cheese it, the cops!

suleiman: "do not listen to the satellite stations!" now there's a person who is accustomed to autocratic power. he seems to expect people to listen to whatever crap he may frame as an order.

just a few minutes ago, cbs published a story with this headline: clinton advocates 'orderly transition' in egypt. see, my view is that you actually publish news; a random sentence by an average demonstrator would be more interesting. you can't make news out of continuous extreme redundancy, much less the 1,235th repetition of the same weasel words by the secretary of state, especially when you're getting precisely the same sentence every 30 seconds out of every administration official, every member of congress, every u.n official, every world leader and their press secretaries etc. the fact that the person who says it is important doesn't make it news unless it is something rather than nothing. you've got to coax these people toward content; publishing their white noise only encourages more of the same.

you know, if obama doesn't have anything to say except the same blahblahblah, he doesn't need to 'address the american people.' if all you've got is the same cant about orderly transitions and aspirations, then wait until your thinking, if any, does actually come up to speed with events. come up with something, or just go back to your bedroom and watch more cnn. right he's stuck in a difficult dilemma etc. ok, well, shutting up is one of the options, because this is liable to look very different in 48 hours.

cnn just can't decide which is the bigger story: a revolution across the arab world, or 'charlie sheen's crazy 36 hours.'

tell you what. let's resolve not just to feed this into our little political interpretation machines, left or right. it's not necessary for everything that happens to confirm our political positions! i mean how insecure and monomaniacal are we? it would be a very good idea to try to hold on to the reality and particularity of people, events, situations. wait a minute before you look at any given event as an example of something or ask how it can be used.

i'm grooving on the red thong theme. last time i was with sarah, that's what she was wearing. coincidence? on the other hand, last time i was with liberace, that was what he was wearing too, with diamond encrustations. now it may be speculation, but i think the moral collapse of america - the point at which it started to descend into the total decadence, universal suicidal despair, and the war of all against all in which we now find ourselves - was the point at which liberace did his gig in tucson. and liberace was definitely packing a 'gun.' does limbaugh wear red thongs? does beck? (no, as a matter of fact, beck wears baby blue thongs.)

listening to the media focusing on exactly one moment from the new sarah palin self-defense video: her use of the phrase "blood libel." now i think she or her writer probably vaguely recalled this phrase from somewhere and used it in the sense of 'libeling me and people like me as murderers,' saying essentially that she has blood on her hands. i don't know, it's sort of a gaffe, or unfortunate moment of some ignorance, though i doubt that most americans could elucidate the concept of 'blood-libel' in anti-semitic history very clearly. but it's hard to read it as anti-semitic, as it appears to identify palin herself as the jew (libeled for having within him the blood of the murderers of jesus). anyway, get over it and deal with the substance of the statement, which is irreproachable, more or less. one pundit said "you won't hear a gaffe like that from obama tonight." well, he's got more and better staff, for one thing; anyone can use the wrong phrase without understanding all the connotations.

let me try to make the 'disqualified' thing stick with a simplified scenario. ok let's take some assertion of fact, and stipulate that it is as likely to be true as untrue (the assumptions can be adjusted to deal with real scenarios). it could be 'palin influenced loughner' or it could be 'there is extra-terrestrial intelligent life' or something. now insofar as people formed opinions on such claims based on the state of factual knowledge at the time - which is the only rational standard - we would expect the yeses and nos to be relatively evenly distributed across at least some ways of sorting populations, namely those that are arbitrary with respect to access to information. so now suppose that all the leftists think that there is no extra-terrestrial intelligent life and all the rightists think there is. you wouldn't be justified in asserting of any particular person that their belief was based on irrelevant factors, but it would nevertheless appear that the beliefs of (at least) half the members of each group are based on irrelevant factors or are clearly irrational. that should be plenty to make you doubt what any one of these people - in this case everyone - says. it tends to disqualify everyone. it ought to.

a rational procedure would be to ignore the opinions of everyone in the debate, in that case. but now say there were a few anomalies: leftists who believed in extra-terrestrial life, e.g. it would not of course follow that they were actually applying some relevant procedure instead of just wishing or trying to boost their ego, for example (though it does indicate that the belief is not merely based on social desperation or in-group loyalty: surely a pretty good hypothesis about why the distribution of opinions takes on the form it does), but it would be a good initial presumption. what you couldn't do with the anomalous cases is apply the 50% rule, and you would need to check their actual belief-generating procedures. 

one premise of this argument is that one's political position is irrelevant to the factual claim that palin influenced loughner. i take this to be obvious. it's not like 'we ought to help the poor' or 'supply-side economics is wrong' or 'obama is my president' - bear on whether palin influenced loughner. that my anarchism is true does not bear one way or another; nothing could be more obvious.

this might make you re-assess the credibility of a lot of people, possibly including yourself. climate change is another compelling example. we've got a series of factual assertions, and we've got an extremely asymmetrical distribution of views through the political spectrum. that tends to impugn the credibility of every single participant, except those who are on the 'wrong' side of the factual question with regard to their political affiliation.

 

it really is astonishing watching what these folks will do to preserve their moral superiority to their opponents. so as soon as it's pointed out that there's no evidence of palin's influence, we start trying stuff like this: 'he assassinated a politician. it is by definition a political act.' no more than killing the baker cause he's doing your wife is an act of confectionary. here's the truly pathetic crap, though: "it's never wrong to reflect on our political rhetoric." it's never wrong to reflect on the beauty of the rose either, the question is whether that is the way to understand the actual case before you. the position - formed of course on evidence drawn purely from your own political positions - is that sarah palin is a murderer, that your political opponents are monsters. then there's screen after screen of completely - obviously - dishonest attempts to continue to claim that at the same time as you are saying that that's not what you're saying. i have to figure that this chain of strategic claptrap can't really be engaged in wholly unconsciously. could one really be that mistaken to this extent about what one is saying or why or when or about what? words for these folks have power. but no meaning.

you know, "the media" thinks in terms of constructing a narrative. that's even what they learn their job is in communications programs. and there's a half-assed lame-brained metaphysics that sort of says that narratives are all there is to reality. so they swing into action and they create a narrative. and the fact that they are beautifully fact-free - absolutely pristine of actual information - shows the whole big problem with that half-assed theory of truth itself. and it's also true that even the discourse will eventually be bent by actual facts; bad or purely hallucinatory or prospective though the narratives may be (they fit the event into a pre-existing template at almost any cost), they always also bend in the screaming wind of reality. still there could be more faced-up and less dishonest approaches, especially in the reporting of news.

cnn is actually polling on the question of whether extreme rhetoric led to the shootings, as if they think everyone is obliged to take up a position in absence of facts. polling is a key moment in imposing the 'frame' or creating the truth by constructing the narrative. indeed for all i know everyone actually does have a position on the matter already, perfectly predictable from their party affiliation. that's a hell of a way to develop an answer to a question of fact, isn't it? it's a kind of category mistake, as though: 'was loughner influenced by right-wing rhetoric' is a question like 'is abortion wrong?': you have to decide on the basis of your moral/political values. if you find yourself agreeing with your own segment of the political spectrum on this, i would reflect on your belief-generating procedures. i am going to regard that provisionally as disqualifying you: apparently the question for you is not at all about factual truth. btw, i don't think the facts are helping the glenn-beck-did-it theory so far.

thinking about y'all the same way y'all think about palin: what if there is an assassination attempt on palin today? maybe the assassin blows up a bunch of other people. before we actually find out anything, we will of course assert it's because a thousand op-ed columnists and television hosts held her, you know, partly responsible for "atmosphere" that led to the murder of all those good people. it's a matter of moral luck, for one thing: how bad your rhetoric is depends on what actually happens. so anyway, fox news develops a story-line: it's paul krugman's fault, etc. then it's days of: nobel prize winner kills with his words; how could american political rhetoric have grown so extreme, polarized, and irresponsible as to have produced a krugman? why is paul krugman so angry? you know people actually do follow slavishly along with what krugman says, like dylan klebold listening to marilyn manson.

you know i want to hate david books, and he is like a natural moderate - every insight brings us toward a reasonable middle - and i am kind of a natural extremist. but where other people just emote in a chorus, brooks really does think.

a good parallel - though without the screeching partisanship - is columbine. the media pivoted within hours to video games. pretty soon we were having a "national discussion" about that - whatever the hell it actually had to do with anything - and not about the actual event. well the actual event was overwhelming and you don't know what to say. but you can sleepwalk down the video game road - children imitate what they see like lobotomized monkeys - and everything seems comprehensible. really, cnn could have spent the last 72 on drowning pool and we could have made this all about music. it could all be about the diagnosis of mental illness. or...whatever works in the cultural mood of the moment. but at least there is some evidence that he listened to drowning pool. i mean we could just make shit up: you go straight from 'perhaps his state of mind was due to multiple concussions' - without there being any evidence that he ever had a concussion at all - and then spend the next few weeks on that, until people sort of forget about the whole thing. however, concussions are not as telegenic as sarah palin, so let's go with that.

no one who has ever been tempted toward a revolutionary politics or a radical political philosophy or envisioned a big transformation can be entirely comfortable with the the notion that "anti-government" rhetoric must be...controlled, lest it lead to violence. that sort of thing threw eugene debs in prison and deported emma goldman.

it's amazing watching cnn; every piece frames the thing in terms of the dangerous rhetoric of the right. the coverage is focused on sarah palin, and on a hundred people calling for moderation and civility. now they've been upbraided enough to preface each such foray by saying: we don't know his politics. there is no evidence that the rhetoric was a factor, etc. right so how can it possibly be right to frame the thing this way right now? it seems like a bizarre case of journalistic...i don't know, malfeasance, like a violation of the whole basic practice. if there is no factual basis then how can this be the whole thing? i don't know why events like this immediately have to freeze into a shape. like after fort hood it took krauthammer twenty seconds to pivot to 'we need more profiling' and then that framed a whole big chunk of the debate. but this is more egregious.

one function of the hyper-simple explanation utterly abstracted from the actual human situation is that it gives people a sense that they understand and hence in some way might control events like this. but the cost of that kind of cognitive leverage is too high: you lose the thing you're supposedly talking about entirely. in this case, we just force the thing into the approved channel and then all the sentences flow autonomically; you can't tell one op-ed from the next. well you've done something, but getting an actual understanding of the actual situation was the opposite of the goal.

i guess this will oblige me to take it seriously when they produce loughner's sarah-palin -crosshairs map or show him to have been addicted to her twitter feed etc. what i'm saying is compatible with his turning out to be a straightup rightwing gun-nut irs-abolisher or whatever, and i am not going to call for these positions to be silenced in any case, though people ought always to reflect on their rhetoric, which i don't always do very well myself. but we don't know yet. 

look. at an absolute minimum you have got to wait and see what the process was that led loughner to his bloodbath. i just don't see how krugman or olbermann can emerge hours into the process, with obviously inadequate information, with a fully-formed (and identical) political interpretation. don't you think you ought to be a little more responsible as interpreters and a little less mechanical as commentators?

i might add that the notion that glenn beck or sarah palin is ("in some small part" etc) "responsible" for the "atmosphere" etc is just a round-about way of saying they are tantamount to being murderers, and that their continued existence endangers all of us. that is, the sort of attack the are mounting is a particularly clear example of the rhetoric they are condemning, and it is unbelievably polzarizing. ok so if you think we need to tone down the kind of rhetoric that could lead an unhinged person to kill, then you need to tone down this stuff. 

and there's no reason you can't, right now. we don't even know the story. so in that condition you can easily refrain from all pointing your fingers simultaneously, yelling "murderer!" (then qualifying it six times with just a touch of disingenuousness). you're going to attack your opponents for "demonizing" people?

i think it's the toxic atmosphere created by oprah winfrey that's directly responsible for the killings in arizona. winfrey has a gift bag for everyone...except disgruntled - well, psychotic - male loners. who cares about our self-esteem? only rush and sarah. the way to read the whole event is as showing that u2 fucking sucks. was the disgruntled male, loghner, inspired by "sunday bloody sunday," or was he just goaded into ultraviolence by the fact that simplistic little ditties are being staged like wagnerian operas? one thing the shootings clearly show: global warming is a hoax, or at least the evidence is not evaluable. it's amazing how, no matter what happens, no matter who dies or how, every single event just confirms my pet positions and shows that my opponents are evil and irresponsible. one thing you have to understand: words have consequences. and that means exactly one thing: everyone who disagrees with me - or indeed does anything other than chant along with the slop i am yapping - is a murderer. i am against censorship, but it's plain that there must be some limits. those limits are the borders at which standard-issue american liberalism shades off into any other position. 

on the nytimes op-ed page today, egan, krugman, and collins all use the event as a mere stick to bash their political opponents, just the way they used...columbine, ok city, etc. well this should teach gabrielle giffords an important lesson that we all need to learn: in the minds of other people, one's actual human existence has no meaning. your death is nothing but an occasion for the narcissism of others. the victims do not actually exist for any of these folks: they're read as little symbols internal to the conceptual scheme of the observer. or not even that: just little echoes of their own positions, an endless chorus of whispering shades, all redundant, because all nothing but confirmation after confirmation of what was already an unrevisable set of commitments or memberships.

i may have something to say about the arizona shootings eventually. my policy is more or less not to say anything unless i can say something that other people are not also saying. i guess an event like this puts my various little jokes about political violence - like the napolitano thing below - in a different perspective, and makes me feel wrong. at any rate, one thing i will not do is blame my political opponents - if any - for the shootings. i swear it takes people less than a moment to turn from anything resembling the human situation to blaming sarah palin, etc. at a minimum it seems like you've got to wait and find out what was actually going on!

wait. the airforce is blocking the nytimes? i think they're going to have to essentially block all news sources if they don't want their people finding out what's in those memos. surely you can't let our american heroes (alternately, slaves) watch cnn or access google news. well at least we're getting some idea of where we actually live. 

i note that the primary outlet for wikileaks in msm, the guardian, is down, at least from my computer. has been for a couple of hours. routine glitch or dod/cia? if the latter, i think there might be a bit of an international problem! can y'all bring it up?

brooksie:

Yet it might be useful to consider one more filter. Consider it the World Order filter. The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted.

This order is tenuously maintained by brave soldiers but also by talkative leaders and diplomats. Every second of every day, leaders and diplomats are engaged in a never-ending conversation. The leaked cables reveal this conversation. They show diplomats seeking information, cajoling each other and engaging in faux-friendships and petty hypocrisies as they seek to avoid global disasters.

at a minimum, i propose that the question of whether the operations of world governments and their brave soldiers have a negative or positive effect on "order" is open. david brooks lives his life amid order, i suppose. but say he was living in kandahar, or grozny, or darfur, or even really downtown. the disasters that are happening in these places - with the possible exception of downtown - are due precisely to the operations of states, and the inter-operations among states. one of the many interesting features of this wholesome order is that it has developed for the first time the ability to annihilate all life on earth.

understand that when folks like brooks use the words 'order,' and even, god help us, 'community,' they mean coercion. every statist philosophy, from brooks-style burkean conservatism to obama semi-progressivism to stalinism, holds that the state is in its essence the cooperative activity of people. cf tony judt, for example: he frames the whole thing as a choice: serve yourself or serve a higher social cooperation = the state. now if that's the position i would just point out that cooperation cannot be coerced, that cooperation can take place only in an atmosphere of freedom. in some sense coerced action may be concerted or simultaneous action but it is precisely the opposite of cooperative action.

now secrecy is central to the operations of coercive power. the vast power of the gov to coerce is applied precisely to keep the activities of the state - including the coercion itself - unknown and hence irresistible. coercion both supposes and enhances secrecy. of course, ignorance of what in fact you're doing - when you pay your taxes, for example - is also completely incompatible with any sort of actual cooperation. at any rate, this is why the activities of governments must be relentlessly exposed. and few have ever done better at that task than wikileaks.

 

i like the response to wikileaks: seriously they are now invoking the apocalypse, or multiple apocalypses.

Koh wrote that publication of the documents would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals" as well as military initiatives and cooperation between countries to confront problems from terrorism to pandemic disease.

obviously assange and everyone else better watch their backs. i don't pretend to evaluate the charges against assange, only of course one has to be extremely suspicious of a frame. it's a small price to pay to avoid pandemics, nuclear warfare, and the deaths of countless individuals (as well as a few pairs of conjoined twins).

by an amazing coincidence, every journalist that criticizes the russian state, especially on chechnya, gets rodneykinged. who knows who's responsible, or why they're doing it?

President Dmitry Medvedev promptly tweeted Saturday, shortly after the beating happened, that the criminals must be found.

dmitry! i've found the perp! he is in fact the person who just sent me that very tweet!

so the iraq war leaks show, among other things, that the military covered up the extent of its killing of civilians throughout the war. (right, cb?!) at the same time, it's not that -the fact that it reveals their own profound evil - that causes the pentagon to condemn the whole thing, but...risks to civilians! (i.e. their informants, or the members of the shia death squads deployed by our man maliki). oy, the irony! really, nothing is more comical than the machinery of death.

It added that "more than 15,000 civilians died in previously unknown incidents," going on to say that "US and UK officials have insisted that no official record of civilian casualties exists but the logs record 66,081 non-combatant deaths out of a total of 109,000 fatalities."

And the Guardian said the "numerous" reports of detainee abuse, often supported by medical evidence, "describe prisoners shackled, blindfolded and hung by wrists or ankles and subjected to whipping, punching, kicking or electric shocks."

It added: "Six reports end with a detainee's apparent death."

Al-Jazeera concluded that major findings included a US military cover-up of Iraqi state-sanctioned torture and "hundreds" of civilians deaths at manned American checkpoints after the US-led invasion of 2003.

etc etc. thank you for your service! and in all seriousness thank you, bradley manning, for yours, to humanity and to the truth.

most muslims are not terrorists. but most terrorists are muslims. there's very little chance that any given muslim is sporting a suicide vest, an extremely good chance that anyone sporting a suicide vest is a muslim. i don't know: create a google news alert for "pakistan suicide bomber" and see what comes in today. the attacks are continuous; no sign that they're running out of volunteers; they throw them away by the dozen. there are serious operations in many locations on every continent except antarctica. they're successfully recruiting in minneapolis, for example, and not among the buddhists. not only that, but the motivation is directly religious. the groups are 'islamist.'

now are there anti-terrorist muslims, as well as elements of the teachings of islam that appear incompatible with killing people at random? of course. now the pc idea is that muslims with sympathy for terrorism constitute a tiny, an infinitesimal, minority. however, i think you'd find a pretty widespread sympathy in various muslim communities here and there, or at least you'd find a lot of condemnations hedged about with qualifications. wrong, but...understandable. you might want to think about how the organizations are funded, what sort of relation they have with the communities from which the terrorists emerge, and so on. no movement is this widespread and potent without a whole background of support of various kinds. the taliban had support widespread enough to throw the soviets out of afghanistan and run the country until invaded by a foreign army. all over the middle east, the biggest domestic issue for the governments is how to deal with their islamists, often more or less the most potent political force in the culture (cf muslim brotherhood in egypt) outside the state. draw the wrong cartoon, and there are angry mobs all over the muslim world, screaming "death" or issuing fatwas with sentences of immediate transmission to the afterlife.

here's the usual line: people don't blame christians in general or christianity for, say, oklahoma city. on the other hand mcveigh's self-account was not primarily religious. the killings of abortion doctors are a better example, and people definitely use acts like that to condemn christianity, or large swathes of it. listen to rachael maddow on this topic, and the way she connects such killings to much more mainstream evangelical christians, or even to the right/religious wing of the republican party or fox news. that's not insane, and i would think about the history of violent and fanatical christianity for a few moments. it's not edifying. does it have anything to do with the teachings of jesus?, a profound man of peace, who said "His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor, gathering his wheat into the barn and burning up the chaff with unquenchable fire." that's...typical. think that might help you justify your crusades or giving people a choice between conversion and impalement, demonstrating the effect of impalement with extreme vividness? these things set half the world on fire in their day.

but attacking christianity is actually compatible with pc standards. attacking islam, or even making any kind of assessment with a vague connection to reality, is completely unacceptable. it's sort of understandable because if we end up in a completely polarized religious war, we're all in trouble. but on the other hand you can't address the problem very effectively if you're not even permitted to examine or describe the problem. but juan williams wasn't even saying all that.

at any rate, i'm just against strategic assertion. there's not a lot of real benefit to "let's pretend." and yet that is all there is to these formal and informal pc speech codes. alright. enforce your little forms of words. you can't be puzzled, though, if i have no tendency whatever to believe what you say, or even believe that you believe it. start insisting that everyone manifest your favorite set of fraudulent beliefs (fraudulent in the sense that they are not actually beliefs) and you create a la-la land of non-stop lying. or it doesn't even really rise to the level of lying; it's just enforced unanimous noise, like a flock of geese or something. if what you say is not about reality, but about expressing your solidarity or trying to appear to be a good person by the standards of a given moment, then what you say loses its meaning, in a very clear way. the words no longer have their customary reference, or even any reference at all. to believe something is to take it to be true, not to take it to be nice, or sweet, or even necessary to express under the circumstances. people who make and enforce speech codes, in other words, do not believe what they're saying, and neither do the enforcees. but it's even worse than that. 'islam' in their vernacular does not refer to islam; it refers to a set of possible effects of the utterance itself, etc.

no doubt the reason that the military freaks on wikileaks is because they are concerned with the safety of their informants and soldiers, obscure or speculative though any such such endangerment might be. (i want you to show me some of the many deaths that y'all predicted with the utmost confidence from the afghan leaks. obviously assange is a murderer. ok who did he kill?) it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they do not want you or the iraqis etc to know what the u.s. military actually has done. indeed, if people knew things like that, they might cease to support the war effort. that is, it would be bad for morale. patriotism, as robert gates has so often asserted, or perhaps merely implied, can only be maintained under conditions of utter delusion. and are we not patriots?

i always thought juan williams was almost completely uninteresting, just peddling bromides or conventional political positions. but i will certainly defend him in this case. the stuff he said comes up far far short of any sort of a firing offense for any sort of news organization that does not regard itself as the bastion of a particular ideology. as i say, we're rolling into a renewed era of extremely narrow, completely self-righteous, and utterly useless political correctness. y'all have fun!

seriously that's why we need to elect sarah palin, carl paladino, christine o'donnell. it's astonishing, but they appear actually to say things. in information theory, info is inversely related to redundancy: you can't be informed of what you already know. that's why there is no sense at all in listening to a speech by obama, for example. his take on the gulf oil spill, e.g., consisted of an undifferentiated hum well below the range of human hearing. but palin and o'donnell hold themselves to a higher standard: they are unpredictable. this opens up the possibility that they are actually communicating something. now that is a problem, because if you say something someone might disagree with it. it might turn out to be false, etc. but at least it's not nothing. i admit that that's a pretty low standard for political discourse, but it's also much better than we were doing up to that point. 

it may be strategically useful for the american state to take the position, or to maintain the rhetorical stance, that islam is hyper-mellow religion of peace. that doesn't make it true. and the fact that it is a useful thing to say does not entail that all of us, inside the war machine or outside it, must pretend to agree with what hillary clinton pretends to believe. 

i like the form of this. williams was saying that, like, when he's flying, seeing folks in muslim costume makes him nervous. he was reporting a personal experience, one that is surely typical in post 9.11 america. it's an experience we all have - well i wouldn't say 'nervous' but i also wouldn't say i don't notice at all. right? it's an experience we all have that cannot even be mentioned, like pretending there is no such thing as masturbation. the whole idea of these restrictions is to make it impossible to tell the truth or even to relate your own experiences. 

obviously a coup for wikileaks or anyone else would be the "trophy photos"  that american troops allegedly took with allegedly previously-alive afghan civilians. it's funny because the representation in the msm is almost all on the obvious legitimacy of repressing those photographs. look the abu ghraib shots led to a an insurgency! on the other hand, if you are doing the things that they were doing in the photos in abu ghraib, you deserve an insurgency. don't underestimate the effect of those photos in deterring whole years of monstrous abuses in a u.s.-run gulag (and insurgency and counter-insurgency without end: the release of those photos led to a profound change in strategy.). that is precisely why there is a press, but i will bet that the new york times or washington post will not publish them even if they have access. at any rate, you would think that they will leak eventualy as they will have to be discovered to the defense?

the only thrust of a thousand attempts to explain the rage that drives the tea party etc.: no one can rationally disagree with me, the leftist commentator. obviously, what i believe is true. obviously, all people of good will and rudimentary intelligence agree with me. now on that basis let's investigate the apparently incomprehensible phenomenon of people who do apparently disagree with me. well, they believe what they believe because they are incapable of rational thought, being swamped by emotions. they believe what they believe because they are inhabited by demons - glenn beck, for instance. all i can say about a book like that is that not a word of it is about tea party. it's about the author and his friends, and this kind of incessant self-congratulation and complete failure of understanding or connection is about the overwhelming weakness of the author's actual convictions, or his faculty of conviction: his need for a thousand props, for everyone always to be saying he's right, his horrendous fear that he may be wrong, which expresses itself in an absolute assumption that he can't be wrong: a completely irrational sheer faith, a sheer kierkegaardian leap presented as empirical research.... i can't imagine being so insecure in my beliefs that i need the kind of unanimity of rational beings that will bunch and all y'all need. and you write from that need, not from some sort of facts, to which you are far more indifferent than the people you oppose.

you know i'm surprised that there isn't a lot more focus on bradley manning and what may be happening to him. this would be a time for actual investigative reporting. or if there is some out there, i'd like to see it.

Manning allegedly used the power of Lady Gaga to lip-sync his way to leaking immortality—pretending to burn a copy of 'The Fame' while stealing thousands of classified documents from the government's SIPR-NET secret stash.

the stuff of legends.