cheese it, the cops!

one more time

once more on syria. of course i called for a cruise missile through assad's window at the outset. and i'd still support such a step, which would be both 'punitive' and 'strategic.' but i also share my fellow war-mongers(krauthammer, e.g.)'s irritation that you'd proceed by publicly promising for day after day to do x, y, and z, and everyone in the regime has surely spent the time running for cover, even as obama's promising not to target or remove him. i would have tried to assassinate him the next day.

just to try to establish the slightest credibility on this: i was squawking about how ridiculous the pseudo-intelligence was on iraq from the go, in print. that colin powell performance at the un was pitiful; i will never take him seriously again. i do not believe they got the intelligence wrong and believed it; i think they manufactured intelligence and sold it like a used car. now, as far as such things go, what kerry (who i just tried to rip to shreds in 2004; the worst presidential candidate i ever saw; he never even managed to take a position on iraq) presented today was comparatively convincing. however, if you were waiting for the u.s. intelligence to weigh in in order to make up your mind, you're kind of screwed both ways around, because (a) you should never believe what intelligence people say publicly on the sheer grounds that they said it (nothing is better-established ever in the whole wide world), and (b) the evidence was already as convincing as it could be, in the nature of something like this; you should already have known.

i just don't think there is any real room for doubt about what happened. it's frigging obvious. he has the gas and the rockets to deliver it. he did his massacre in a center of resistance to his regime. the on-the-ground vids and accounts from aid workers and ordinary people have more credibility than any cia memo. there just is no plausible alternative explanation unless you absolutely insist that you will only believe what would support your idea of what ought to be done even as the reality is staring you in the face.

i am aware of the tension of this with anti-statism. but also people like me are - or surely ought to be - incredibly repulsed by murderous tyrants. i have an autonomic response of violent hostility; they, and not whoever irritated keith olbermann today by disagreeing with him, are the worst people in the world, and definitely the worst boyfriends. i don't think you get any very clear guidance on this from the sheer fact of being an anarchist.

everyone's a critic

heterosexual romance is difficult for all of us, even billionaires, repulsive mayors of san diego, and dictators. admittedly therapy, anti-depressants, sad country songs, and changing my identity and moving to the yukon have not worked for me. apparently, kim jong-un just takes the direct approach: having his gf and her whole pop group "machine-gunned". how you like me now, baby?

 

 

 

somehow i screwed up the link to chris mayer's piece about me on the laissez faire books site. fixed down there too now.

booker, stray or gate?

whatever cory booker's sexual orientation is, he gives exactly the right response:  "I love seeing on Twitter when someone says I’m gay, and I say, ‘So what does it matter if I am? So be it. I hope you are not voting for me because you are making the presumption that I’m straight.’" this is especially the right response if, as his gay friend jonathan capehart says, he is straight. it's kind of difficult to say something like that, actually, and one feature of straight men (say of my generation) is that we/i were/are/am often extremely anxious to establish that we are not gay. i think probably at least for the first x years of this blog (started 2004), for example, i probably rarely or even never wrote about any issue of sexual orientation without finding a way to assure everyone that i'm straight. (there, i did it again!) i tried to stop doing that later. well, that there is homophobia, and booker's is the courageously right approach, especially in the middle of a senate campaign, for god's sake.

laissez-faire

here's a piece about me, by the doughty chris mayer, for laissez faire books.

are chemical weapons worse than other weapons?

the question has arisen, here as elsewhere. i guess the first thing to say is that every killing technique kills people and also wounds and injures people; that's what all these things are for. so i'd sort of go piecemeal, and it would be silly to say that chemical weapons are the worst sort of weapons in every respect. but, chemical weapons are, first, entirely indiscrimate: they just kill or wound everyone in a given area, which is why they are grotesque when applied to, say, neighborhoods or inhabited regions. and they can't even be confined to the area you want to target even if you hit it, because they waft at the whim of the winds. and they are cheap and easy to make, so it is especially difficult to stop their proliferation. it's a task for the mullahs or the beloved leader to make a nuke and deliver it, or even a biological agent; i could probably whip up poisonous gas in my basement. of course the sorts of injuries and deaths inflicted by sarin are excruciating and horrific; you die slowly in one of the most painful ways possible. you can imagine a situation in which whole cities or regions could be gassed in a horrifying genocide; you turn a whole city into an instant auschwitz; saddam (with cia assistance) came close to this, but it could even be worse, and assad has the stuff to do it.

but if you're considering whether it would better to have your neighborhood gassed or napalmed, for example, you would face a difficult decision. if assad were napalming neighborhoods, i hope people would have the same reaction, and for god's sake i hope they'd be outraged and want to do something about it. the firebombing of dresden or tokyo, the nuking of nagasaki: right, these weren't any more wonderful or less indiscriminate than it would have been to use gas. now, cruise missiles actually are somewhat better in my opinion (look, we are moraly distinguishing ways of killing people, which always is going to look rather grotesque), for example, as is anything that on a good day can be reasonably precisely targeted so that you could try to limit their use to actual military targets. obviously, even in a best case you are liable to kill and injure innocent people. but still, there is a moral distinction between a weapon you can (if all goes well) drop right into the military command center, and a weapon whose nature forces you, if you use it at all, to take out the command center by annihilating everyone in its whole region. 

my best blog post since june

every woody allen movie since 1910 has been his best since annie hall or whatever it may be. a good parallel is the stones, whose every album has been their best since exile on main street. this is an indication that people really really want to like woody allen. every time out, they are working to persuade themselves in defiance of their own actual opinion that this is a good movie. they are actually expressing once more their disappointment, only they don't want you to know that quite. well, i myself really really want to like the rolling stones. but i really really don't want to like woody allen. so i'm ignoring the reviews (not to mention the sort of reviewers who all write the same blurb simultaneously) and will be skipping blue jasmine.

i have a scream

as you listen to obama at the lincoln memorial today - which i would not recommend - you should understand that martin luther king's dream was an america in which a black man could administer a regime of total surveillance. he's like mlk and j. edgar hoover in one deracinated body. our long national nightmare is over!

miley and the protestant ethic

my daughter grew up on hannah montana, and i have to say that i too found that miley cyrus performance disturbing. i did actually experience the sexual self-presentation as disgusting and wrong and sad and stupid. well, i have a streak of prudery, but on reflection i am endorsing that streak; i have watched various alternatives in action, having let's say dated or married some folks who lacked it entirely and so might pull a miley at any given party. but one thing that i don't think people are focusing on: it was completely incompetent. she just didn't seem adequately rehearsed even for miming butt love with robin thicke or whatever. actually, the crazy teddy bears might have been sort of amusing. only she didn't work out the dance steps at all apparently and there was nothing interesting or fun about the song. so, madonna, say, or even katy perry or gaga is a good model here: right they might show up in lingerie, offer you their butt in the time-honored tradition, pretend to jerk off etc. but they are not going to appear on stage without working out the performance carefully. i like a ho with a work ethic.

and fuckwad: an introduction

i was kind of hoping that space travel would be common by the time more books of j.d. salinger were published, so i could try to find a planet where they were prohibited under threat of execution. painfully, incomprehensibly overrated writer, but of course an admirable person. and you can never have too many cults.

some highlights of the decades-long labor of love:

The authors contend that Salinger “was born with only one testicle” and they argue that this caused him enormous embarrassment — that it was “surely one of the many reasons he stayed out of the media glare” so as “to reduce the likelihood that this information would emerge,” and that it amplified his psychological need “to create flawless art.”

Mr. Shields and Mr. Salerno even suggest that “Catcher” in some way played a role in the killings of John Lennon and the young actress Rebecca Schaeffer, and the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. These terrible acts, the authors write, “are not a coincidence; they constitute frighteningly clairvoyant readings of ‘Catcher’ — the assassins intuiting the underlying postwar anger and violence in the book.”

“Story by story,” Mr. Salerno and Mr. Shields observe, “from ‘Teddy’ forward, Salinger’s work moves from religion as a factor or even a crutch in his characters’ lives, to religion as the only thing in their lives that matters, to the work’s entire purpose being to cryptically convey religious dogma.”

etc. i'll stop counting testicles now.

 

 

Clarity...

 

In which Crusader AXE shares the brilliant insights of a English Muslim on the future of the middle east. 

Pefectly rational solutions abound and nothing will go wrong!

Nothing but togetherness and love in the Muslim World. 

At the final Peace Festival, the Kinks Reunion Concert will sell out.

 

sometimes you start yelling at the wrong moment

oh my. well that unbelievable story (cia helped saddam gas the kurds) comes along on the right morning to make lisa's and el mago's point, and rather to turn our red line into the scribbling of a psychotic. what the hell are we going to do about this thing we live inside?

but i do think that the assad regime has been soaking children in sarin, and lisa, the people reporting that are not cia; it's activists and human rights people on the ground posting their own videos to youtube, etc. you really really should not take bashar's propaganda seriously. that's obvious. and i think anyone who can do something to stop it is morally obliged to try, even if they are themselves war criminals or whatever it may be.

i do not think that the obama admin has been looking for pretexts to attack syria. they have been looking for pretexts not to, for very good reasons starting with self-interest, and there's little popular support here for any action. human rights people and others on the ground in syria and also the governments of great britain and france have been trying to force them into something. the cia or whomever is more likely to say it's not clear what happened or something than that we must attack. 

i am, however, going to withdraw that thing i said about the us never having tortured on the scale of assad. i shouldn't have said that. we have no idea.

way way way late

i hope those who savaged me for suggesting early intervention in syria including the assassination of the monster bashar al-assad are watching children being gassed to death. they are going to do something now anyway, i believe: at least 100,000 deaths and innumerable tortures and millions of refugees later.

ditch

if there are any statists left out there, i just want to point out (a) that you have been paying to have yourself surveilled, without your own knowledge. (b) you have absolutely no idea what else you are paying to have secretly done for you, or to you. i have heard many a liberal say, with all apparent sincerity, that they are not taxed enough. right. i don't think you're being taxed enough either. i think you should pay up, right now, for the ammunition it will take to kill you and the rental on the ditch. that'll be you, what did that to yourself. same for us antis, of course. only you are really really into it as a matter of principle. i respect that!

what happens when microsoft tries to come back

what went wrong at microsoft? it's very simple: they committed suicide by their own (temporarily successful) attempt to achieve a monopoly. so, somehow they managed to impose windows on the whole world, and spent much of their energy crushing the oppostion (and trying to fight off anti-trust, etc). right, but windows was an unbelievably shitty operating system, which became immediately evident to anyone who was able to access an alternative. it was full of stupid bugs, unbelievably virus-vulnerable, crazily heavy, still working on underlying dos code a decade or more beyond where that many any sense. i have no idea what their thousands of code writers and such were doing that whole time: playing tiddly-winks, maybe. so, in the usual fashion, a monopoly grows mind-numbingly complacent. after a certain point, it didn't (and it doesn't) matter what they did: people associated their flagship product with palpable shittiness that fucked up their day every day. it may well be that there's no coming back from that even if you improve, and i say good riddance.

 

you might want to think about this history when bill and melinda are trying to tell you how your children should be educated. i'm not saying they aren't extremely, insanely, unbelievably wealthy, however, which of course does entail their excellence in all possible dimensions.

junior sisk and rambler's choice rock in general - for one thing, a fresh repertoire within a traditional vein (check 'the story of the day i died', for another example) - and i am rather delighted by 'old bicycle chain'. i'm going to let it stand as my reply to highs in the low fifties, while speculating on the grounds of having read all the author's other works that this one is liable to be extraordinarily well-written and very hilarious, with moments of profundity.

it's morning again in bob filner

here are a couple of fine pieces on nsa from the wall street journal, which - remarkably - has been very aggressive in its coverage and condemnation. i'd say this has been a pretty good moment to see who the decent human beings, clear thinkers, and people who keep faith with american ideals really are, and any time you've got kucinich and noonan together in their outrage, you might want to listen up.

from a roundup by peggy noonan:

If you assume all the information that can and will be gleaned will be confined to NSA and national security purposes, you are not sufficiently imaginative or informed. If you believe the information will never be used wrongly or recklessly, you are touchingly innocent.

If you assume you can trust the administration on this issue you are not following the bouncing ball, from Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who told Congress under oath the NSA didn't gather "any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans" (he later had to apologize) to President Obama, who told Jay Leno: "We don't have a domestic program." What we do have, the president said, is "some mechanism that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack."

Oh, we have more than that.

 

 bob filner, currently looking for employment, would make an excellent nsa director. 

 

 

 

wake up; it's a chelsea manning

in the gender declaration as in the leak itself, chelsea manning is a courageous person, and the least we can do is refer to her using the name and pronouns she specifies.

 

i think it's fair to say that i've got some reservations about this style of music, but i'm working on freeing my mind of prejudice. it's a process, sweetie.

 

A Barely-Detectable Sideways Smile

By Crispin Sartwell

 

Knowledge, as educators like to intone, is power. If it is, then a universal system of surveillance is power indeed. So much so, I believe, that we have no idea - or at least, we did not until Edward Snowden's revelations - what our actual form of government is. We have no idea who's in charge and what policies they are in fact pursuing; we have no idea how the powers and institutions of the government are really arranged and coordinated.

     Whoever runs a secret system of total surveillance - I mean whoever has day-to-day management of the thing - is the person in charge of the country. Perhaps this is actually Barack Obama. Perhaps it is NSA head Keith Alexander. Perhaps it is someone we have never heard of.

     Consider, for example, the congressional defenders of the NSA programs. Now, a Congressman -  Mike Rogers, say - might be tempted to oppose the thing on the grotesquely obvious grounds that it is entirely incompatible with the basic liberties America was founded to preserve, the form of government prescribed by the Constitution, human decency, and so forth. However, Alexander or whoever it may be has a very simple technique for turning such a person around on a dime: he just gives you a flicker of eyebrow or a barely-detectable sideways smile. That's when you start trying to remember every communication you've had over the last decade. After that, you do what he wants you to do.   

    If all that sounds hyperbolic, consider this: last year, someone was pawing through the email of David Petraeus, the director of the CIA. Now David Petraeus was one of the most powerful people in the world, a fellow who could rain death on you from the sky wherever you were huddled. The person or people who had access to his communications ended Petraeus's career. Someone who can control or destroy the CIA Director can control or destroy anyone who is not a saint, if he has similar access to their communications. And people who rise to positions of power, it seems to me, are considerably less likely to be saints than members of he population as a whole.

        Putting it mildly, a situation in which a population cannot know how their government actually operates - for example, the period during which Egyptians were under the delusion that they had elected their head of state - cannot be a democracy. Imagine what the government of the United States would have been if J. Edgar Hoover had achieved omniscience.

     A person who controls a universal system of surveillance can control the president. He can appoint or delete members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He can work over the Supreme Court like Whitey Bulger working over a snitch. He can flick away attempts by other agencies or powers to rein him in. This replacement of democracy with blackmail conceived as a national security imperative was the essence of Hoover's approach, only he didn't have perfect information. When you create a universal system of surveillance, you create a shadow government that runs the country.

    For such reasons, I wouldn't merely assume that the advocates of the programs, from Obama on down, are sincere. (Snowden asserted, recall, that he could access Obama's communications if he had his email address; everything else Snowden has revealed has been borne out, I believe.) Indeed, to assume that the defenders of the program believe what they're saying is also to assume that they are profoundly evil. It's far more charitable to figure that they're being worked like marionettes.

    If Keith Alexander indeed controls the various NSA surveillance programs revealed by Snowden, then he is either the de facto Dear Leader for Life of America, or he is engaged in an act of sheer charity: he's permitting people to keep whatever power they retain and America to keep whatever shreds or symbols of its political traditions we hold on to.

   You might go to DC to see the Capitol, the Supreme Court, the Archives, the White House, and so forth. What you'll need to realize on your jaunt is that the whole thing is a kind of historical re-enactment; DC might as well be Colonial Williamsburg. They're still miming the legislative process, judicial review, Commander in Chiefdom, and so on, which will have some historical interest for any tourist. But you might want to stick to Williamsburg. It 's more realistic.

 

Crispin Sartwell teaches political science and philosophy at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA.

 

 

what is totalitarianism today?

it's true that i've been throwing around 'totalitarianism,' and i do think we're at a pivotal moment, a moment when, thanks largely to snowden, we can see clearly what's happening, a moment we'll look back on from the camps and go, 'well, that was our last shot.' but, stimulated by the author of possible experience, i do want to try to do something a bit more careful and definitional. one thing that we should immediately acknowledge is that whatever form totalitarianism is taking here now, it is not the same as the forms it has taken elsewhere in the past. it won't be shrouded in marxist ideology, of course, or be fascism, exactly, as that emerged historically. well that's good, because those ideologies were grotesquely false and unbelievably annoying. but what might it mean now?

a general definition encompassing the whole miserable history might start with how hierarchical a society is in a variety of dimensions (economics, politics, military, information, rights, aesthetics, status, skills, access to weaponry, etc), how entrenched those structures are, and how much the hierarchies of all these dimensions overlap or coincide. also, i'd look for carceral institutions on a large scale - prisons, internment facilities and so on - and of course the police power to fill them up and keep people inside. also consciousness-forming activities dominated by the central authority or pinnacle of the hierarchy: propaganda, education, media regulation, for example. also sheer centralization of coinciding hierarchies over large territories, reduction of local autonomy or any centers of power outside the center, from individuals to pretty large social systems, all of which are to whatever extent possible incorporated or dominated from the pinnacle.

a particularly central feature of totalitarianism, it seems to me, is a merger of state and economy, or of political/police and economic power. fascism had that (and much else) in common with communism, and with the classic military juntas (egypt right now, for example), and our system has that too, to an ever-more pronounced extent. snowden showed that among many other things: the regime of total surveillance is a 'public/private partnership,' though neither 'public' nor 'private' has any real meaning anyway at this point.

now i do note that i can still say things like this, so the current configuration has not in the classic hitler/stalin/pinochet fashion tried to achieve total control over the content of communications or a total regime of censorship. and at least until recently, i would have said that the current leaders have figured out that previous totalitarian regimes put way too much emphasis on repressing dissent. if you really have very pervasive political and economic and police power, dissent does not threaten it until you reach a point close to popular insurrection (which can be directly put down in a pinch with your overwhelming resources, weaponry, personnel; it's unlikely anyway if it's obviously futile.) see, if you're not driven by ideological or religious fanaticism, then a lot of these procedures just look non-cost-effective. (if you are a fanatic, of course, nothing looks more important than killing disagreement.) but totalitarianism is expensive no matter how you cut it, of course. that's one reason you need the police and economic hierarchies to be the same. 

i do think that's one thing that today's historically-minded totalitarian would shake his head at in the classical varieties: oh my god that's crazy: a soldier in every apartment or an active attempt to have an informant in every conversation or to kill people for subversive graffiti reduces your profit margin or the resources available for other projects and unnecessarily irritates people.

the new totalitarianism might not have the charismatic-yet-ridiculous systems of all history and reality, the apocalyptic flava, or the tinhorn-messiah-and-his-blank-eyed-acolytes structure of some previous attempts. a more rational calculation of costs and margins would be a feature of 'post-ideological' totalitarianism. that doesn't mean there won't be brutality. it's liable to be somewhat more sustainable, though.

in fact, if you're resting on total surveillance, you should want people to speak as freely as possible; that's the best way to identify and monitor Enemies. also, freedom of expression could be a safety-valve or a replacement in people's minds for action that does actualy threaten the political and economic 'order.'

on the other hand, there are forms of expression (for example, revealing state secrets) that do threaten the regime - which massively depends on self-concealment, a bland pseudo-rational surface and a roiling gigantic repressive machinery accompanied by massive personal corruption - and hence people like snowden and manning and people who represent their material may have to be repressed, interned, assassinated, and so on. 

a regime of total surveillance of the sort revealed by snowden has been a dream of every totalitarian regime, obviously. it's not in itself every aspect of totalitarianism, of course, but it is extremely extremely useful, and it yields a situation in which any member of the population can be blackmailed into silence or picked up on a pretext and silenced and confined. so it is both an extremely effective aid to other totalitarian moves and institutions and itself directly a form of universal oppression of the sort that every totalitarian regime aspires to or identifies as the salvation of mankind or the essence of collective identity. of course there are many other practical measures that might be relevant: oh, stop and frisk, for example.

at any rate, it's a matter that ultimately needs some care. but i do think 'totalitarianism' is a useful term, and that what they're doing now is aptly described by it. also, i think whatever response you think would have been appropriate to the period in which a historic totalitarian regime was being imposed - germany in the 30s, russia in the 20s, all those military regimes here and there - is appropriate here, now. i do want to point out that all of these regimes, once they were ensconsed, engaged in mass murder, the worst our planet has seen by a long way, and you should brace yourself for that if the thing cannot be stopped here. ultimately, when you constitute an irresistable power, you should expect to be its victim in many dimensions. no one responsibly or even sanely exercises power on that scale.

 

 

 

jumping ship

yes, we might all have to abandon the internet because of its colonization by the secret police, as these very reasonable people show. it'll be ok. we'll miss it, but you know, 25 years ago we puttered along without it.

truth is a cascade of diamonds

bombazine on manning's dignified statement, made just before they re-gagged him. her!

dangle

god told benedict to quit. perhaps He had extremely good reasons. i can picture the conversation: 'look, We want your letter of resignation on Our desk in the morning. if not, regrettably, We'll have to terminate you.' it's business-mystical, baby. i always figured someone must have been dangling a devastating scandal over benedict's head. no doubt it was that committee which is the catholic god. (i know y'all have been struggling with this for millennia, but the solution is straightforward: three gods, one committee.)

in fact it's a gas

all i do is complain. so now i'd like to suggest a proactive twobirds solution to various problems. i'd like to transpose the assad regime and its whole arsenal to ft. meade maryland, and let him have a crack at nsa headquarters. however the conflict comes out, as long as there is excruciating suffering, the world wins. they can argue as they croak about whose authority is less legitimate, who is more enthusiastic about or effective in subordinating their own population, who's the more shameless screeching liar and so on.

exercise: what's wrong with this sentence (from politico)?:

The National Security Agency began improperly collecting Americans’ electronic communications that had no connection to terrorism in 2008, but the government didn’t learn of the problem until 2011, senior administration officials said Wednesday.

i don't know what to say about the manning sentence except that i'm on his side.

smashing the guardian's hard drives

it's a little odd that the revelations below were made down inside an opinion piece on the miranda detention, because they are at least as dramatic and important and should have been reported on top of the front page [5pm update: it's on the top of the front page]. also i do not necessarily share rusbridger's confidence in the practical effectiveness of the first amendment in the us. but surely it grows ever-clearer what we're dealing with: people on both sides of the pond who are taking their model of statecraft more and more from - oh let's see - erich honecker. all forms of resistance are legitimate or morally required. this is the moment where we descend into yet another totalitarian nightmare or vitiate the systems that are working to impose it. if this can be accomplished by voting, or through expression in our compromised free press or on the streets, it must be. if it can't be, then we need to proceed by any means necessary.

 

A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: "You've had your fun. Now we want the stuff back." There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. "You've had your debate. There's no need to write any more."

During one of these meetings I asked directly whether the government would move to close down the Guardian's reporting through a legal route – by going to court to force the surrender of the material on which we were working. The official confirmed that, in the absence of handover or destruction, this was indeed the government's intention. Prior restraint, near impossible in the US, was now explicitly and imminently on the table in the UK. But my experience over WikiLeaks – the thumb drive and the first amendment – had already prepared me for this moment. I explained to the man from Whitehall about the nature of international collaborations and the way in which, these days, media organisations could take advantage of the most permissive legal environments. Bluntly, we did not have to do our reporting from London. Already most of the NSA stories were being reported and edited out of New York. And had it occurred to him that Greenwald lived in Brazil?

The man was unmoved. And so one of the more bizarre moments in the Guardian's long history occurred – with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the Guardian's basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents. "We can call off the black helicopters," joked one as we swept up the remains of a MacBook Pro.

Whitehall was satisfied, but it felt like a peculiarly pointless piece of symbolism that understood nothing about the digital age. We will continue to do patient, painstaking reporting on the Snowden documents, we just won't do it in London. The seizure of Miranda's laptop, phones, hard drives and camera will similarly have no effect on Greenwald's work.

ditch the dilemma: errol morris and janet malcolm

times literary supplement's review of janet malcolm's 'forty-one false starts'. the reviewer, gideon lewis-kraus, sets up the thing as an opposition between malcolm and errol morris, who evidently hammers on the objective truth.

Morris’s canards about journalism and the “relativity of truth” are reminders that Malcolm’s work is never done: he represents one more defender of the fantasy that there are such things as facts that speak for themselves – a story that itself dictates the way it ought to be told, a story that has silenced its competing versions.

assuming both malcolm's and morris's positions on these things are being accurately represented, i'd like to point out that it's a false opposition, and i think that, as set up, neither malcolm's nor morris's position can be sustained or even made comprehensible. also, i think both need a bunch of philosophy. anyway, lewis-kraus certainly does.

so, what in the world could be meant by 'a fact that speaks for itself' or 'a story that dictates the way it ought to be told'? insofar as persons are facts, i suppose, they do indeed speak for themselves, or might, but it's true that the mountain isn't telling you how to describe it or dictating to you like you're its stenographer. on the other hand, the mountain certainly places extreme and elaborate restrictions on what can be said truly about it. so, you know, everest is where it is and not in another place, for example. did it tell you that? something like that would only occur to you if you thought mountains and everything else were made of words or that everything yaps, a position which, though it was fashionable in the 90s, was the very worst position anyone ever took about anything.

now, what about 'stories that tell themselves'? well, that is a bizarre formulation, and right, anyone who took the position that there were stories that told themselves would be deeply confused. but the whole style of formulation is bizarrely question-begging: it just identifies what actually happens with stories. so, i might write a story about edward snowden, but if you think edward snowden or everything that has happened around him is himself and itself a story, you are making the sort of mistake that psychoanalytic litcrits and documentary filmmakers make when they try to grapple with ontology. also you're some kind of wacky idealist. also, even if you could make something like that comprehensible, it would turn out to be obviously false.

stories are things people make. some of them are about the world. the world isn't a story, though it contains stories, for example in libraries or hard drives, or in the form of sound waves. every story is of course an extreme and brutal simplification of the world. don't believe me? alright i'm telling the snowden story. do i include a maximally-complete description of the international-departures area of the moscow airport? i mean every crack in the floor and molecule circulating in the air? snowden's every hair and slightest movement? that's what the world is like, but that's not what any story is like, even one by proust. as to the constant freudian hints in malcolm that we are each of us entirely stuck in our own subjectivity: that's just false and no one believes it.

on the other hand, if you are going to tell a story about the world, then you are going to have to select, interpret, and so on, and it will be marked by your subjectivity and relation to the facts. take a murder, which is what morris and malcolm are arguing about. there are indefinitely many ways you might tell a true story about it: you could do it in french or swahili; you could do it in 100 words or a million; you could do a fictional reconstruction or a documentary film, a graphic novel or a hyper-link tree, each of which could take a thousand different shapes; you could shape a classic hyper-coherent narrative, working up a climax and denouement, or in the style of james joyce; you could do it with multiple narrators or in the third person. and so on and on. obviously, the event and the trial etc do not determine all these things. but i will assert this, for example: there are even more inaccurate ways than accurate ways to tell the story. you might be wrong about who did the killing, for example, or you might construct in your million words a grotesquely skewed or even self-serving interpretation. 

in short we do not have to and we cannot choose between facts that dictate how they are to be represented and a world melting into narrative strategies. ok?

and just one other thing: there are many ways of representing the world that just are not narratives or stories: statistical tables, maps, paintings, dry and relatively unorganized listing of facts, and so on. there are many ways of writing that do not consist of telling stories: polemics, outlines, scientific papers, the tao te ching. is this blog entry a story? is an argument a story? what about super-string theory? i think there will be many items in today's new york times, for example, that are just not best understood as stories. here's one at random. is it a story? alright, help me out: what do you mean by 'story'? also in the 80s and 90s stories took over every other mode in which the world could be represented (or if you prefer, constructed, invented, hallucinated), but that was just disciplinary imperialism by litcrits and certain sorts of psychologists. i guess you can work on that if you want to, or try to show that my road atlas is a story after all, but as you do, i think you'll notice that 'story' no longer at all means what people actually mean by it, so you lose the essence of the doctrine you're supposedly propounding.

detain and interrogate

before i said that maybe greenwald should tone down the threats a bit, as when he was saying 'this will be the most destructive set of revelations in american history.' however, i think his response to the detention/interrogation of david miranda is more than appropriate: essentially: you want to play like that? i'm going to be a lot more aggressive from now on in my reporting. if we had the power, i'd suggest detaining and interrogating david cameron's wife. i'd release her unscathed after 9 hours if cameron awakens to the truth of what he is, but it might take years of recreational abuse visited upon her person to show him the meaning and value of freedom. certainly, miranda has as much right to detain and interrogate cameron and rummage through his stuff as cameron has to detain and interrogate miranda, and unlike cameron, he has a compelling moral justification for doing so. if you think that sentence is false, then you'll need an argument, and brother, you ain't got one.

bacevich rocks the house

this piece on snowden, manning etc by andrew bacevich really gives the thing an incredibly clear and compelling frame.

stop

i just want to register that i completely agree with the decision vitiating stop and frisk in nyc. the profiling aspect of it is luridly disgusting, but even if that was not at its center, it is clearly unconstitutional and profoundly oppressive. of course, the nsa is frisking everyone all day. it's good if they're not particularly targeting black people, though it wouldn't be surprising if they rummaged a little harder about the persons of muslims, opponents of current american regime, and so on. i am delighting in whatever i can find of backlash against these sorts of oppressions, though honestly my hopes for the future of human freedom are extremely muted.