obama declares a coup to be "illegal," he is evidently appealing to precisely an aquinas conception.

but it's the commonalities of the kingsdom of god and the rule of law i want to emphasize. "the law" is not a concrete object: it's an abstract or spiritual object. but, amazingly, it has a will and is active in moving around physical objects. "it" rules. like protestantism, its religion is scripture-heavy, and is expressed above all in texts. like catholicism it is an instrument wherewith some people tell other people what to do or articulate their lives, sometimes to good effect, sometimes not.

its will is not capricious, but (supposedly) rational and universally valid, like the "physical laws" of the universe: it's not emotional, like a pagan or jewish-type god. it's an enlightenment god. still, it does not, it cannot exist in an actual universe. we are ruled by human beings, because abstract objects exercise no authority and have no physical effects.

arresting professors? ok. now i'm ticked off. what am i gonna do about it, pda? get outta my way: i'm gonna blog, bitch.

exactly. the notion that the government of france should be able to tell people how to dress can only be the result of some kind of fundamental confusion.

trying to protest in the streets is good. but if i were, let's say, a young person in tehran today sympathetic to the opposition, i'd be thinking in terms of urban guerilla actions, sabotage, sniper work/molotov cocktails on the paramilitaries, etc. these fuckheads are killing young women in the streets etc. time to fuck some shit up. the authorities are begging for actual physical resistance. you'd be surprised what a little knot of pissed-off teenage boys can do in their own city if they can stop to think and plan.

i don't think you're going to have a soft/eastern-europe-style revolution, because i don't think that the religious hierarchy is going to suddenly realize that they have no will or moral claim.

today's dose of law:

"Everyone should respect the law. Once lawlessness becomes a norm, things will be complicated and interest of people will be undermined," said Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has ultimate authority over political and religious life in Iran. "We will not step an inch beyond the law: our law, our country's law, the Islamic Republic's law."

this overweening respect for the law expresses itself by arming thugs, beating people, shooting them, throwing them off bridges, etc. now if you did stuff like that, it would be murder. but when we do it, we are enforcing the law. the rule of law = unconditional submission to our every whim. or: the law is a decent, neutral arbiter, indifferent as to persons. and it is identical to the will of a particular person.

it's not an original observation, but perhaps the immediate future of our little world is being written in pakistan. it's stunning to realize that hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the swat valley, roughly because we've pushed incredibly hard for the gov to launch an all-out attack. i don't understand pakistani politics, which seems to be about these family dynasties; perhaps if the population has another chance to vote, they should try thinking about it on some other basis. it's hard to know where the military is at; obviously some of these people are willing to fight the taliban, at any rate. the nukes are a mystery, and if an action is required by us to secure them, it will be incredibly dramatic and risky: it will be essentially devoted to disarming the country, more or less permanently. the pakistani program, of course, has fueled world proliferation. there is some likelihood that we could get involved in a war there that would make iraq look like a skirmish, and that this would plausibly be completely unavoidable. i only pray we have decent intelligence: trying to look at it from here, it's incredibly complex and enigmatic.

here's something i can get behind: sending al gore to north korea.

i love totalitarianism.

obviously, we need to wonder whether russia intends simply to conquer georgia, annexing it or (more likely) installing a puppet regime. it seems obvious that basically no one would (or, really, could) do a damn thing about it.

just want to acknowledge the war around georgia, and point out again that the current russian regime is xenophobic, expansionist, and genocidal.

Photo: George Abdaladze/Associated Press

 

i didn't even know that karl rove had an interest in nigerian politics.

LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) -- Police on Friday arrested the head of a federal agency charged with developing Nigeria's impoverished southern oil region after allegations that the man spent millions of dollars on a witch doctor in hopes vanquishing a rival.