cheese it, the cops!

the state of cuny

cuny has ditched tony kushner from its graduation ceremony (=honorary degree) on the grounds that he's "disparaged the state of israel." sometimes i agree that new york should secede from the union, or that it already has. or maybe it should just be annexed by "the state of israel." obviously the settlements in manhattan are expanding. yo i wonder what the propaganda value is supposed to be of always using the phrase "the state of israel." 

“I think it’s up to all of us to look at fairness and consider these things,” Mr. Wiesenfeld said. “Especially when the State of Israel, which is our sole democratic ally in the area, sits in the neighborhood which is almost universally dominated by administrations which are almost universally misogynist, antigay, anti-Christian.”

just for the hell of it, i'll point out that turkey is a democracy. but what you're doing with trustees that just mutter word-for-word the propaganda of other governments, or engage in exclusions or repressions of speech to enforce the conventional yapyap of their bureaucrats, is a question cuny should ask itself.

while we're at it, we might ask what the attitude of the state of israel actually is to the spread of democracy among their neighbors. at any rate, the question here is whether kushner's positions as articulated disqualify him for an honorary degree from an american public university. i would have said that the idea that they do is ridiculous. 

knowing what you don't know

i kind of wish that people would allow themselves to be aware of what they don't know. i was talking to an anti-celebration person yesterday, and he was saying that the killing of bin laden obviously will have no effect on world islamic terrorism, and that osama's body obviously wasn't really buried at sea, etc. well, it's right to take everything the cia (for god's sake) or the president says with a grain of salt. if you just buy their (varying) accounts of what actually happened in the compound, for example, you're a chump. however, no matter how well some other account comports with your worldview or no matter how well it supports your overall political posture, you don't actually have any evidence that he wasn't buried at sea, for example. that's not to say that you should simply believe that he actually was; it's just to say that you don't know, unless you have access to some actual info. i don't think the average american is in a position to assess the effect on world terror etc. or at a minimum: i want you to produce the actual evidence, just like i want brennan or whomever to do the same.

that a person is frequently subjectively certain about matters of fact like items in the news without any evidence ought to make you doubt their credibility quite in general, even when - or especially when - it's all part of a coherent worldview or the commitments of a demographic or political segment.

blog fixins

in response to some stuff from montag, i've made some changes for rss feeds (especially i'm trying again to title posts), reversed the order of comments, etc. if people have ideas for other changes (i know you want caps, lisa!) let me know. [email protected]

let the kids celebrate

here's a pretty good argument for 'letting the kids celebrate,' from all things considered last night.



don't let the fact that you hate dick cheney or whatever make you defend bin laden, or even edge for a moment in that direction. don't start making lists of people to whom bin laden compares favorably. what's the good part of bin laden's vision? the part where he kills anyone for no reason at all? or the part where he aspires to impose an extremely rigid yet ultimately entirely irrational or arbitrary theocracy on the world? if you're not going to fight against that, what are you going to fight against? also i don't think every death is a bad or a sad thing. some lives are, though.

dickinson college goes native

dickinson had a big spontaneous beer-soaked celebration after the osama announcement. then it went into controversy. a small group of students had misgivings; they took a bunch of grief and had their fliers - saying things like, "celebrating a person's death: is that the campus we want to be" - ripped up. reportedly people getting called unamerican as well as 'fag' and 'fucking cunt.' then the admin sent a memo which among other things described the antis as taking a 'more thoughtful' position, though basically just saying everyone should feel safe in expressing their views. etc. for dick, quite the little tizzy, and i guess one that's appeared in some form all over. like i say, i wouldn't have gone out cheering, and i also get uncomfortable about waving the flag and chanting usa in a militaristic context. now on the other hand i'm a partriot at least in that i feel utterly american and that i am only possible in this culture, and that american culture (music, specifically) and various elements of our political tradition are great things. and i do regard that killing as more than justified and as a moment of justice, long deferred. and if people want to wave flags and chant usa without actually fucking with anyone, i say that was a good time to do it. 

what terrorism is

in order to reject a particular military action as evil, or in order even to condemn all military action as evil, it is not necessary to call it all 'terrorism.' the pentagon doesn't have to be a nest of terrorists in order to be condemned, any more than they have to be communists or serial rapists. just because 'terrorism' is a word that the authorities sometimes abuse, and just because it is the current strongest term of moral condemnation, it doesn't follow that all bad actions or death-dealing actions are terrorist. i more or less reserve the term for military-style actions intentionally directed primarily at non-military targets, at non-combatants. now i actually do condemn, say, hiroshima as state terrorism. and i actually do think there's a difference between attacking the wtc and the pentagon, even though using an airliner full of ordinary passengers to crash into the latter is also terroristic.

i don't think terrorism should be distinguished from other sorts of things by what sort of person does it (state vs. 'non-state actors') or methodologies (suicide attacks, e.g.). but i'm saying this really is a distinctive sort of demented action or person, where i set out intentionally to kill people who have nothing to do with the conflict i'm in, telling myself that i am actually prosecuting that conflict. 

apparently osama produced some sort of 'martyrdom tape' to be released in the event of his death. i just heard anderson cooper on cnn saying that such a tape would never be shown on any show he was associated with; 'he's a mass murderer and doesn't deserve to be heard.' that is crazy wrong! it's hard to imagine a more newsworthy item, precisely because osama was a mass murderer.

rarely has a human being more clearly deserved to die than osama bin laden. there really is such a thing as terrorism. it really is distinct from other military or death-dealing action. and it is not only monstrous; it is demented. it is not a tactic: its means are detached from its ends in a way that makes it entirely irrational and also, in effect, unbelievably stupid.

there are different ways of being evil. one is bureaucratic or technocratic: an excess of rationality, a blank conformity, the mobilization of an entire society to achieve evil ends: the genocide or unnecessary war, or oppression or exploitation of entire populations. but then there is purposeless, mindless, impressionistic, random, improvisational killing: anyone anywhere for any reason or no reason at all. 

i don't think that jubilation or celebration is exactly the right response, though it is understandable. but a quiet appreciation for a moment of actualized justice and justified revenge (two notions that are identical in this as in so many other cases, if you ask me) is sensible.

i have to say that - whatever actually happened in the airstrike - nato or whomever is actually making the decisions is obviously trying to kill gaddafi. this is a rational decision. and i think it would actually be hard to argue, whatever the various pseudo-legalisms involved - that assassination is not the quickest, cleanest way to 'protect civilians.'