cheese it, the cops!

letters to the editor

from this week's rappahannock news (from little washington, va, where i'm hanging with my ma).

To the Editor:

I would like to express my deepest gratitude and thanks to all my family members, therapist, friends, employers and supporters in the community during this difficult time. As all of you know by now by reading the Rappahannock News on a weekly basis, I made some bad decisions, for which I take full responsibility.

I am glad that the attention is focused on me, as I am sure I am the only one in this county who has ever made a mistake. As someone once said, 'There are two sides to every story.' That statement is very true, except that I have not had the opportunity to tell my side. I am very lucky to have so many people who love and support me and I can't thank you enough. Thank you for the phone calls, cards, emails to my family, books sent and money.

I have taken full responsibility for my actions, so those of you who continue to gossip at the 211 Quicke Mart, or with co-workers, etc., really need to attend to your own problems and stay out of mine! This ordeal has done nothing but make me a stronger, better person that I have ever been.

Tammy Atkins

Rappahannock County Jail

killin em dronestyle

fbi chief says we'll get him. people like mike rogers and diane feinstein think we ought to be trying snowden - and, what the hell, greenwald - for treason, espionage, etc. they wanna strip him naked and torture him in a cell for awile, a la bradley manning. at any rate, i don't know why he went hong kong. but he seems to be alive and free so he's doing something right.

socrates and snowden

whatever you do, don't let the debate come down to whether snowden is a 'whistle-blower' or rather a 'traitor.' the worst is just to say 'he committed a crime; it's just that simple.' really you can't get moral decisions out of definitions of terms like this, and it's a merely bullying set of moves. well, i blame socrates for the technique, the old shyster.

arm the populace

like i say, i think this is the fork in the road, where your way swung off, where you chose between freedom and slavery. it's revealing opinion-wise who takes what road. thomas friedman hesitantly throws his weight behind the view that the sheer fact that everyone is under surveillance is legitimately a secret. gene robinson hesitantly goes the other way: so hesitantly that it's hard to tell. one very big sign that some mealy-mouthed colluder in totalitarianism has no idea what to say is that he's glad that the discussion has been opened. it's an important discussion. one way i'd like to take this significant, open discussion is to open up the question of arming the population as a militia. i do think that we could responsibly market high explosives to patriotic groups of all kinds through gun shows. we're definitely going to need anti-aircraft materiel, e.g. i think, simultaneously, that we're going to have to think about disarming all agents of state power. safety first.

no, honestly, anyone who ever considered themselves a journalist is out of their minds to be ambivalent about this. what happened to the media? oh y'all didn't go to fucking grad school in communications or something? christ. whom do you identify with? what is the place of your own freedom to speak in a democracy or free society? time to admit that you're just pr or whatever.

vicious and grotesquely fallacious

it is amazing what's happening to edward snowden. the outpouring of revulsion is remarkable: it shows you every flavor of the authoritarian personality. also it is bullshit. jeffrey toobin on cnn practically jumps out of his skin with hostility and - like many others - constantly makes reference to snowden's age. i suppose 29 is too young to do the obviously right thing. say rosa parks had been 29; she'd have been a laughingstock. and he goes with 'you just can't do that' as an argument; just a sheer repetition of the authoritarian imperative.  here are david brooks's complaints today:

 

He betrayed honesty and integrity, the foundation of all cooperative activity. He made explicit and implicit oaths to respect the secrecy of the information with which he was entrusted. He betrayed his oaths.

keeping your promises is one dimension of honesty and integrity, but it can be over-ridden by other moral imperatives, including the moral imperative to help other people. understand, that is exactly what snowden took himself to be doing.

He betrayed his friends. Anybody who worked with him will be suspect. Young people in positions like that will no longer be trusted with responsibility for fear that they will turn into another Snowden.

this is assistant principal bullshit. everyone will be punished for your transgression.

He betrayed his employers. Booz Allen and the C.I.A. took a high-school dropout and offered him positions with lavish salaries. He is violating the honor codes of all those who enabled him to rise.

to repeat, honor codes are important. they can be over-ridden by other considerations, and for that matter other honor codes. here the argument is that it's obligatory to violate your own basic values if you're being paid lavishly. that i guess is what david brooks would call a social contract.

He betrayed the cause of open government. Every time there is a leak like this, the powers that be close the circle of trust a little tighter. They limit debate a little more.

this is unbelievably tendentious, fallacious claptrap. on brooks's view, it serves the cause of open government for it to be a secret that everyone is under surveillance at all times. revealing that just causes more secrecy. truly, the logic is depraved.

He betrayed the privacy of us all. If federal security agencies can’t do vast data sweeps, they will inevitably revert to the older, more intrusive eavesdropping methods.

this 'backlash' style of argument has got to go. your resistance to oppression is wrong because we'll double the oppression. the correct answer is then we'll double the resistance. seriously, here's why keeping all your crap secret is a bad idea: it forces us to reveal your ass to the world. don't make us do it. you'll have only yourselves to blame. you're just serving the purposes of julian assange again.

He betrayed the Constitution. The founders did not create the United States so that some solitary 29-year-old could make unilateral decisions about what should be exposed. Snowden self-indulgently short-circuited the democratic structures of accountability, putting his own preferences above everything else.

this is mindless. i don't know what the founders thought about 'solitary 29-year-olds,' but brooks does. i want to say this: edward snowden is not alone. he is not a solitary figure. what he did, he did at tremendous cost to himself and out of an evident commitment to actual public service. he has a worldwide community. 

the community brooks appeals to is an imaginary community simulated by secrecy and coercion. every one of these arguments is an argument that everyone should be secretly under surveillance at all times. but the arguments are just this anthology of desperate manipulations, meaningless spasms of the authoritarian mind, real stupidity.

no evil committed by an institution, whether a state or (for god's sake) a defense contractor cannot be justified by arguments like this. you could transpose these arguments directly to any fascist or communist dictatorship in the world; they could be and have been the ideology of every genocide. they are arguments that your conscience does not count, and hence you should do what we say. you don't even deserve to know the basis on which we're making our decisions.

you know, arguing for evil is annoying, but it's really the logic i find discrediting. so, your argument against revealing a massive secret police program to its victims is that the person who did it was a high school dropout. what's sweet about this as an example is that it both implicitly accuses snowden of stupidity on an inadequate basis (have you heard him talk?) and itself enacts stupidity (it's derangedly irrelevant, like a kind of incompetent surrealist poetry). 

glenns and eds

also thank god for glenn greenwald. this is a test of basic decency or where you decided whether or not to support slavery. anyone who spends any time considering whether it might be alright to keep these programs secret, for example by focusing outrage on ed snowden,  is a mere lover of tyranny. don't let anyone obscure even the trivial question of legality; read the 4th amendment. 

i myself went at first with 'oh we figured that.' but it's one thing to vaguely understand that you might be under surveillance, and another to show in detail that and how this is possible. one thing is that a world in which some of the things they are describing are happening, they might get to the point of info control at which edward snowdens become impossible. but right now, they are still possible. practical measures of all sorts, legal and illegal, to keep them possible, are essential. 

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

 

 

letting holder go

yes, absolutely, eric holder ought to resign. if he does not, i'd think about what recourse there is, up to and including moving toward impeachment of the president. the rosen situation (etc) is really grotesque: grotesquely unconstitutional, grotesquely partisan, grotesquely wrong. and let me say this: if you let the fact that the organization in question is fox affect your opinion on this at all, no one should listen to anything you say ever again, you partisan twit.

It hurts my head when Fox News is in the right on a matter of principle

In which Crusader AXE mutters into his amontrillado about Harry Frankfurt, bullshit, talking points, the relationship between Roland Hedley and Winston Churchill and whether or not Jay Kearny now showers after or before or during each press conference....hands and soul never get clean. Oh, and involves Montaigne, Rolling Stone b-sides and Bob Dylan...with Popeye. 

oops we kicked your ass

i have been doing research and working on the wikipedia entry for my great-grandfather, herman bernstein (he's my mother's mother's father). what an unbelievable life! i thought i wrote fast. for one thing, the dude was super-jew. for example, henry ford, with whom he locked horns for a decade, called him 'the messenger boy of international jewry.' he was rolling across russia during the revolution, interviewing john reed and leon trotsky.

even a superficial skim of the list of his correspondence (housed at the yivo center for jewish research at the center for jewish history) reveals letters to and from Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Sholem Aleichem,Andrew Carnegie, Leo Tolstoy, William Howard Taft, George Bernard Shaw, Max Nordau, Louis Brandeis, John D. Rockefeller, Louis Marshall, Israel Zangwill, Henri Bergson, Arthur Brisbane, Mordecai Kaplan, Henry Morgenthau, Sr., Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franz Oppenheimer, Felix Frankfurter, Warren G. Harding, William Randolph Hearst, Herbert Hoover, Constantin Stanislavski, Leon Trotsky, Arthur Balfour,Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, Arthur Goldberg, Adolph Ochs, Romain Rolland, Julius Rosenwald, Benjamin Cardozo, Yosef Yitzchok Schneersohn, and Franklin Roosevelt.

as herman might have put it: jesus a vehicular christ.

herman bernstein as a sensitive young poet

 and as a mature ass-kicker

 

when my mother (joyce abell, b. 1925) was 5, she was sent by her parents, alone, on a ship to albania, where herman was the ambassador. she still remembers the spectacle, the dresses etc., at the court of the magnificently attired zog, king of albania. 

here are a few of the other writers in my lineage, on both or all sides, whether they arrived with the puritans in 1637 or came to ellis island from the russo-german border in 1893. some were protestants, some were catholics, some were jews (100% on my mom's side). most were atheists, though, whatever their heritage. some were communists and some were republicans and some (well...) were anarchists. novelist and short story writer grace sartwell mason (my great great grandfather's sister; one of her books is women are queer); herman's brother hillel bernstein, novelist and new yorker contributor; novelist etc murray gitlin (my grandfather and herman's son-in-law); my grandfather franklin sartwell, columnist for and editor for the washington times-herald and the washington post; my father franklin sartwell, jr., reporter and editor at the washington star, national geographic, science news, and defenders magazine; herman's son david, writer and editor for, and owner of, the binghampton sun. there are others!

te'o and media

i can be pretty hard on reporters who get stories wrong. like i was ragging on all the misinformation they were purveying on newtown. but i'm going to forgive them on the te'o story. it's just not the sort of thing you'd think someone would make up. it spoke well for us that we wouldn't require verification on something like that, just believe the raw emotion he was...expressing. well, i suppose even things like that have to dissolve in our current context, including social media. but that's sad, see? do i resent the fact that i was laboring under a misapprehension? well yeah a bit. how much of a burden was it to continue to labor under that misapprehension for a few extra weeks? indetectible in the face of the actual burdens that confront me on any given day. this crap ain't exactly watergate. believing a college kid about his tragedy is not like believing what some politician or military spokesman or corporate flak is saying, which are real and constant problems in american journalism. so i just don't feel that there is a big media problem here, except maybe that te'o was tailoring the story to fit into espn's formulae. the formulae should be reflected on not least because the narrative forms they deploy are getting awfully old, and have the sort of falsifying imperatives that alway arise when you try to read actual life as though it were a novel.

or: how could notre dame not release this information as soon as they had it? well, this is the kind of story that there just is no urgency in reporting to anyone. now, maybe it's disturbing that they waited til after the championship game, but really we don't know how the deliberation went at all. it's sad, stupid, and fucked up no matter how it happened, but nothing turns on getting it out immediately at all: it has no, like, policy implications. no one has to make up their mind about anything on its basis, at least until the draft. 

there are still journalists

the best use of cnn is something like this gaza situation; they're reporting from gaza city, jerusalem, cairo, etc; you watch bombs exploding live behind the anchors. they have crazy-brave war correspondents who have done every conflict and who speak fluent arabic: ben wedeman and arwa damon, for example; these are people who did day-by-day through iraq, watched libya explode, have infiltrated into syria. really people like that are still my heroes. wedeman did an amazing piece about a funeral for a family killed in gaza yesterday. i have to say wolf blitzer is the best anchor in a case like this, despite whatever ethnic/professional background he may have: scrupulously fair, very sharp and pointed interviewing people from either side. anderson cooper likewise. sneer at their ratings slump if you want; they are indispensable. 

pussy politics

paul ryan: extremist, of course. so we'll go through a few weeks of this sort of thing. honestly, everyone who disagrees with the new york times editorial page, even slightly, is an extremist. well the same is true of the wall street journal. this is the basic means by which we enforce a narrow range of possibilities - a political spectrum an inch wide - on our beautiful-but-wack nation. you know, gingrich is all about how obama has an extremist socialist vision etc. i'd like to cobble together an extremist party: we could strike extreme fear in the main stream by proposing a 2% tax increase on dog-owners or something. i do so love 'extremist' or 'out of the mainstream': the sheer fact that you are capable of a tiny bit of independent intellection disaqualifies you entirely. 'extremist extremist': all it means is " disagrees with me.' but it tries to shape this stunning criticism through inventing a people to apply peer pressure to even slight deflectors of the weight of public opinion as articulated by the writer. it is the rhetorical stance of extreme cowardice, proceeding from fear to try to strike fear. there's no argument at all except: look he's different than us! crush, batter, kill. i'm going to assume until you stop that slop that you've got no actual reasons to take the positions you do. or rather, that you have no idea what would or would not constitute a good reason to believe anything. i am going to treat you as a pitiable idiot.

i realize this is unlikely, but i'll make you a deal: you stop trying to manipulate me socially into agreeing with you, and i'll stop insulting you.

my own grandpa

been working on the wikipedia entry for my great-grandfather (my mother's mother's father), herman bernstein (which already existed). quite the life and i'm still only scratching the surface.